We have a newsletter that we produce on a weekly basis. You likely know this. The newsletter is designed to provide quick links to our new summaries and interviews, as well as to provide exposure to other great resources we come across in our digital travels. The newsletter opt-in list has been growing steadily over the past few years, and it’s nice to hear from people every now and then letting us know how much they’re enjoying the free service. And that’s nice.
But as we’ve grown, I’ve become busy – traveling for interviews, constructing workshops and generally building “the business”. I’ve become so busy that my “list management” has really just been checking mailchimp stats from time to time, and relying on Andy to keep me abreast to any questions/comments/suggestions that we get from the newsletter group. BUT…
Yesterday I had an unexpected couple free hours pop up. On a whim, I decided to cruise through the list of recent subscribers, mostly just to see if there was anyone I knew. Some of the email addresses raised my curiosity though, and I ended up spending most of the time surfing the amazingly diverse websites of the people that are subscribing to our newsletter. I reached out to a couple of them; scheduled a few calls, traded a few emails, and generally got to know a few people who are reading our content. Three lessons here:
1. I’m extremely humbled by the caliber of people who hang out at ActionableBooks. It was a great reminder of the type of people we’re working to serve.
2. If you work for a cool company, subscribe to stuff using your company email address. I’m sure there are some fantastic subscribers using gmail or hotmail, but I’ll never know, because their email addresses didn’t stand out on the list.
3. Say hi. Business (any business) isn’t about volume of customers. It’s about the rich complexity of each one of those patrons.
