Your grandparents didn’t need dietary guidelines to be healthy and your parents didn’t need books to raise you. Instead, they did things that humans always have been doing because these things probably make sense. This is called the Lindy effect.
Lindy’s Law was coined by Albert Goldman in 1964. It means that the future life expectancy of things and ideas is proportional to their current age, so that every additional period of survival implies a longer remaining life expectancy.
This excludes people, as our life expectancy decreases while we age.
Things that are old are expected to survive the longest in the future. Where the Lindy effect applies, mortality rate decreases with time. Some examples are:
- Books: the longer a book has been read, the longer it will probably be read in the future, e.g. Meditations by Marcus Aurelius.
- Food: the longer a food has been eaten, the longer it will probably be eaten in the future, e.g. meat.
- Artists: the longer an artist has been popular, the longer it will probably be popular in the future, e.g. The Beatles.
- Exposure: the more exposure something has received, the more exposure it will probably receive in the future, e.g. COVID-19.
- Companies: the longer a company exists, the longer it will probably exist in the future, e.g. McDonald’s.
- Technology: the longer a technology has been around, the longer it will probably be around in the future, e.g. email.
I want to stick with the last example here.
Email is lindy, so email marketing is lindy. Email has been around for almost 50 years, survived all social networks and is still alive and kicking.
Businesses are spending shitloads of money to gain followers and producing content for social media. But as we can learn from the past, social networks come and go and those that are around now can be gone within a year. And all your followers will be gone then, too.
Social media has not been around for a long time, and a newer network will have a shorter life expectancy than an older one.
This makes mailing lists extra powerful and I think it should be the cornerstone of your online marketing strategy.
9/ Email subscribers are gold bars in the bank.
New media rise and fall. Email isn’t going anywhere. It’s been around longer. It will survive longer.
Medium can't paywall it. It's the best place to build an audience online.
— Harry's Marketing Examples (@GoodMarketingHQ) May 22, 2020
MarketingExamples taught me how to create value on your channels, transfer that value into your website and store that value in your mailing list by converting readers to subscribers.
Email subscribers are the lindy gold bars in the bank and the best way to build an audience online.