“BETRAY YOUR AUDIENCE!”

Picture this:

You’re at a movie festival/event, and someone with a camera comes up to you and asks you…

„What is your favorite movie?“

You answer:

„Oh it’s the Shawshank Redemption.“

But the thing is…

That’s NOT your favourite movie.

Your favourite movie is actually Shrek 2.

You love Shrek – you have copies of all installments as DVDs and Blu-rays… you have Shrek memorabilia… and you’ve watched the „shrek is love“ video more times than you probably should’ve.

(To the point that it’s become… weird – at best.)

So why did you change your answer?

Because you took note of the environment you’re in and you figured you would’ve come across as „less sophisticated“ if you said a kid movie was your favorite.

(Yet in friend circles, you have no problem ever saying Shrek 2 is your favourite movie.)

This is why you shouldn’t trust what your customers say they want.

Because they’ll say one thing…

…but actually mean the complete other.

(That’s one of the main reasons why I’m against the use of surveys when doing market research.)

And yet here I am…

Listening to what my subscribers tell me.

(Well, what ONE subscriber told me.)

Specifically – and I’ll cut this short:

He messaged me saying how he loves my emails and gets a lot of useful stuff out of them…

…but that he doesn’t like how I always have to start out with a story and then lead into something.

Fine.

So I listened to him and wrote an email the other day titled: „Breakdown of Hank’s story-selling masterclass“.

It was a 2100+ word email of me going possibly the deepest I’ve ever gone when it comes to marketing/selling/persuasion in a single email.

And yet…

I got buck’ all engagement on it.

I’ve seen this enough times to the point that it has become a pattern:

Whenever I drop some serious apex email shit…

(Like the email from a few days ago, or something like that: „How to stay out of spam/promo tabs by donating to charity“ as another example…)

… I get super low engagement and hear crickets.

But when I do my usual story-heavy emails with lots of analogies, metaphors, examples, dry humour, and the occasional rant in there…

Everyone claps like seals.

Whatever.

I’ll still keep writing emails like that one from a few days ago occasionally – if for anything than to just reinforce this lesson of how you should never ask a deer how it wants to be hunted.

(You ask the hunter btw.)

Or as the legendary game director Hideo Kojima would say:

„BETRAY YOUR AUDIENCE!“