Why your emails might be a magnet for discount-vultures (and how to SHUN them away for good!) 

In 1936, Dale Carnegie wrote what would eventually become the monster bestseller book:

“How To Win Friends and Influence People.”

To this day it’s still in print, and it’s super popular with BOTH the corporate…

…and the public world.

It was based on a simple premise:

People like being treated as if they’re important.

And the people and/or companies who do so?

Tend to get rewarded for it.

As a corollary, this begs an obvious question:

How do you signal your customers they’re UNIMPORTANT to you?

One of the easiest ways?

Throw a blatant sales pitch their way – a few real examples from my inbox:

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Break The Limits—25% OFF 💥

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20% OFF Protein Powders—Time to Reload!

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🤑 Spend $99, Save 15% Until Monday

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20% OFF Sale Ends Midnight!

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72hr Price Cuts Sale 🚀

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These are 5 emails from 5 real, and “different” supplement brands.

Aside from the fact that they’re all shouting the exact same thing and are killing their differentiation…

They’re also making me feel like I’m just part of a herd there to be billed.

But some have even managed to one-up themselves!

They’ve managed to put their obnoxious sales pitches…

…on a “diet” of trenbolone sandwiches:

By using AI.

How much further could you go in signalling how UNIMPORTANT you think the customer is…

…than by forcing him to get his needs/desires/demands addressed by a stochastic pattern recognition machine AI?

It’s pretty clear.

“Mr. Smith, you are so unimportant and such a low priority to us… that we won’t even allow you to waste a human marketer’s time. Buy from our AI-generated blatant sales pitches or go away.”

Not to mention:

You’re also taking a dig at his intelligence.

“Did you really think I was so stupid I couldn’t tell it was AI?”

A study from Gartner found that most people can ALREADY spot so-called AI-generated content…

…within only two sentences.

(And when they do, the trust allegedly drops by 44%.)

People can tell fool’s gold from the real thing.

And even if you absolutely don’t give one iota of care for any of the above because:

“Well… there will always be SOMEONE who will buy!”

Yes, there will.

But the type of customers who will buy after having their intelligence insulted…

…and being reduced to little more than a wallet with a pulse…

Are the exact same ones you (or at least your CS) team…

Secretly curses at.

• They’re the flakey, bargain-hunter “Karens” who will squeeze every last drop of profit they can from your squealing, exhausted piggy bank in the service of cheap…
• They’re the same ones who bully & harass your customer service because their order hasn’t arrived 52 minutes post-purchase…
• And they’re the same ones who exploit chargebacks and/or abuse your refund policy.

Many such cases.

(With many more headaches – biological & financial – they can cause.)

But you know what’s funny?

Even probably THEY won’t buy from emails like the above.

Why?

Well, in order to buy something from an email…

…they first have to notice it in the inbox.

And considering all the emails I’ve shown are blatant sales pitches…

(Further “augmented” with a large language model AI…)

None of them are differentiated.

So too bad Shifty:

Your emails aren’t good enough even for the bottom-of-the-barrel “customer”.

(I put it in quotations because calling them a customer is almost an insult to proper customers.)

All of this is remedied by, frankly, a little common sense.

What was the entire premise of How to Win Friends And Influence People?

Make people feel important.

So if you send people relevant, interesting, entertaining emails that they would WANT to read…

…making them decent offers in those emails that they would want to buy…

It’s “flabbergasting” how well that works.

If you want to see how I do it with my Email Storyselling methodology…

Check out, well… my entire book frankly.

(And pay close attention to the Appendix section, where I actually have 11 email examples + a Loom breakdown of each one.)