Aside from forgetting to include unsubscribe links in emails, something far too many startups do, there’s one other thing that many apps forget about: keeping their email list engaged. Over the past few days I’ve been consistently unsubscribing from newsletters that I no longer read. One email that keeps popping up is updates from startups that I don’t remember what they do. I thought they were interesting at some point in time but subsequently deleted the app. Now, out of nowhere, I receive an email letting me know about an incredible update they’ve released.

Don’t Let That List Get Stale

Every company risks having their email list go stale. When you send out occasional updates with no consistency you are going to drive a ton of unsubscribes and get lower open rates. In other words, all the effort you put in to getting those initial subscribers was all for not. If you are going to have people subscribe to a newsletter, do yourself a favor: let them know how often you’ll be sending updates and stick to that schedule.

This doesn’t need to be every day. Honestly, it doesn’t need to be every week. If you sent out an email every two weeks, you’d be able to keep people engaged and set their expectations. This can be any relevant news pertaining to your product, an interesting experience you had with a customer, or just a general thought. Whatever it is, make sure you send those emails on a regular basis.

One company that’s doing a great job of this is Mattermark. They send out daily and weekly curated emails of news happening in the venture capital space. That’s because their target customers are venture investors. Granted, they set the bar high. Sending out daily emails is not an easy task. You need to be monitoring news via an RSS reader or staying on top of your Twitter feed. You could even partially automate this by programming a tool but that’s an entirely different story.

Anyways, I’ll be short and sweet with this post: don’t let your list go stale!

Want an audio version? Here you go: