List building and subscriber numbers

My ezine now has 16,433 subscribers and I sometimes try to visualise what this means because I aim to write to people as individuals whereas I clearly don't know them all personally. Perhaps the easiest way to grasp the scale of the number is to imagine all my subscribers standing in a line along the side of a road. If they occupy 1 metre each then the line is over 16 kilometres long or more than 10 miles as we say in the UK.

The other thing is that this line is getting longer by about 50 metres a day, sometimes more (66 metres yesterday.)

I spend a lot of time mulling over the way internet marketers write to their lists - it's a curious sort of relationship, 1 to many, yet every person on a list has the ability to write back if they feel like it.

I've always felt that as a publisher of an ezine I have a duty to provide a high quality product and one of the things I watch closely is unsubscription levels. I do this by sending out test emails to a limited selection of people before broadcasting to everyone. If I get objections or unsubscriptions from my sample, I pull the broadcast and think of something else to write about.