Have you joined my incredibly non-annoying, once-in-a-while email newsletter?
You can tell I’m tired. Every once in a while, I want to reach a segment of people in my network. Not an email newsletter or update, but a specific email sent to specific people, on a specific topic about which I know they care.
I use a very cool Gmail program that allows you to send a mail merge to a select few. (Don’t get excited, you can’t send a billion-person blast to everyone you’ve ever met, it’s deliberately designed not to do that, and anyway, if you want to do that, you actually hurt the universe.)
Anyhow, you write an email and put it in your “drafts” folder on Gmail, then you direct this script to that email, and you can make it personal, with a first name, etc. Beats the “bcc” by a mile.
So today, in reaching out to 300 specific business buddies about a very cool event I’m producing in NYC, I used the mail merge. Right? Why not. I figured it would be helpful.
I hit send. Thirty seconds later, I got an email back “Sorry, dude, I’m not.”
Followed two seconds later by “Huh? No, why?”
Something was wrong.
Sure enough, I looked in my “sent” folder. I just sent out 300 emails with a subject line of “Hey bro… You still top tier at Hilton? I may have something for you,” and nothing in the body.
Oops. I just sent the wrong email to 300 people in about five seconds. Ah, technology.
So the following happened in order:
1) The color drained from my face.
2) I cursed a stream of sixteen curses, invoking several mythical deities.
3) I sent out this:
Subject: Apologies
My apologies – I just sent you an email that obviously wasn’t for you. My sincere apologies.Best,-Peter Shankman