I just signed up for a blog newsletter, and I immediately received a welcome email from the founder. Pretty standard stuff, honestly. I usually don’t read these welcome emails, but this one was titled “why’d you do it?” and I my immediate thought was – do what? What did I do?
So of course I opened the email. Manipulation #1
The author wanted to know why I signed up for the newsletter, a question many authors ask. I usually don’t respond because I spend way too much time in my email as is, but then the author said:
Almost everybody who signs up replies to this email, and those responses have been super helpful.
I didn’t want to be the only person who didn’t respond. Who would? I didn’t want to be the only unhelpful person. Who would?
So I responded. Manipulation #2
That is a powerful way to end an email and a very clever way of using Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) to elicit responses.
Usually I’m annoyed when I realize I’ve been manipulated, but for some reason I have a warm fuzzy feeling. I think I’ll add something similar to my Duet welcome emails and hopefully get some additional customer feedback 🙂
PS: The email author is Justin Jackson and you can read the email here
