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If Your Email Newsletter Feels Automated, Stop Sending It!

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Last Updated on February 12, 2022

An Email newsletter can be a valuable tool to keep readers coming back to your blog. But they can also be so spammy and formulaic that I want to hit the “unsubscribe” right away.

I get that email newsletters have to be, for lack of a better word, “automated.” I’m not saying this is automatically a bad thing. But it’s bad when the writer makes it obvious that it’s automated.

I’m going to illustrate my point with a message I received here at the Patrick’s Place that was not an email newsletter, but that reads the way some of them do. And I hope you’ll quickly see the problem.

But first things first: it started innocently enough:

Hello Patrick,

I hope you’re doing well.

Well that was nice of her. I know she doesn’t really hope I’m doing well, beyond a generic best wish for wellbeing that anyone should have for anyone else. But it sounds warm enough without being over the top, so I’m fine with it.

She wastes no time getting right to business. I’m going to remove her name and the name of the company she represents. Otherwise, you’ll see what I did. She continues:

By the way, I’m Jane, one of the editors at FakeName.com- a Walla Walla-based online community dedicated to bring simple astrology to ordinary people.

We produce up-to-date content on topics related but not limited to Astrology, horoscopes, tarot, and numerology. We are quickly becoming an authority in astrology niche.

Astrology? Well that’s interesting. I’m not interested, but at least it’s different, so I’ll give “Jane” of Walla Walla — no, her name wasn’t Jane and she wasn’t from Walla Walla, remember? — the benefit of the doubt.

Until the next line happened. This is exactly as it appeared:

I have come across some of the articles that you have here on [[SITE]] and it is very well written.

That was the deal-breaker. That [[SITE]] was not some modest effort of mine not to repeat the name of my own blog: it was what “Jane” sent. Instead of the name of my blog, there was a wild card left unfilled. There were about three lines after that, offering to compensate me for mentioning them in an upcoming article. I didn’t really pay attention after that.

As soon as “Jane” showed me she couldn’t even take the time to either manually type my blog’s name or utilize a line of code that worked well enough to make it display correctly on an automatic basis, the cat was out of the bag. I’d seen the man behind the curtain of this little message. I wasn’t buying it, no matter what she had to say.

I’ve seen email newsletters do this, too.

For some reason, some genius decided that every email newsletter had to begin with a personal salutation that mentioned the recipient by name. But the writer of the email newsletter, while writing to me generically, isn’t writing to me personally. I get that. No one who has an email list of 1,200 people, for example, is sending 1,200 emails one at a time.

But if you don’t have a way to make sure you’re not sending a mass email that begins, “Dear [[Name]],” then your email may very well be sent to the electronic equivalent of the vertical file before the reader ever gets to the first sentence.

Blog Posts vs Emails

Here’s where someone might chime in about the similarity with a blog post.

It’s a valid point, but only to a point.

I’m writing this blog post to you, my reader. But I don’t pretend that I’m not writing it simultaneously to a potential audience of millions. I hope to make this post, as I hope to make every post, feel like I’m writing it to you, and if you’ve managed to make it this far, I must written it well enough to make you stay. If two people have made it this far, I’ve done the same thing with someone else.

But I didn’t pretend to be writing this for only one person. Anyone who reads this site, whether they’re in New York, San Francisco, Finland or Hong Kong, can receive the same message. While I hope the content is useful, there’s no personalization because, obviously, for the majority of people who’ll read this, I don’t necessarily know your name.

The advantage of the email newsletter is exactly the problem with it.

In most email newsletter signup forms, you’re prompted to enter your name. The writer then does know your name and proceeds to craft a generic message she hopes reads like a personally-written email. And almost always, even without an obvious fail like the misfiring wild card, the email fails to reach that level.

Most of us know, I think, that the email newsletter isn’t a one-on-one conversation: it’s a one-on-unlimited conversation masquerading as a one-on-one conversation. But the harder the email newsletter writer tries to mask that fact, the more likely I am to unsubscribe.

Your Turn:

What’s your biggest pet peeve for an email newsletter?

the authorPatrick
Patrick is a Christian with more than 30 years experience in professional writing, producing and marketing. His professional background also includes social media, reporting for broadcast television and the web, directing, videography and photography. He enjoys getting to know people over coffee and spending time with his dog.

1 Comment

  • I don’t receive many newsletters, in fact I try to unsubscribe from any that land in my inbox. There is one similar occurrence that I think applies, however.

    I’ve been on the Internet since before the World Wide Web existed, and I’ve signed up for countless forums and other online communities along the way. One of my email addresses is the very same one I first registered around 2000 or 2001. I don’t actively use it, I just have it forward email to my primary account in the off chance that some contact from 14 years ago wants to get in touch, or if I need to re-access some old account. (I’ve actually come across interesting sites “for the first time” and tried to sign up for them only to find out I already did, a decade ago.)

    About ten years ago, the most popular forum software by far (think WordPress in blogging terms) was vBulletin. So, I signed up at a lot of vBulletin sites along the way. A LOT of them. Now, although the software itself matured (and arguably deteriorated) over time, one thing remained static: their birthday message.

    You can see where I am going with this…

    Each year, I get the same email, tens of times. I can quote you the line by heart: “we at [site name] would like to wish you a happy birthday today!” It’s the superfluous “today” at the end of it that really drives home the fact that no one at that site bothered to modify that message, making it even more apparent how insincere the whole greeting is. Without the “today”, I could at least pretend that they DID modify it, but simply arrived at a fairly generic greeting. Alas, no. No effort.

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