Having been running our newletter for about 3 years now, it never ceases to amaze me what our readers find interesting week in week out and what they find totally boring.
As our database has grown to several thousands, the problem with today's newsletter is trying to make it appeal to all tastes.
I have actually come to the conclusion recently that this is realistically never going to happen. It is impossible that each week everyone is really going to appreciate something within the newsletter, despite our best efforts.
Here is an example. At the beginning of the year when it was one horror story after another and articles about the market crashing etc, we decided to do a piece about the
10 reasons why you should buy in Spain to balance it all out a bit. Despite what you read it's not all bad here, many of us live here very happily and run our businesses here and there are still good places to buy.
However, this particular article yielded the highest
ever number of complaints and unsubscribes since we started the newsletter. We were accused of leading people into some sort of false sense of security saying that there was nothing wrong with buying in Spain.
Errr...no we didn't!
This week we sent out an email about Mark Wikins' new guide about
buying distressed property in Spain. This time we've been accused of helping to bring down the market even further..more complaints and more unsubscribes!
Now, don't get me wrong. I love feedback, infact I really appreciate it, even if it is rather nasty sometimes and I certainly don't have a problem with people unsubscribing from the newsletter. Infact I would rather people unsubscribed than have to keep deleting emails from us that they don't want to read or care about.
When we started the newsletter we just wanted to tell people about all our experiences and to help them along the way, to arm them with the facts and the reality of moving to Spain, living here and working here. The whole point was to write about the good AND the bad. Back then we only had a few hundred to please....
Appealling to serveral thousand people is very complicated and will always lead to conflicts of interest. It's only getting worse as more and more people sign up every day.
So what to do?
Well we recently asked for our readers' feedback and we got a massive response, which shows how brilliant the majority of our newsletter readers are. I'm going through all the data now and it looks like where the newsletter is concerned we're going to be making some very big decisions leading to some very big changes....watch this space....
Justin