Part of the overwhelming charm of Constant Contact: you know who's picking up what you're putting down.
A decade ago, I endured a long weekend of 'sales training' with a firm called Frank Foster and Associates. Frank's idea: the only 'bad' potential customer is the 'maybe.' A customer who says "yes!" is great, it goes without saying. A customer who says, "no, thanks" is your friend - because you can move on to the next potential member with your great idea immediately. But a customer who says, "hey, maybe!" requires a lot of your time and energy to try to turn them into "yes," and you'll usually fail. They're just being polite.
Frank was talking about cold calling (I didn't really like Frank.) I'm talking about your monthly newsletter. (If you're not putting out a monthly newsletter, go do that now, and then come back.)
For our first three years, we sent our newsletter to a growing list of recipients without ever removing more than ten people. Though they may have been tired of listening to us, the uninterested audience would prefer to just hit either 'delete' or 'spam' than reply and thus, offend us. Our first email list was drawn directly from a local Chamber of Commerce website, and chances were good that recipients would eventually meet us. So they'd trash the newsletter, and we'd never know. This is not good.
If a client wants to remove themselves from your newsletter list, that's fine. They should have that choice, so you're not irritating them (they'll find their way back eventually. Don't worry.)
IF, though.....
Mary receives the email. She's not interested, but she knows that Sherri will like the sound of OnRamp. She forwards the email to Sherri, who clicks from the newsletter to our site. After reading about OnRamp, she clicks the tab for the next Running Group. Maybe she signs up right away - after all, it's easy, because you're using MindBodyOnline now, right? - or maybe she'd rather call first, just to have her intuition stroked a bit.
....and you see it all. With Constant Contact, you know where Sherri got the newsletter. You know which offering interested her. You could, potentially, be ready for her when she calls.
Typepad is similar. Twice per day, I let myself check our hits. Hits aren't everything, but if there's a major spike, it's nice to know why. In the new marketplace of paying attention, don't you want to know who's reading the menu?
If I wasn't checking, I would never have known that CrossFitNYC has linked to us several times. I wouldn't know which type of essays our audience prefers to read and share among their friends. I wouldn't know who is visiting our site from a friend's facebook page. But I know, because I check.
Call me paranoid, or obsessive-compulsive, but if I'm going to perform, I'd like to turn on the house lights once in awhile to make sure the audience is still there.
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