Ninja AI segmentation voodoo?

One of the new subscribers I interacted with during my “hand crafted welcome email” experiment was CJ McDaniel.

He read my email yesterday about this, and replied (sharing with permission):

That is insane! I was wondering how in the world you knew I was into book marketing. Man that must be time consuming though. Your direct welcome email probably did more to engage me than anything else I have ever read. You’ve really got me thinking about if there is some way I can do something similar but maybe a little less high touch for my 9,000 new subscribers each month.

This totally cracked me up.

For one thing, people are so used to getting automated responses that CJ assumed I had some kind of ninja-level, AI-driven segmentation voodoo going on.

Nope, just a little human curiosity.

In two minutes of Googling, I discovered that CJ helps book authors launch their books onto best seller lists, and that he actually lives pretty close to me.

From our interactions I learned that he has a pretty healthy email list too.

In about 5 minutes he went from an anonymous Gmail address to someone I actually know.

Now the point here isn’t that everyone should shut off their welcome email and spend all day emailing their new signups.

CJ’s business is a case in point.

He can’t possibly do this kind of thing for everyone who joins his list.

There is, though, a threshold in his business where personal, un-automated interactions would be highly beneficial and profitable.

Think of automation in your marketing as a dial, with efficiency on one end and effectiveness on the other.

In the majority of cases you want to start with that dial cranked all the way over toward effectiveness.

Then as your email list and your business grows, you can choose to sacrifice some effectiveness to maintain your sanity.

Automation is a tool to help you create better relationships—NOT a way to avoid all human contact.

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