The trouble with e-mail lists
There are two ways this could go - either May 25th marks the end of all these stupid e-mails re-asking for permission to stay in touch, or else it carries on and just gets worse - people keep getting spammed and they go ballistic towards the spammer and it just keeps escalating. There are two assumed rights here, the right to spread word about my business and the right not to be kept informed about your business and although the new law is heavily skewed towards trying to protect the latter right (thank god!) there are a lot of people out there who believe that no law should take away their right to send me e-mails about their brazillian waxing marketing consulting business.
I'm just keeping out of it. I haven't ever been desperate to read an e-mail from someone who I hadn't already expressly given permission to contact me, they just go in the junk.
But the idea of keeping a mailing list and writing to them regularly not in a super salesy way but in an interesting keep-you-up-to-date way is really appealing to people who think they need a bit of extra help getting other people's attention.
It's one of the things that Steemit solves for me. I no longer subscribe (sorry) to the idea that I blog but because everyone knows there's no way to directly monetise blogging, it's really a way to market myself and that sending e-mails is going to get a much better return than anything. I mean, I'm sure it will still work. I'm sure it will still work after GDPR, but I have another way of doing my thing now. I just put it here and the pennies flow through the network and there's no mailchimp, there's no legal compliance-ese for you to read, there's no button to click or not click that might end up tracking whatever. It's just a blog. That I get paid for (most of the time).
Sure, I've tried the newsletter thing. It never worked for me, I never got into the swing of it like I did blogging. It always felt like it needed to be something a bit more intimate, something special and that's just not my way. Everything's special and nothing's special. You don't have to sign up to read my words and I don't have to carefully manage your data (because I don't have it).
I really hope that it's like Y2K and it just goes away until the next tech bogey-man appears.
Steemit's way easier than emailing in my opinion. And you can find new people without them having to find you first. 😁
It seems 90% are not responding to request to resubscribe and we may see a return to direct mail which is not covered by the GDPR. Not sure which is the lesser evil, really.