What makes an email worth sending.

It’s time for you to put your ideas out into the world.

I’m avoiding my email inbox right now.

It’s after a holiday weekend. And I just have this sinking feeling that there are a lot of words, questions, and ideas in there.

And my brain is full.

Which got me thinking.

I am experiencing something that needs a name.

Email dread.

I dread emails.

Sometimes I think emails are the mouth breathers of the communication world.

But when everyone and their affiliate manager signs me up for their mailing list – without my permission – it gets tiresome.

Because along with email dread comes enthusiasm fatigue.

Everyone selling stuff is so excited all the time. Have you noticed that?

They are excited to tell you about this. They are really excited to share that. They are really, really, really excited to announce…

Yes, friends, we are swimming in an ocean of hokey sales enthusiasm and email.

It’s little wonder so many business owners have a real reluctance about sending emails that promote their stuff.

Who wants to be THAT guy?!

There’s no easy resolution here. I write sales emails for a living. If they don’t work, we don’t eat.

Singing for your supper is so clarifying, don’t you think?

But I do think there’s room for improvement here.

And I have evidence that sending emails that sell your stuff can actually shift a conversation.

And not just be some empty gesture of self-interest.

People have written some of my private writing clients back, thanking them for sending an email. A sales email. They write things like “I was feeling bad about myself. And this was just the thing I needed to hear today.”

Part of me thinks it’s weird that you can hire a ghostwriter to craft emails in your voice… and it actually touches, moves or inspires a reader.

It’s not entirely truthful. About who’s doing the writing, anyway.

But then, I think of Richard Dawkins.

(Bet you weren’t expecting that in a blog post today, huh?)

He’s an evolutionary biologist, who popularized the idea that “survival of the fittest” isn’t about the fittest creatures.

In fact, it’s about the fittest genes. So that we as beings are really nothing more than “survival machines”… containers that protect the genes from a cruel world.

Dawkins also goes on to talk about memes – the IDEA version of genes. Like the gene pool, there’s an ocean of ideas, too.

Ideas spread through a population, based on their fitness.

Now, I may be a total nerd right now. But when I start feeling weird about writing sales emails – for my clients and for myself — this is my mental patch:

I want the ideas I’m fighting for to win.

The truth is, they aren’t even my ideas. They are the ideas of my clients and their teachers. They are the ideas of my teachers, and my teachers’ teachers.

Every book I have loved. Every page I have underlined ferociously, because I felt like the author was talking to me. Every TED talk I watch and tell people, “you should watch this TED talk.”

We aren’t self-promoters. We are meme survival machines.

Which means that if I send emails that are all “hey, you schmoe, buy my stuff”… I am perpetuating that idea in the meme pool.

Uff dah.

But if I can root into something more human, more real, and that’s actually connected to the ideas I have inherited, cherish, and am fighting for in my business (and life)…

…why, that’s an email worth sending.

So, messengers and comrades, let’s talk about that. What memes are you putting out into the world? What ideas have you been sitting on, for worry that you will be “spamming” the good people? The time has come…

Mighty thanks to Neal Fowler flickr photostream for the dandelion.