Here’s What Happened When I Sent An Email “I Want To Hear From You”

Build your email list they said. It’ll be fun they said. So I did. And I enjoy the process of sharing content. But most email readers are passive. 70-80% don’t read anything, and the remainder doesn’t do much, or anything at all with what they’ve read. What group are you in? Are you conscious about your email newsletter subscriptions?

Email is Dying

Spam filters make communicating via email harder every day, which is a great thing to keep Nigerian princes out of your inbox, but can be tricky if you’re legitimately trying to communicate with people who have actively indicated they want to hear from you. Email is more and more becoming like social media: what you see in your timeline (or inbox) is increasingly controlled by bots and algorithms.

So I sent an email saying “I want to hear from you – please text me, just say Hello”. Here’s what happened.

The responses and reactions I received can roughly be categorized in three groups:

1. 2% of people replied to my email with “Hello”, and nothing e…