🌱 The Curation Advantage: Improving Engagement and Conversion at the Same Time

The way I sometimes describe communicating with an email is this:

If you have an email list of 50,000 subscribers, that’s the equivalent of a small stadium of people. What do you think will happen if you stand up in front of this crowd and ask them to buy your product with no introduction, no attempt to build any rapport?

Don’t do this. When someone who has trusted us to provide value to them quits the relationship by unsubscribing from your email list, it can only be interpreted as a failure to meet expectations. They thought they were going to receive one form of value from you. Instead, they received emails that weren’t relevant, or worse, simply annoying.

Consider the perspective of a new subscriber. Having just signed up to your email list (perhaps in exchange for an incentive such as a discount code or free download), they’re now ready to be introduced to your brand and, ideally, the problems you can help them solve.

Instead, what often occurs is they are immediately hit with a "buy now" email for a product they’re not convinced they want or even need. The result of sending irrelevant or unhelpful information at this critical early stage is invariably the same: poor engagement.

This is the reason brands often start out with decent engagement metrics with 25% or higher open rates, but over time see them gradually diminish. After not too long, they find themselves struggling to maintain a 10% open rate, making it extremely difficult to get as much value from your list.

By sending emails that fail to provide value, you increase the likelihood of them hitting the unsubscribe button at the bottom of your message. If this happens in great enough numbers over time, departures soon begin to outpace replacements – "mortalities" become greater than "births".

If you can’t increase the amount of new subscribers being added to your database to keep up with the corresponding increase in unsubscribes, your list begins to shrink. Just like a natural ecosystem, your email list begins to collapse "top-down", in a chain of events.

But there is a way to overcome this:

Read The Curation Advantage: Improving Engagement and Conversion at the Same Time