How to turn your unsubscribe button into a cost-cutting machine…

Fisher Investments became the biggest advertiser in their category by running ads which, in effect, say:

‘If you ain’t got at least a mil, go somewhere else.’

There are roughly 24 million millionaires in the US of A – meaning their total addressable market…

Is a “mere” 7% of the population.

Take a popular platform like RobinHood, on the other hand:

They don’t care whether you’re lounging in a marble mansion with a Lambo in your driveway…

…or your net worth is $20 and sleep beneath an overpass.

You can invest with them.

As a consequence?

They have over 28 MILLION funded customers.

Fisher?

“Only” 200.000.

And yet…

Fisher’s total assets under management are a whopping $387B.

(About 5% larger than Robinhood’s.)

So Fisher has 140x fewer customers…

…but EACH one is worth 147 Robinhood customers in AUM.

Is there a point to this financial shebang?

Yes, there is:

Telling people who you are NOT for repels the time-wasters.

Robinhood likely has a legion of customers who bring very little – if anything – to the table…

…yet still take up their bandwidth.

Being 28M large, you’re probably full of unmotivated people who just… simply…

They don’t buy things.

(Or in this case, don’t invest in things.)

They don’t exchange their money for solutions to their problems – they just sit there and watch the world go by.

Your newsletter probably has a decent chunk of these people:

• Who only joined for a discount code/welcome gift and clocked out…
• Who bully & harass your CS because their unhinged mind cannot comprehend an order not arriving 21 minutes post-purchase…
• Who exploit chargebacks and/or abuse your refund policy…
• Who opted-in to your emails years ago but changed interests or straight up forgot you exist.

On and on and on.

All of this is remedied by drawing a line in the sand – taking a stance.

Fisher’s stand is that they’re for millionaires only…

…or you don’t interest them.

Well…

Are you for bodybuilders? For strength athletes? For functional lifters? For combat sport folks?

Being for all of them is akin to opting for a shotgun instead of a sniper – so much imprecision/inefficiency.

The wider the net you cast, the fewer fish you get.

I understand this is quite a difficult thing to do for most businesses…

After all…

We’ve been conditioned taught to stay away from this area – if you stand only for someone…

…it means certain people will realize they don’t want what you have.

And since we’ve been conditioned taught to fear rejection…

…we don’t tend to go anywhere close to anything that could create it.

Does this mean you’ll get less traffic, fewer people in the door, and more unsubscribes?

Yes…

And it’s a wonderful thing!

A higher unsubscribe % means that people who normally wouldn’t notice your emails…

…have started paying attention.

The biggest obstacle to driving someone to a sale?

Is that they don’t CARE!

They’re not reading your emails… they’re not paying attention… they probably don’t even know you’re running a promo because they simply never open your emails in the first place.

So, if you’re getting more unsubscribes as a result of tightening your messaging?

That means you have caught the attention of people who normally IGNORE you.

And they’ll make one of the two decisions:

(1) Exile you from their inbox by unsubscribing…

(And if they get all pissy/angry and send you an email about it? That’s great fodder for a future email – see the “Why there’s money in mockery…” email uploaded on Email Echoes.)

(2) Start paying attention to you and – if you play your cards right – start actually buying things from you.

So I hope the writing on the wall is crystal clear on what my most followed email metric is.

An unsubscribe is a non-buyer removing himself from your email costs.

It’s a gift, not a wound.

Speaking of gifts: