Email lists are money-printing machines.
Every (serious) entrepreneur knows that. However, I deleted almost 3,000 email subscribers from my list last June.
Here’s why.
Slaughtering the crickets
Tyson has a famous saying that goes like this: “Everyone has a plan until I punch them in the mouth.”
This is the entrepreneurial truth most entrepreneurs don’t want to admit. Because, we all start with a plan that looks neat and clean on paper. We map out a funnel. We start driving traffic. But then hear the sounds of crickets instead of money-making ca-chings.
What we make up in our heads rarely happens in real life.
It’s time to slaughter the crickets. You do that by listening to your market, not your beautiful thoughts. Start with an imperfect plan and iterate on the go.
I started my journey on Medium back in November 2021. A few weeks in, my note-taking articles began to take off. Then, I rapidly expanded my email list by over 3,000 subscribers in just 4 months. I then launched an online course that made 5 figures.
But I soon realized that something was wrong.
Bragging about the numbers
Most email marketers pound their chests on social media about how large their list is:
“Look, mommy, how many subs I have!”
This is stupid show-off marketing that only speaks to rookies. Your list size doesn’t matter. Your follower counts, either. In fact, if you’re just chasing the numbers, you can buy hundreds of thousands of email subscribers or social followers online for a few hundred dollars.
Greed for useless vanity metrics makes most marketers lose their sense of reality and embark on a journey where only the numbers count.
And this is why most burn out and bite the dust.
Marry your email subscribers
Building trust is hard. But losing it is easy.
It could take years to build a relationship. But you can mess it up and destroy it in a few seconds.
Don’t be stupid. Your focus should be on using email marketing as a trust-building machine, not as another vanity metric to showcase on your profile.
Sure, social proof matters. But you don’t need a gazillion subscribers to get the testimonials you need to make an impact.
Instead of chasing “more” subscribers, start chasing “better” subscribers.
Start building a long-lasting relationship with the people who join your list. Ask them questions and learn more about their journey and pain points. Be the one in your niche who cares about the human being behind the email.
I’ve done this, and I realized that the people I attracted were off track.
My tabula rasa frenzy
After that, the list grew to almost 4,000 subscribers. But I decided to let go of most of them.
The reason? 80% of them weren’t my target audience.
Now I had two choices: either trying to appeal to them, solving their pain points, cranking out more products, or perhaps prostituting my subscriber database and make money with ads or other irrelevant feces.
Or I could refocus on my core audience and let the others walk the plank to start with a clean slate.
I chose the latter.
While it can be hard to select and press the delete button for something you spent months building… I realized that it was the best thing for everyone.
Here’s the copy of the email I sent out:
It would help me reconnect to what I truly wanted to do (and not create offers and emails I wasn’t interested in doing) It would help my target audience because I’d have more focus to be obsessed with solving their problems. It would help those who weren’t my target to unclog their inboxes and give them more time to seek someone who could help them better and is passionate about solving their problems which I didn’t really care about.
That’s a win-win-win situation.
Growing from pain
Growth happens outside our comfort zone.
I certainly wasn’t comfortable deleting 3,000 subs from my email list. Especially since I could have been monetizing them in other ways.
But I didn’t align with that.
Deleting was necessary to grow.
Doing counterintuitive things and burning bridges are the best ways to live a meaningful life and build a thriving business.