I even received an email from my mailing list provider the other day that my welcome email had a higher rate of abuse complaints than they allow. This isn’t Mailchimp’s fault either—they’re looking out for the sender reputation of their service and their customers. The problem is that people are freely signing up for my list, getting my welcome email, disliking it for some reason, then marking it as spam (when it’s clearly not—spam is email you get without asking for it). It’s totally demoralizing, because my welcome email was something I was quite proud of, and has been talked about all over the internet as something unique and interesting. And, of course, I teach an online course about using Mailchimp... the irony here is not lost on me.
In the end, I axed: the silly tattoo story (which I felt was on-brand and truly me since I have a lot of tattoos), a single swear word I used (purposefully), toned down my voice and very clearly remind people of the specific URL they used to sign up to my list. The experience of signing up for my mailing list, my most valued part of my business, is now diminished because it has to be if it’s to keep existing. But it did bring my “spam” rate down to zero.The Enemy
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Paul's newsletter has remained as one of my favorites for years, he was the one who even introduced the concept of an onboarding email to me.