Every person on your list already has an association with you (well not YOU but your brand or business)
What an association is
It's not an opinion someone formed about your last campaign. It's not something they could articulate if you asked them.
It's a learned response, built over time
The science is evaluative conditioning.
Take something a person feels nothing about, pair it repeatedly with something they do feel about, and the feeling transfers.
It's been shown with images, words, tastes, smells and sounds. It doesn't require anyone to notice the pairing happened.
Your sender name is the neutral thing. On the day someone subscribes, it means nothing.
What it gets paired with, over and over, is whatever feeling arrives alongside it.
After twenty or thirty pairings, your name isn't neutral any more. It carries whatever it's been arriving with.
So what are you pairing yourself with?
→ An ask. Mild obligation, or mild irritation, depending on how many there've been
→ A discount for something they weren't thinking about. A nudge of pressure, and the faint sense of being sold to
→ A deadline that wasn't real. Distrust - and it compounds, because the next one gets discounted before it's read
→ Something useful they didn't expect. Surprise and a small debt. This is the one you want.
→ A question answered before they had to ask. Relief, which is stronger than most marketing ever manages
→ Nothing much at all. The neutral pairing. Builds nothing.
Which means your association isn't what you've said about yourself in your copy.
It's the accumulated feeling of everything that's arrived carrying your name.
A email campaign can be beautifully written, perfectly on brand, and still be training people to feel mildly hassled every time it shows up
Why the wrong one is so expensive
It doesn't just cost you unsubscribes.
A negative association degrades the performance of good work you've already paid for. The email that would have landed with a neutral audience arrives at an audience who already decided what it is before opening.
You're never starting from zero on a send. You're starting from whatever you've built (and usually stuff outside of email)
So - right or wrong? Click below to read the full piece and understand what associations you've built.
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