Picture this:
You’ve been standing in line for 3 hours outside the Brooklyn Botanic Garden one frigid January morn.
Your breath hangs in the air. You rub your hands together—partly to keep warm, but also because you’re excited to catch a whiff of a flower so rare, it only blooms once every 6 years.
One by one, you and your fellow flower-sniffers shuffle through the Garden’s hallowed doors…
And then it hits you.
The smell.
Gym socks.
Hot garbage.
A few of the serial killers in the audience even pick up notes of “rotten corpse.”
You fumble with your phone, trying to snap a picture of Sumatra’s rare Amorphophallus gigas flower…and that’s the last thing you remember before passing out.
Such is life.
This so-called “corpse flower” cleverly attracts pollinators with its putrid stench…I’m guessing flies, because what bees or butterflies are that nasty?
(And thrill-seeking, nasally challenged humans, apparently.)
Surely there are better things to wait in line for than a stanky Indonesian flower…
And yet…
A lot of the business owners I talk to are sending their own version of a “corpse flower” via email as we speak.
They capture contact info…go “dark” for 6 weeks…or 6 months…
And then when it’s time to sell something?
“Here, have a putrid peony.”
Go look at the “Promotions” tab in your email account, and you’ll see exactly what I mean.
“I know we haven’t spoken since last year, but we’re having a BOGO sale.”
That’s a rotten rose.
Or…
“You probably don’t remember me, but we just redid our website so go check it out.”
Pungent poppy.
Or even worse…
“Now introducing new AI-powered blah blah blah…”
Odorous orchid.
And just like Sumatra’s corpse flower, your scattershot email strategy repels all but the most crazed and fanatic readers.
The rest of us?
If you haven’t messaged me in months and expect me to buy your stuff out of nowhere, that’s an unsubscribe, my guy.
Solution?
Well, that’s easy.
Be like clover flowers—open every day for weeks and months on end, meeting and greeting bees…and they smell nice.
Meaning…
Email more frequently. (And smell nice.)
Emailing often means getting bad customers off your list faster…and building stronger relationships with your good customers.
How often?
That depends. I don’t really want daily emails from Lululemon or McDonald’s. You probably don’t either.
So, the real answer is…
Email more frequently than you are now.
