I love receiving emails with this pre-amble, because generally, I like messing with people, and especially people who get sloppy, and I call them on their cookie-cutter writing, as there is no thought put into it to pique my interest, and really engage with me right from the start.
My last response to this email-opener was:
“Hello, you may think that the email was looking for me in my inbox, but since it is an email, consisting of essentially bits and bytes existing in an electronic medium with no intelligence whatsoever, ipso-facto it could not find me at all so your email has utterly failed at finding me, since I actually found it first. Also when I found your email I was not well at all, and was quite ill. So it hasn’t found we well in either case Thanks anyway though.”
I wish I could tap into their webcam and see the look on their face at this reply as they are reading my response. I would relish in every facial movement, eye twitch, and verbal response. Their eyes squinting, with a furrowed brow thinking WTF?
It’s as if the sender thought the email was like a Sentinel off the epic movie “The Matrix” and they are dispatching these search and destroy machines to “find me” and “blow me away” with their great offers thinking to themselves “Go forth my minions!!!!!! And bring me back sales!!!!!!!!!” My apologies Agent Smith. You’ll have better luck holding aloft a sword and yelling “By the Powers of Grayskull.”
I’m sure whoever read my response was probably thinking “What a prick” but hey, it was something different — something unexpected, something shocking to them, eliciting a response that got remembered, and hopefully forced him/her to really think about what they are writing and take corrective actions.
For the love of all things good, be engaging, be different. Blow me away with an opening that makes me do a double-take — anything but the same old drone-speak that we all hear and dismiss. Hit me in the face with something profound that make my neck do a frickin’ 360 and spin-off so I have to look for it on the ground.
I’m not going to get into the fact that most organizations really don’t know their customers well enough to be able to write engaging sales pre-ambles and literature that will instantly captivate their target audiences, and have them salivating.
How about this for a start:
- Shock the reader by opening up with something they have never seen before. Just make it SFW.
- Research what problems exist in your target market and show how you are addressing them in a unique way
- Make them laugh. It’s no surprise that people will remember something if it makes them laugh, or is at least amusing enough to bring up in a conversation.
- Write less, and more concise. Distill your writing down to the essence with a bit of flair and humor, and leave off anything that sounds cliché, or anything that rolls off your tongue. To get creative you’ll actually have to think a bit for some good material.
- Space it out for christ sake. Nobody likes reading an entire blob of text. They will just tune out. Spoon feed me in chunks, rather than ramming the entire jar down my throat.
If you receive any replies back stating referencing anything in your email, funny, clever, etc, you’re doing it right.
