A quick chat with a barista made me rethink my whole email funnel strategy

I was grabbing coffee last Tuesday at this spot in Austin and the barista asked what I do. I told her I run email campaigns for small businesses. She said she deletes every marketing email unless it's from a local shop she actually visits. That hit different because I've been focusing on fancy automations and not enough on real personality. Now I'm redoing our welcome sequence to sound like a human wrote it, not a bot. Has anyone else tweaked their strategy based on a random conversation like that?

3 comments

3 Comments

sandra7152d ago

Honestly, I used to think the whole "be more human" thing was just fluff people said at conferences. But ngl, a random convo at a gas station changed my mind. I asked the cashier about her phone notifications and she said she only opens emails that have a real person's name on them with a story, not just "Your order is ready." It slapped me in the face. Now I'm rewriting all my subject lines to sound like a friend talking.

the_ryan5h ago

Wait does that mean you're scrapping all your automation or just rewriting the voice behind it? I'm curious how deep you're actually going with this because stripping out the automated stuff is scary for a business. Like do you still use templates at all or is it literally just you typing into the box every time now lol

matthewperry1d ago

Friend of mine owns a little bakery in Portland. He was complaining about his newsletter open rates at a barbecue, and his neighbor's kid just blurts out "your emails look like homework, dude, show me a cookie." So he re-shot his whole campaign on an iPhone, just messy shots of him covered in flour saying "hey we burned a batch of croissants today, come get them half off." His open rates went up 40% in two weeks. You ever get hit with that kind of brutal honesty from a stranger?