Giving youth pastors the tools they need to make and shape disciples.

400 Gone. Just. Like. That.

5 · 23 · 18

It was like Thanos had snapped his fingers and 400 subscribers vanished.  In my earlier post I shared how I had lost over 100 subscribers, but I had no idea I had lost that many. Here’s what really happen and why I think it happened.

After some back and forth with Mail Chimp, my e-mail list provider, here is what the compliance team told me,

Paul. Reviewing the account and the contacts who were unsubscribed from that recent campaign, we can see that many of them are on the yahoo.com or aol.com, and domains which use them for their email service. It appears that some automated process at these domains is clicking through all links in the campaigns, including the unsubscribe link. After checking our system for similar cases of high unsubscribes, we also found that virtually all accounts experiencing this issue are using an address at icloud.com or me.com as the reply-to address in their campaigns. Looking at the account, we can see that your campaign also matches this criteria.

So, it wasn’t my fault after all and everyone did not hate me for sending  one too many e-mails. Oh, did I mentions the good part, all the e-mails that are gone, I can’t add them back.

Unfortunately, we will not be able to return the addresses that unsubscribed back to your list. US Federal CAN-SPAM Act regulations are very specific with regard to respecting all unsubscribe requests.

I went from a list of over 700 to a list of a little over 300. There are lessons to be learned here.

Don’t Take Anything Or Anyone For Granted

You know when people tell you “nothing lasts forever”? They ain’t kidding. I can’t say I took all the great people on my list for granted, but I took the list itself for granted. I never thought something like this could happen. Stupid technology.

Don’t Put Your Trust In Anyone But God

Some trust in chariots and some in horses, but we trust in the name of the LORD our God. Psalm 20:7

I was up at 2:00 a.m this morning thinking, praying, and repenting. Somewhere along the line, I had misplaced my trust. I put too much trust in a list to bring me what I needed, be it affirmation or sales, or whatever.

One of my old Associate Pastor friends told me a story about trusting God. One of the Busch sons of Anheuser-Busch beer fame, attended our church for a while. When the church as not doing well financially, my friend  told me he would be sitting on the platform, on A Sunday morning watching the back door to see if the Busch son came in. My friend thought, “if he’s here today, its going to be alright”. He also told me that God immediately checked his heart by “I wish you trusted Me as much as you trust him”. Wow!

By looking at my new number of subscribers, I could not help but think of Gideon. Gideon had a war to fight, but God thought he had too many men so God pared them down to, yep, 300. God will get the glory in the end, not my list (sorry guys)

Whether God was involved in this purge or not, it doesn’t matter. The incident itself revealed my heart. Anything I accomplish isn’t because I have a list of people, who are awesome by the way, but because I put my trust in the Lord.

Going forward, I’m watch the back door to make sure God is walking in. When he does, I know everything will be ok.

Good News:  I have room for a few more subscribers, plenty of room. 🙂

Sign up at the bottom 🙂 vvvvvv

 

 

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