Principle: People like people, and dislike corporations
The advice to “be more professional” has always struck me as dumb.
I was the least professional intern in my first job, and the only one the CEO of the company wanted to talk to for an hour at a time.
I’ve been writing emails the snooty 10% turn their nose up at, and the 90% of actual human beings think are funny/culture-promoting.
There are trade off’s for sure, but being a real person and acting like on too usually pays off.
Here’s an example from a $10M company called Alice’s Mushrooms:
👆🏼 That’s an email that went out to all customers. On purpose. No design, no format, typos, a nasty-looking coupon code. Didn’t even capitalize alice.
Tactics
Be dumber.
Go write an email that looks like trash, and send it before spell checking.
It’s Cyber Monday, and everyone has beautiful emails with perfect, AI-generated subject lines.
Go send the subject line, “its open.”
See if that doesn’t perform better than your other ones.
Just take yourself less seriously, be more human, and you’ll get noticed.
Everyone else is competing to be the fastest in the 100-m dash, go win your gold medal at the pogo stick.
Habits
Send one email a week where the copy is good, and the design looks like 2003 AOL.
Mike
Today’s inspiration: An email from Max the Inbox