Should You Ignore Complaints From Your Email Subscribers?

Last week I did a little 3-day affiliate push for my new digital product sales weapon of choice, Coach.

After email #2 went out, I got my hand slapped by a subscriber I’ll call “Jeremy”:

Consecutive emails shilling for Coach is a bit heavy handed, IMO. Otherwise, I’ve loved your daily notes.

My reply:

Thanks for the feedback! And you might not want to open tomorrow’s email. 🙂

Any time you do a multi-day promotion like this, you can expect SOME blowback.

(And all in all Jeremy was pretty polite—I have great subscribers!)

The vocal minority is, by definition, vocal.

Which makes it easy to forget about the subscribers who appreciate your reminders and follow-up—even if they don’t always say so.

Looking at my open rates for last week, all three of the emails where I was “shilling for Coach” received higher open rates than usual.

In fact, the one that Jeremy complained about (which had a dead-giveaway subject line of “7 reasons I’m selling my products with Coach“) was actually the best-read email I’ve sent in several weeks.

And then there were the replies—at least half a dozen subscribers reached out with specific “can Coach do X?” questions, and one named Sean said:

Thank you so much for telling us about Couch and the prices going up. I’ve been looking into it excitedly the past few days. I would have loved to jump on it, but I can’t convince any family members to support the investment because I don’t have any digital products or courses yet. I signed up for the free plan through your affiliate link as far as I know. Maybe they will be able to lock me into the old prices through that!

Just goes to show you:

One man’s “obnoxious pushy shill” is another man’s “thank you so much, I almost missed out on this!”

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