The Email You’re Afraid Of Getting Rebel Therapist

If you fear bothering people with your marketing, this is for you.
I recently got the worst email I’ve opened in over a year.
I’m gonna share the actual email with you and I’m gonna share my internal reactions and the decisions I made after.
In the context of life, this email is really NOT that bad at all. No trigger warning necessary.
I’m sharing this because I know many of you are really afraid of getting an email like this.
I’m hoping hearing about my experience will help you feel less afraid of getting an email like this. I’m hoping that you feeling less afraid will help you make aligned decisions. I’ll explain all of that in a moment.
The email I’ll share was a response to one of my sales emails promoting Create Your Program, the high touch program I run 3 times a year.
Here’s what the email said:
“Way too many emails with not much info. Blocking your email and please remove me from your waitlist.
Feels like clickbait.”
I said “ouch!”
My partner looked over my shoulder and said “that’s not nice!”
I had a moment of panic. I thought: Am I a fraudster? Am I a villian? Am I a jerk who never provides value?
AND…Does this person hate me?
And then paused and I said to my partner: “No it’s OK. She’s right to tell me. She’s annoyed.”
Now I did feel a little peeved with the email sender. I thought: “She could have just unsubscribed. There’s a link in every single email to unsubscribe! Why didn’t she just unsubscribe? Why be like that?”
And I wished I could write back to her and explain about unsubscribing and also say I’m sorry you didn’t get value…and maybe you should check out this or that free resource I provide.
But I couldn’t write her back because she told me not to contact her.
But you know what? She might not know that unsubscribing works. She’s totally within her rights to tell me about her experience and to set a digital boundary. She was clear. She did not call me names or behave abusively. She let me know that she’s withdrawn her consent to be emailed.
I very much WANT people to be able to withdraw their consent.
So as she asked, I went into my email platform and deleted her from it.
Then while I was there I looked into what emails I had sent her, so I could better understand her experience.
She had signed up for a free workshop through an instagram ad that I run. Then she’d gotten follow up emails reminding her to watch that free workshop, and then some sales emails about my program.
It’s likely that she didn’t actually watch the workshop…which is totally understandable. I’ve signed up for a free workshop or class and then not hit play on it.
She also signed up for the waitlist for Create Your Program.
She received the maximum amount of emails someone could ever get from me, about 2 a day for a handful of days. That’s because she signed up for my free workshop and then my waitlist, all during a launch of my program,
I took a step back and considered…is there anything I want to change about this email flow going forward?
In this case, there’s not much I wanted to change.
I want people who are new to my list to have a chance to jump on the wait list for CYP, which functions as an interest list. Often people find me right when they’re looking for a program like mine, and it’s important that they CAN sign up right away if that’s what they want. I only run CYP 3 times a year right now, so I don’t want people to have to wait months to have a chance to jump in.
I did make one change to my email flow.
I already have an opt OUT email that I send to my list when I’m launching. It basically says: “I’m gonna be promoting my program for a couple of weeks. If you want to stay on my list but you don’t want to hear about CYP this round, click here. I’ll be quiet for a couple weeks.”
I learned this opt-out approach from Kelly Diels, and I always hat tip to her in that email.
Here’s the change: I adde