Study email marketing actions as a way to learn from what others do.

Instead of learning from “what they say” or “teach”.

There’s a lot of hustle in the indie world, trends and growth charts come and go.

A great way to learn about how businesses are run is to sign up to their email list. It can be pretty insightful to see what emails actually go out and how they are promoting their products.

For example, often we’ll see events being promoted right up until the day before they are happening. When I see that, I interpret it as: they haven’t sold out, or they don’t have as many attendees as they would like. If they were sold, and if it was easy to sell, one single email would have been enough.

This applies as much to social and content as it does email, however email is easier to track and observe. I use to sign up email lists so I could keep them in a folder and look at them every so often to look for patterns.

What I take away from observing emails:

• there are ebs and flows in business, emails are often sparse or they come in all at once
• when value is being sent out, it’s usually followed by sales pitches
• often the lifespan of these businesses can be short, or sporadic
• most are not consistent
• and oh my, the long sales pages and drip campaigns (I don’t care if they “work”, urgh, no thx)