I recently dusted off my trusty mailing list and moved it from MailChimp to ConvertKit. I am loving ConvertKit (apart from a minor link glitch – learning moment!) and I have high hopes for growing my list with their lovely landing pages and forms.

What’s interesting is the unsubscribes! Now, I get a lot of email, and I also unsubscribe when I’m no longer interested. And of course, sometimes you just sign up to get a freebie and then you’re like ‘Huh? How come they keep emailing me!’

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I’m fine with it – really I am. I’m not broken-hearted. If readers sign up to get the free book but aren’t really interested in further books or what I have to say and share, then of course I don’t want them on my list. It costs money to keep subscribers on a list, so keeping it engaged is a key task.

So what I’ve decided to do now – just to keep my ego relatively safe – is focus on shrinking my list for a while. Yes, that’s right! I’m going to view each of those unsubscribes as a gift. I want to shrink my list down and down and down … and even if I end up with only 20 subscribers, if they are all people with a genuine interest in hearing about my books and engaging in topics around reading and stories, then I am happy to wave goodbye.

I do plan to do a bit of canvassing though, on social media, to find out how often people are happy to get emails land in their inboxes. All the experts say to send them weekly – and not to only email when you have news or want to sell a book. Which makes sense. But this is all new to me – or at least, it’s changed a lot during the years I allowed my list to gather dust.

What do you think? Weekly? Twice a month? More or less often? I supposes the answer is test, test, test, just like everything.

PS If you’d like to see what I’m sending to my subscribers you can sign up here.