OK, I know you’re busy, we all are.
And you have a lot of people you want to connect with. We all do.
And yes, it’s true, sometimes you copy and paste stuff into more than one email, because the meat of the update might be pretty similar from person to person, right?
But here’s the decision you get to make: how much value do you place on making the person on the other end feel like the note was written just for them, every time?
Outlook has a whiz-bang feature that allows you to create a text email that is, in fact, a mass mailing. It’s tempting isn’t it? Think how efficient it would be!!
Except.
Except you have to decide if relationship-building is a mass-market undertaking. You have to decide if scale comes from going broad or going deep. You have to decide which tradeoff you’re willing to make, because halfway there is no man’s land.
Sure, you’ll be careful most of the time. But the moment a giant block of text in your email is in another color, or another font, or another size, the illusion is shattered. The moment you email the same thank you note to five different people, the wires appear to the whole audience, and the magic of your flying act goes *poof*.
And the thing is, the moment someone discovers that they’re the kind of person who gets impersonal notes from you…well, there’s really no way to recover from that.
