Email Marketing is a Privilege, Not a Right

These tips help keep your list happy to hear from you.

Linda M. Lopeke
3 min readMar 4, 2022
Kaitlyn Baker on Unsplash

We’re all familiar with the traditional measure of business success being s/he who makes the most sales in a given time frame wins. But digital marketing means to sell to one person who needs or wants what you offer, you interrupt hundreds of others who don’t.

Each day my inbox receives many messages with subject lines that make me sad: don’t miss out, closing in 12 hours, last chance, last day, three hours left, one hour left, last call and due to overwhelming demand we’re giving you one more day to get in plus we’re not offering a payment plan (translation: no one bought a damn thing from us yet).

We all know marketers who’ve been sold on this practice as being the best way to more sales. But most learn the hard way it doesn’t work nearly as well as they’ve been led to believe it will. Unless your marketing objective is to burn your list that is. (It’s beyond effective for that!)

The cost of gaining one more sale at the expense of burning the permission of those whose trust you have worked hard to earn — the people who granted you the privilege of communicating with them via email — is simply too high!

Your email marketing campaign analytics can tell you what links people clicked, who unsubscribed, and how many buy, but they don’t tell you how a person receiving your email messages feels.

And understanding how your marketing communications make a person feel has a direct correlation to the number of sales you can make.

For this reason, your email marketing success should first be measured by your open rate percentage and then by how well your message moved a subscriber closer to wanting to buy from you (as indicated by the number of days/messages needed to go from offer to sale).

Pay especially close attention to how the people who received your email and don’t buy, feel. The harder you work to understand those you serve and focus your energy on making things they truly need and want, the less time you’ll have to spend trying to make them want to buy whatever it is you’re selling.

And wouldn’t you rather make those sales by producing marketing that is respectful of the people you’re creating it for, rather than devalue your work and reputation using marketing that screams your desperation and lack of creativity? (I certainly hope so!)

You don’t have to hate (or be hated for) the marketing you do! You can learn to make a bigger and better impact with a lot less effort.

Don’t let your results be limited by outdated tactics and the tiny frames of reference the world gives you. Rather, focus on building an asset-based business and use strategic marketing to fuel hustle-free its growth.

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Linda M. Lopeke
Linda M. Lopeke

Written by Linda M. Lopeke

Founder, SMARTSTART | Elevating the financial footprint of entrepreneurs through its Business Success Accelerator, podcast & community of 266,000+ members.