Who will you break up with this Valentine’s Day?

It’s not you, it’s me. We’ve tried but it just isn’t the same anymore. It would be best for us both if we just moved on.

Feel good? Maybe you have a bit of a nervous feeling in the pit of your stomach?

What if you took this honest approach to your marketing? Especially with your newsletter subscribers.

We’ve all heard of GDPR by now and there is a lot of fretting and faffing going on. Many people are worried that they will lose a huge number of subscribers. I totally understand.

Now, this is going to sound harsh but this might be for the best.

Hear me out.

Forget the whole GDPR stuff for a moment. Maybe they don’t WANT to hear from you. Maybe they are just being polite and not unsubscribing and they are just quietly ignoring your messages or simple deleting them.

Well, with GDPR, you now have the perfect excuse to break up. You can actually ask your list if they still want to hear from you as you are keen to ensure relevance at all times and that you are being useful to them.

You could even crowbar in the phrase ‘best practice’ if you like that sort of thing.

If you aren’t being relevant or useful, you could ask them what they would prefer. Maybe they want a clean break, no hard feelings. Maybe they want to hear from you less often.

Maybe they don’t actually recall you from that first date long ago.

Maybe, they don’t think they ever asked to hear from you thinking about it.

Or….maybe they will say WAIT DON’T LEAVE ME – I CAN CHANGE.

Well, good news, now you can get together for a coffee and a chat again.

GDPR is a very dry subject but you don’t have to treat it like that. Sure, you can see it as a threat and worry about your number of ‘subscribers’ dwindling or, you could see it as a way to focus on your actual prospects and forge better engagement with them.

I will be sending this out to my database actually asking people if they want me to stop messaging them. Will I be heartbroken if I lose a tonne of subscribers?

No.

Well, maybe a tiny bit, we’re all human BUT I know I will be more delighted to know that those who still want to hear from me have told me they do and that I can now concentrate on better serving them.

They might even want to hear from me MORE.

Marketing isn’t about ‘spray and pray’ it is about being useful to your suspects, prospects, leads, customers and clients.

If you can add a bit of humour in there too, even better.

Just don’t take it so personally if you have a few break ups over this. You were never quite right for each other in the first place and deep down, you know it.

Take care out there.

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