☮️ 6 Tips to Be a Good Sunday Sales Delight Subscriber (Or Any Newsletter)

Michelle puts a lot of work into this newsletter every week. Curating the links, recording the letter to the editor and Ask a CRO. The least you can do is be a good member of the community. Here’s how:

1. Never become graymail

A subscriber who signs up for a newsletter, then doesn’t open or click any emails, and doesn’t even unsubscribe, is dead weight. We call it graymail in email marketing. This creates a worse experience for all the subscribers, even ones who do engage, because the sender’s email deliverability drops. And it’s also frustrating and demoralizing to the sender because they put a lot of work into writing their newsletter. It’s no fun being ignored.

2. Unsubscribe

Don’t be a passive recipient of emails you never read. If a newsletter is no longer valuable to you, unsubscribe without a second thought. Don’t feel bad about it. The sender thanks you and is grateful you did, believe me. Any action, even a negative one, is far better than indifference.

3. Reply to emails

A reply is the most valuable email engagement there is. Much more so than opens and clicks. Even if you only reply with an emoji, it goes a long way to improving email deliverability (for all subscribers, not just you.) And it’s reassuring for the sender, because she doesn’t feel like she’s emailing into the void. But if you can, do more than send an emoji. Share your thoughts on the email you just read. Offer feedback and ideas. They’re all helpful. Email is one-to-one communication, not one-to-many, and it’s two-way.

4. Click on links

The next best thing to a reply is a click. With email clients like Apple and Gmail now opening emails for you (to check for cybersecurity threats) open rates are a useless metric. The only reliable email engagement metrics are clicks and replies. Plus, if the newsletter includes ads, they may be getting compensated on a pay-per-click basis. Your click is revenue that allows them to keep publishing the newsletter.

5. Buy the things

Some ads in a newsletter will be affiliate links. When you buy the things advertised in the newsletter, the sender gets compensated. This compensation comes at no cost you. Revenue is what keeps a newsletter running.

6. Share it with friends & colleagues

The highest quality subscribers come from word of mouth. If you enjoy reading the newsletter and know someone who’ll also benefit from it, share it with them. You don’t even have to ask them to subscribe. Just forward one of the emails and say, “Read this and thought of you.”

About Nabeel Azeez

Nabeel Azeez is a direct response copywriter and the owner of Dropkick Copy, a B2B email marketing agency.