Why Quality beats Quantity in Newsletter Subscribers

I was listening to an interesting webinar from Vertical Response (they’re the guys I’ve partnered with for my email newsletter service) today.

Several things came out of it worth noting – I’ll blog about them all in the coming days.

One of the stand-out points was about list size.

The bottom line on list size is that it’s quality that counts, not quantity.

It’s better to have 250 active, interested recipients of your newsletter (whether print or email) than 1,000 who don’t care.

Why? Several reasons:

  1. It’s response that counts, not the total size of your list. If, at the end of the day, your aim is to get customers and purchases, then the only people who really count are those who act – not necessarily buying something (not everyone is ready to buy right away) but at least opening your email and clicking on your links.
  2. If you are sending a lot of newsletters to people who aren’t really interested, then you’re spending money unnecessarily. This is particularly the case for print newsletters, of course, which cost money to print and mail, but it’s also true for email newsletters – most email service providers raise the price you pay the more emails you send or the bigger your list.
  3. With email marketing, in order to build a reputation as a responsible email sender, it’s good to have a significant proportion of your subscriber list opening your emails – it shows you are providing something valuable instead of spamming.

There are no doubt plenty of other reasons why quality beats quantity when it comes to list size. If there are any I’ve missed, please add them in the comments.