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 those practices had stood the test of time. 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 idea applies to nonperishable things, not people; our remaining life expectancy generally decreases as we age.
Under the Lindy effect, things that have lasted a long time are expected to last longer still. 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.
The last example is the one I want to focus on.
Email has endured, and so has email marketing. Email has been around for almost 50 years, survived all social networks and is still alive and kicking.
Businesses spend huge amounts of money gaining followers and creating content for social media. But as we can learn from the past, social networks come and go and a platform that feels permanent today could disappear quickly. And all your followers will be gone then, too.
Social networks are comparatively young. By the Lindy logic, a newer network has less evidence of staying power than an older one.
That makes a mailing list especially valuable. I think it should be central to an online marketing strategy.
https://twitter.com/GoodMarketingHQ/status/1263831042659618818
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.
A mailing list is a durable asset and one of the best ways to build an audience online.