The email that broke the camel’s back

A while back, I subscribed to the Farnam Street email newsletter.

I’d seen a headline in the New York Times about Shane Parrish, the guy who writes Farnam Street. The headline read:

“How a Former Canadian Spy Helps Wall Street Mavens Think Smarter”

Interesting.

So I subscribed, without knowing too much about what the content I would be getting.

The first email arrived with a ton of links to important, helpful articles on the Farnam Street blog. I scanned through, but I didn’t read anything.

A second email hit me a few days later, with more helpful content.

Then a third.

And a fourth.

There was nothing wrong with any of these emails. And the content was apparently good — after all, Shane Parrish got a feature written about him in the New York Times.

But none of it clicked with me. It was too earnest, too virtuous, too positive.

Finally, I got an email with the headline “Introducing your new favorite holiday tradition” (it was around Christmastime).

I opened it up. It was about a “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” to exchange books and then spend the evening reading them together with friends and family.

That’s when I unsubscribed.

Don’t get me wrong. I’ve got no beef with Farnam Street or their email newsletter. I personally didn’t find the content interesting. On the other hand, a lot of other people obviously get a lot out of the same emails that I unsubscribed from.

I only bring up my experience with Farnam Street emails to illustrate a point:

It wasn’t that last email that made me unsubscribe.

That was just the straw, or the email, that broke the camel’s back.

All the previous emails had already primed me to open up the “charming Icelandic holiday tradition” email and say to myself, “Oh, hell no.”

This is something to remember in case you do a lot of email marketing.

It’s very hard to assign blame (or praise) to an individual email.

Odds are, it’s the entire email sequence that’s driving readers away — or winning them over.

Of course, there are things (unvirtuous and unearnest things) you can do to stack things in your favor early on in the relationship, while you still have your reader’s attention and good will.

If you’d like to find out what some of those unvirtuous ways are, you might be interested in my upcoming book on email marketing for the health space. For more info or to sign up to get a free copy (once it’s out), here’s where to go:

https://bejakovic.com/profitable-health-emails/