Tue Feb 4, 2025
I was struck by how strangely personal the subject line of this email newsletter was.
I was checking my email the other day, and a subject line stood out to me. It seems to be an email marketing trend to write the subject lines in a way that’s not obviously advertising to you – almost like it’s crafted to appear as if it’s from one of your contacts. While a little amusing (it did catch my attention, after all), this kind of marketing has always felt vaguely intrusive, or insincere, or a little manipulative (or slightly more so than regular marketing is intended to manipulate you).
Early access February 4, 2025; published publicly February 17, 2025.
Irreverent commentary about marketing in the full post:
While I don’t think there is much more to read into here other than the idle thoughts this made my mind wander with, this kind of marketing aiming to be super-personalized always feels creepy to me. It puts me off when marketing tries to act like it’s your friend – I would rather be marketed to in a straightforward way, versus this insidious, disingenuous way that is trendy now. And which obviously is probably very effective to a companies KPI’s. But at what cost? Marketing that feigns genuine human interaction – and “where have you been?” is the sort of thing you’d expect more from a friend, not a company sending you an ad – this kind of marketing risks cheapening those instances of genuine human interaction in online spaces.
It contributes to the increasing perception that the internet is being overtaken with bots. Because is that really your friend texting you asking how you’re doing? Or is it that vacuum company you ordered from 5 years ago contacting you asking why you haven’t bought another vacuum from them since?
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