Maybe they were eaten by a bear
Better reasons for why they unsubscribed (and other things)
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I used to pay attention to how many people unsubscribed after I sent out my weekly newsletter. Besides it getting me down, it was a poor measure of how I was doing — both objectively and because of what sense I made of it.
At best, unsubscriber count is a vanity metric. Or rather, an anti-vanity metric. Worse than that though, the stories I was telling myself to explain the circumstances were all terrible. Such as…
- My emails are pointless and have no value.
- The links I shared this week are dumb. Or over-complicated. Or too weird.
- I sound like an obnoxiously woo self-help guru.
None of these things were true. Or, if others thought them, it would be an obvious misunderstanding of who I am and what I do. And I was fairly confident that was on them.
Yet, I was still checking the count and telling myself terrible stories about what that number meant.
Rejecting the standard list
When you unsubscribe from a newsletter, you might get presented with a page that looks something like the image…
