Nobody Wants to Get [Email] Blasted: The Story Behind the Song

Sifting through my inbox last week, I came across an ebook called Conversations, Not Campaigns. The title caught my attention, if only because it was aligned with my personal views about marketing. Much of my experience as a marketer has been in marketing myself as a singer/songwriter, and it was only after years of trying to “sell” myself that I realized the harsh reality: most people don’t want to be “sold” to. Think about it: do you want to be campaigned to, and treated like a gigantic walking wallet? No. You’d probably prefer to be a part of a conversation, and treated like an intelligent human being. The psychology is simple.

As a songwriter, I think in lyrics, listen in melodies, and walk in tempo. For me, the songs are already out there, floating invisibly in the air all around us. How to catch them? With a net made of inspiration, which is exactly what I found in that ebook. The song I wrote, “Nobody Wants to Get Blasted,” was sparked by some of these ideas:

Batch and Blast: It’s Old School

Gone are the days of batch and blast! The bigger-is-better, hard-sell, batch-and-blast mentality is now the Brontosaurus of modern day digital marketing. As the ebook states, point-blank, “Contemporary subscribers expect personal and relevant emails on a non-disruptive schedule.” Bottom line: nobody wants to get blasted.

“Engaging” Content Marketing

While most of you are probably keenly attuned to the importance of content marketing, can you put your finger on what really makes your content engaging? Engaging content should stimulate organic dialogue. It’s all about a “relationship-oriented mindset, which means:

• Being “spoken with” instead of “talked to”


• Dialogues instead of narratives


• Personalization instead of classic automation

I don’t know about you, but in my relationships I prefer to be “spoken with” in a personalized dialogue. Although much of this may sound like common sense, when it comes to your digital marketing efforts and the volume of customers you are trying to acquire and retain, the human touch often takes a backseat to technology’s ability to automate.

The New Wave: Intelligent Automation

What really struck a chord (pun intended) with me was the unique solution Marketo proposes: Intelligent automation. Intelligent automation makes the idealism of personalized, one-to-one marketing a reality. By leveraging technology to organize and evaluate high volumes of subscribers (and the data associated with each one), we are able to focus on using our core strength (our humanity) to create engaging conversations with our customers. Intelligent automation manages the timing and distribution of these conversations.

For me, thinking about customer relationships in this way inspired a song and an affirmation of my own beliefs about marketing. For you, who knows what it may inspire? Hopefully, at the very least, it will point you toward more effective digital marketing — led by meaningful conversations with your customers and prospects, so that they engage with you for the long-term.

Less blasting — more engaging!

Follow this link to hear Julie’s song, “Nobody Wants to Get Blasted“!

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