Rediscovering Long-Form Email
From humble beginnings in eLearning, I have somehow spent the majority of my career thus far in or around email.
Not to flex, but I am an email expert. Cold, hot, and everything in between.
I'm one of very few people on the planet that can say they've personally been responsible for sending 10,000,000 emails a day. I've recently nurtured an email-infrastructure-as-a-service platform from the ground up to over 100,000 monthly sends.
I know nuances about SMTP and IMAP servers that would give you nightmares.
So you know after a long day, the last thing I want to do is open an email client. That was until recently.
The fruits of my shitposting on LinkedIn (let's connect!) the last few weeks after waking up from what could be considered some of the worst years of my life have started to yield new human connections.
Nay. Human friends.
These humans don't always use the same platforms I use. The competitive landscape of social platforms is good for the market, but bad for consistent collaboration amongst your peers.
So I've taken to email like I'm Lana Del Rey in 2012.
Seriously, Frank Ocean would have loved her.
Thing is, we're living in a world where it's easy to outsource long-form content to an LLM, and so many people have absolutely no problem with trying to pass it off as their own writing. This puts a target on any long-form content, doubly so if you actually know how to type in an em dash.
But there's something special about a conversation starting with a couple of sentences, then evolving into something bigger. Sentences turn into paragraphs. Paragraphs turn into chapter-sized chunks.
Conversation happens organically on chat services and text messages, but it tends to revolve around bite-sized quips. With long-form email, it's as if you're a soldier trying to catch a loved one up on the happenings since you last wrote them.
That's not to say I'm over here composing love letters, but the ability to connect with deeper conversation is something that you don't see much with cold email these days. Agents are fed with rules like:
- Personalize the greeting.
- Open with a short sentence.
- List benefits as bullet points.
- Ask a question to get them on the line.
- End with a soft CTA.
It's just that simple! Scripted humanity, disguised as a helpful Sherpa that just wants to see you succeed.
Email deserves better than what spammers are willing to do with it. Email doesn't fit the dopamine loop of social media. Email is meant to communicate, and it takes time to craft something meaningful to the human being at the other end.
:wq
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