Would your audience even notice if the baddies took over your email?
It’s Monday morning.
The office is quiet, but it’s the wrong quiet. Something feels off… Your marketing manager is sitting with his head in his hands, looking stressed. Not an unusual thing for him, but still, today he’s looking extra worried.
You get to your desk, log on, and that’s when you see it. Slack is exploding with panic emojis, and ‘what do we do?’ questions are flooding every channel. Your inbox pings with subject lines of ‘urgent’, ‘panic’…
Baddies took over your email list!
They have been sending emails all weekend, and THEY ARE MAKING MONEY!
Lots of it.
You have to give it to them.
Email can return £36 for every £1 spent, so they picked the right asset to highjack.
Somehow, you manage to access the performance metrics, and this is where you realise how big of an asset you just lost.
Their open rates are way higher than yours. Their click-throughs are impressive too.
They are making THOUSANDS of pounds from the list YOU built.
‘How?’ You exclaim to yourself. And it’s not about how they bypassed all the security measures. What you want to know is how they are making so much cash from your list.
You’ve been sending emails every week. You thought you were doing quite well, and somehow, these baddies showed you that really you were collecting scraps.
But here is the scarier thought – has your audience even noticed it’s not you who sends the emails?
So far, not a single message from anyone to say ‘these emails don’t sound like you, what’s going on?’ Not. One. Message.
Instead, they are clearly enjoying the emails, and they are spending money!
Your competitive business streak can’t take it anymore.
‘That’s it.’ You say through gritted teeth as you log in to one of the test email accounts you snuck into the CRM so you can keep tabs on the AI and make sure it actually does send the emails.
You HAVE to see how the baddies managed to execute this stunt so successfully.
You click on the latest email. You read it. ALL OF IT.
What?
The email is fun, engaging, has real personality; you are even tempted to click the link.
‘How are they doing this?’ You cry out.
Is it Claude? Is it ChatGPT? Jasper! Must be Jasper. Or perhaps they trained the AI themselves?
And then the penny drops.
You sit with it for a moment. The embarrassment of it, mostly. You’ve been congratulating yourself on being efficient with emails, and somewhere in all that efficiency, you forgot that the people on your list are actual humans who want to be entertained.
The baddies, whoever they are, didn’t use better technology. They used better people. People who understand that an email is a conversation and a relationship builder. People who are skilled in catching attention, entertaining, and, by the looks of things, telling great stories.
They used COPYWRITERS!
You’ve been sending consistent, on-brand, perfectly adequate emails. And ‘perfectly adequate’, it turns out, is its own kind of slow surrender.
Your list grew because people chose you: your perspective and your particular way of seeing things. The moment you swapped that out for machine writing, you started to gradually dilute down the very thing that made them subscribe.
The baddies took your asset in one dramatic swoop. But it was you who did all the damage, just slower. The baddies just showed you what your list was worth when someone treated it like the asset it actually is.
Would your audience notice if baddies took over your email?
If the answer to this question stings a little, good. It means you know what to do next.
Speak soon,
Dot
P.S.
If you’d like a hand with your emails, a real human one, I’m here. Get in touch and let’s have a chat.