Give Your Readers What They Want – From the Writers in the Storm Blog

By Fae Rowen

Yesterday I opened an e-mail from a source that I usually delete without reading.  I’d purchased something from a “sister” company a month ago, and it seems that every week a new spin-off email touting the same information I’d wanted when I bought that resource book lands in my inbox. And though some of the teaser subject lines draw me in, I rarely get to the payoff, because page after page just hypes up the promise of how much I need the information, how useful it will be, for pages and pages. And it’s never been true.

But then, I’m an optimist. And I clicked yesterday. The second screen gave me a fraction of information, though the text was dense. The next screen another fraction, but with more hype. Determined to make it to the end, I continued clicking, skimming the words, becoming more and more irritated. When I noticed the scroll bar at the edge of my browser, I scrolled to the end. It was quite distant from that first page. I’d blown almost half an hour running after my “carrot.”

And at the end, a screen wanting my e-mail address to take me to another site, from which they would send me what had been promised as only a click away, thirty minutes before.

I went to each of those five “sister” addresses and unsubscribed I was so angry. They’d promised me something, given me the terms for that first click, then never delivered. I’m not going to spend time deleting one more of their unread e-mails. They get no more of my time. Or money, beyond that initial purchase.

Read the rest of this post HERE.