I capped myself at one email a week because more felt rude. Then I actually watched the membership numbers. On going quiet, the 95:5 rule, and why you should make more pots.
Okay, so for the longest time I capped myself at one email a week. Anything past that felt rude, like I was shoving my way into people's inboxes uninvited. Social was the same deal. I figured the second I showed up too often, everybody would get sick of me and tune out.
I never once checked whether that was actually true. It just felt right, so I ran with it for a couple years.
Then I landed at a yoga studio where part of my job was staring at the email and membership numbers every week. And yeah. I was wrong. Kind of embarrassingly wrong.
None of it was clever. We just quit going quiet on people. New instructor? That's an email. Schedule change? Email. Somebody hadn't shown up in a few weeks? "Hey, we miss you, here's a free class on us." Tiny stuff, but constant. And pretty much every time something went out, a few more people came through the door.
Here's what never occurred to me: people forget you. Nothing personal. They've got jobs and kids and forty other emails, and you are not the main character in their week. Go quiet for a month and you don't sit politely in the back of their mind as "oh right, that studio I liked." You're just gone. They go to the place that emailed them on Tuesday.
Showing up on some kind of regular basis is the entire trick. It keeps you the first name in their head the day they finally decide to get off the couch.
Now, this is where the marketing textbooks push back on me. There's a popular idea called the 95:5 rule, and the gist is that almost none of your future customers are ready to buy at any given moment, so you grow by constantly reaching new people and staying memorable for whenever they finally are. I don't fully buy it.
What I've learned working in brick-and-mortar markets with a strong community and a small pool of new clients is that retention grows a business faster, and more organically, than an aggressive acquisition model does. Unless you're a brand like Apple or Coca-Cola selling to the whole world, sooner or later you run out of healthy leads in your niche. The people who already know you are the ones worth holding onto.
The other thing wasn't really a belief, more an anxiety, this nagging sense that nothing I made was ever good enough to ship. And not just emails, any copy: social posts, print, all of it. I'd sweat the wording and the design way too long before letting anything go. Then I read a book about making art, and a story in it kind of snapped me out of it.
A ceramics teacher split his class in two. One half got graded purely on quantity, just make as many pots as you can, he'd weigh the pile at the end. The other half got graded on quality, make one pot and make it perfect. When he graded them, the best pots all came out of the quantity group. They'd cranked out pot after pot and learned something from every wobbly one, while the quality half sat around theorizing about the perfect pot and handed in one mediocre lump.
— from Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland
You don't get good at pottery by overthinking one pot. You get good by making a hundred of them. Email is no different. The more you send, the faster you learn what actually lands, and honestly the ones you agonize over usually do about the same as the ones you knock out in ten minutes.
None of this means blast people with junk, obviously. But that line where you genuinely start bugging people sits way further out than your nervous brain swears it does. For us it came down to one dumb thing: we quit going dark on people for weeks at a time, and that's the whole reason it turned around.
