On a call today, a client asked me an interesting question. “A few people unsubscribe every time we send an email,” they said. “Is that normal, or is that something that happens just to us?”
The good news, I told them, is that it happens to everyone. I used to write a newsletter called This Week in Cats, which had a 60%+ open rate — at a time in which being above 40% was rare — and we saw unsubscribes every week. (I still have no idea what those readers thought they were getting into.) If that newsletter lost readers every week, then every newsletter will lose readers.
But the bigger thing: I’m glad they had the courage to ask the question. Building something new can be a lonely business. It takes guts to be willing to ask: Is this normal? Or am I going through something that nobody else goes through?
Be brave enough to ask. You might find that what you’re going through is a lot more common than you think.
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That’s a photo of an early edition of This Week in Cats, featuring that week’s cat of the week — a cat, with a white belly and brown and black striped fur, sitting upright and looking surprisingly sad.