A scoffer & unbeliever in my ways asks:
“What is the strategy and purpose behind sending daily emails? It’s often said you dont want to “overwhelm” your audience or you’ll lose subscribers. How can you grow an email list this way while keeping your subscribers from hitting the unsubscribe button?”
To answer that I have no choice but to tell you about the late ad man:
Bruce Barton.
The man who is why I got into the copywriting business originally.
(Joe Vitale’s book The 7 Lost Secrets of Success about Bruce is what got me in the game.)
Anyway, I once saw a flock of social activists online screaming “rACiSs!11” about Bruce Barton due to a sales letter he wrote in 1925 – asking for the equivalent of $18,000 from each recipient in today’s money – that got a fat 100% response to 24 prospects.
The reason they hated on him so much?
Because that sales letter talked about the young, impoverished, white (ooh!) teenagers living in the Kentucky mountains he wanted to help raise money for, so they could go to college. And in the letter he differentiated these young men and women – whose ancestors, he noted in the letter, had helped win the Revolutionary and Civil Wars – from what he called the “imported stuff” coming into New York from foreign countries.
No doubt that sentence would’ve gotten him cancelled on Facebook today.
But whaddya gonna do?
Anyway, back to Bruce Barton and daily emails:
He was the second B in today’s BBDO ad agency, a peer and colleague of John Caples, and was an advisor to Presidents. He was also the son of a preacher man, too, who liked using Biblical analogies. Like, for example, way back in the 1920s or 1930’s he did a radio broadcast about the Biblical patriarch Joseph who was considered almost like a god in Egypt in his day. Everyone knew and loved him, and he was second only to Pharaoh himself.
Then he died.
After which arose up a new king over Egypt… which knew Joseph not.
In other words:
All that prestige, influence, “clout”… up and vanished like a fart in the wind.
Why?
Because he wasn’t there anymore. Nobody saw him, heard from him, or interacted with him after he died. And Barton’s lesson was that, every day, in markets and niches and in stores all over the world, new “kings” (i.e., customers, prospects, leads, clients, etc) are rising up. And unless you are there, in front of them, every day, they will forget you and… yes… eventually…
Know you not.
Which is half my answer to the “why email daily?” question.
I say “half” because there is much more to its power.
But if that’s not enough to get you at least thinking about doing daily emails, then nothing else I tell you is going to get you off your lazy gluteus assimus to do them, so no reason to waste any more of your time or mine.
But if you do want to learn my ways of doing it see the paid Email Players newsletter here:
Ben Settle
