“We’re scared to send too many emails.”
I hear it all the time. From journalists. From freelancers. From authors.
Promoting is (unfortunately) a big part of how making money happens. It’s a very linear equation really—the more you promote, the more subscriptions you sell.
Settle in and get comfortable. We’re about to contend with the limits of self-promotion!
Your fears of sending promo emails unpacked!
Why is it so scary to send emails to the people who signed up to receive them?
I’m breaking this fear down into three parts:
👻 Unknown Unsubscribes
👿 Reader Wrath
🌷 Special Flower Syndrome
If you have another fear, I would LOVE to hear it. Comment and let me know what it is! In the meantime, let’s get into these three.
👻 Unknown Unsubscribes
What it means: The obvious downside to sending promotional emails is that readers might unsubscribe and maybe it’s more unsubscribes than you’d want.
How scary is it: It depends on how you monetize your publication. If you book ads or sponsors, you might care about overall list size and clicks BUT if you are mainly reader-supported, it’s a lot less scary to lose readers who don’t want to pay for a subscription and are so disinterested, in fact, that they unsubscribe from the emails when you ask them to.
Turn it into a test: Define how many is “too many unsubscribes” and send one promotional email that ONLY promotes your subscription offer. See how much your assumption is true!
If you get less unsubscribes than expected, send another (different) promo email! Now, you’re cooking!
👿 Reader Wrath
What it means: Your readers will be so offended that you wanted to get paid for your labor that they will come after you in the town square known as the internet. How dare you value your work!
How scary is it: The main risk here is probably more in how you promote your subscriptions than in you promoting them. From what I’ve been learning from publications, news readers value what you’re offering and wish they could pay more to support. They expect to be promoted to just as all news outlets have done for decades and it’s only offensive when 1) they hate the outlet entirely or 2) it’s done distastefully (like with a bad joke or a confusing sale).
Turn it into a test: Test your promotion angles on social media or in your website articles. That way, you can easily pull it if it lands wrong. Don’t hear any negative feedback? It’s probably ok to email it then!
🌷 Special Flower Syndrome
What it means: My publication is unique and therefore, I cannot promote like other publications. I must reimagine marketing and rebuild it brick by brick.
How scary is it: This is an internal blocker, not an external one. It’s scary because it costs you money! But it’s also real and I’ve faced it many times with my clients who believe (insert well established marketing strategy) won’t work for them. It’s really a waste of your time to reinvent marketing whole hog. Everyone says they hate emails and they hate “bro marketing” or direct mail or whatever they hate, but all of that stuff continues to work even on those people.
Turn it into a test: Try the easy route! Take a marketing strategy off the shelf (like, say one of these email sequences) and run it. You can inject your publication’s voice and tone, but I would strongly consider leaning into conversion copy tricks that may even seem basic. Challenge how special that copy really needs to be.
Watch your open rate, click rate, unsubscribes, replies and upgrades send by send and you’ll know if it’s working or not!
Our takeaway
Even when you offend people as The Intercept did with their April campaign threatening to stop reporting on Gaza, your promotion can still ultimately work (as theirs did).
I don’t recommend their strategy by the way. I agree with the tweeters that it’s gross AND also, I don’t think we need to threaten to take away journalism. People know journalism needs money. We need a better sales angle than that longterm.
My point is that even when your promotion is bad, it can still be good. It’s unlikely you will piss off all of your readers and have to shut down forever.
It’s far more likely that you’ll bring in a bunch of money that sustains your work. And wouldn’t that be great!
