Hello, Friend!

I’ve always been a big fan of Cialdini. In his bestselling book, 'Influence', he gives the example of a successful car salesman called Joe Girad, who around the holidays simply sent his customers a card that says ‘I like you’.

Can successful marketing really be as simple as that?

Probably.?

But it’s harder than it looks to get it right.

Every day I get several obviously auto-generated emails offering me personalised offers, e.g.

?“Alastaire! Save up to 25% by inputting GETSOME into asos dot com before exactly 12.47 today… exclusively on asos dot com today but only on clothes you’d never wear lol” is… pretty much my inbox at this point.

Ignore the fact that this kind of hard sell approach is utterly redundant when you’re the online equivalent of the DFS sale, with a new offer dropping every other day. Focus instead on the weirdness of a brand addressing you by your first name, a kind of unsettlingly overly-close familiarity that few people would welcome in real life.

Do we really want to be called by our first names by faceless corporations we’re not close friends with? To borrow from Homer Simpson, “Just once in my life, I wish someone would call me “sir” without adding “you’re causing a scene.”

Calling me by my first name without being on first name terms with me is a turn-off or, to use the current vernacular, "gives me the ick". When said first-name-dropping is coupled with a clearly auto-generated email, the dissonance between the fake personalisation and the obvious generic copy feels even more jarring.

About five months ago, when everyone was hopping to Mastodon or Threads or whatevever because Twitter was dead, I signed up for early access to Bluesky. My invite finally appeared in my inbox earlier this week.

I probably wouldn’t have bothered redeeming my invite code, but one thing about the invite struck me.

The email that landed in my inbox didn’t say “Hey, Alastaire!” like it already knew me. But nor did it go with “Dear sir,” or “Dear Mr Firstname LastName”.

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The opening line of the email was “hello, friend.”

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For me, this was just right. It wasn’t overly familiar or ‘fake’ personalised. By saying “hello, friend” it was saying “we don’t know each other yet, but I like you”. Much like Cialdini’s successful car salesman, it was just the right amount of I-like-you without being overly (fake) chummy. ?It suggested to me there were friends waiting for me over there on Bluesky that I hadn't met yet. Which was kinda Twitter's USP back in its early days.

?So I claimed my invite code and signed up.

?Calling me “friend” vs “Alastaire” was the difference between a successful conversion and an unsuccessful one.

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This is the kind of insight that few people will understand, and a kind of knowledge that even fewer will bother to apply in an era of ai-generated everything.

I like getting nerdy and, to use a business-speak-ism, “granular” about things. Here’s an example of how a single word – and being less chummy with me, was enough to generate a conversion.

I wonder how many other companies there are out there where a tweak to a single word could similarly impact their business.

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Sometimes it’s the smallest changes that can make the biggest difference.

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