“Would you jump into a pool without water?  No.  The splash is what keeps you alive.  Splash is life.”

– Gina Linetti, Brooklyn 99

Here’s the story:

When I first hung up my shingle as an email specialist, I was doing some cold calls to drum up clients.  One real estate agent in my area had mailed out a booklet with coupons to some of the neighborhood businesses, which I thought was a great idea.

So I called him up.

I said, “You seem like a guy who’s open to some new ideas about marketing…”

I asked him if he used email, and he did.  But he was more or less doing what every real estate agent does which is to send yawningly dry market updates or only email when they have a new listing.

I suggested we try something different to help him stand out.

Even add some (gasp!) entertainment to spice things up.

His reply?

“I don’t know…that can be kitschy.”

Based on the reaction of my mastermind group when I told this story (it sent them rushing to the Googletionary to look up “kitschy”) I should probably help you out:

Kitschy adj considered to be in poor taste because of excessive garishness or sentimentality.

“Cheesy” might be a good synonym.

Now…

By no means am I proposing you become the email equivalent of a monkey that plays the accordion.

And you do not need to bowl folks over with your charisma as The Muscle is wont to do (you try keeping a lid on all this animal magnetism).  However, adding “splashes” of personality is one of the key ways we attract interest.

A lot of business owners are scared to death of looking “unprofessional”.  That’s not what we’re talking about here.  Just be a person.  That’s the essence of personality.  Don’t be plain icing.  Add sprinkles of “you” on top.

Retail Marketing Institute recently wrote that 70.9% of customers would STOP doing business with someone and go somewhere else if it was more FUN.

You see, people will say they want to be informed but the truth is they’d rather be entertained.  There’s no amount of information that will make a video go viral.  That’s why your best case scenario is to “infotain” your list with a smattering of both info and fun.

(This is also how you “get away with” emailing more often and “selling” in every email, btw.)

And what of our real estate agent who so wantonly spurned my muscular ways?

I guarantee he’s costing himself sales (and probably a lot of notoriety too).

In the words of advertising legend and original “mad man” David Ogilvy (who the character of Don Draper in Mad Men was based on):

Tell the truth but make truth fascinating.  You know, you can’t bore people into buying your product.  You can only interest them in buying it.

Splash is life.

To add a little sumthin’-sumthin’ to your email campaigns, request your Free Brainstorm Call and dive in here:

http://calendly.com/conorkel/emailincome

Alright, that’s enough pounding the pulpit for one day.

Let’s put an end to this before it gets too “garish”.

Happy Entertaining,

Conor Kelly

a.k.a. The Muscle @ Marketing Muscle

P.S. People sometimes worry I’ll make them sound like “muscle-lite”.  Not so.  It’s about (a) knowing your market and (b) sharing your personality.  And I use a proven system for both.  Here’s a recent comment from a client:

“I am INCREDIBLY impressed with your content…it’s in MY voice, and ACCURATE!!!”

— Stephen Bach, The Digital Docs, thedigitaldocs.com