You're Not Being Annoying

Okay, so for the longest time I capped myself at one email a week. Anything past that felt rude, like I was shoving my way into people's inboxes uninvited. Social was the same deal. I figured the second I showed up too often, everybody would get sick of me and tune out.

I never once checked whether that was actually true. It just felt right, so I ran with it for a couple years.

Then I landed at a yoga studio where part of my job was staring at the email and membership numbers every week. And one day I shifted that mindset and started almost immediately crushing numbers.

None of what I started doing was particularly clever. I just started actually sending emails. New instructor? That's an email. Schedule change? Email. Somebody hadn't shown up in a few weeks? "Hey, we miss you, here's a free class on us." Tiny stuff, but constant. And pretty much every time something went out, a few more people came through the door.

What never occurred to me: people forget you. Nothing personal. They've got jobs and kids and forty other emails, and you are not the main character in their week. Go quiet for a month and you don't sit politely in the back of their mind as "oh right, that studio I liked." You're just gone. They go to the place that emailed them on Tuesday.

Showing up on some kind of regular basis is the entire trick. It keeps you the first name in their head the day they finally decide to get off the couch.

The most boring email I ever sent

My best month at the studio was 134 memberships sold. I'd love to tell you it was the month I finally wrote something brilliant but it was actually just the month I sent the most emails.

And the best performing email in that whole stretch? The new class schedule, no offer, no clever subject line, nothing for sale, and 47% of the people who opened it clicked through to look at it. The least exciting thing I sent all month beat every promo I actually sweated over.

It didn't make sense to me until I ran into the 95:5 rule from the Ehrenberg-Bass Institute. The gist: at any given moment roughly 95% of your market isn't ready to buy, not uninterested, just not today. The way I was taught marketing, that stat is an acquisition argument: only 5% are in the market, so spend your energy hunting new people.

But when I pulled my own data, more than 90% of the opens and clicks were coming from current members and recent drop-ins, people who already knew the studio. Strangers weren't reading these emails. The research is about B2B buyers on five-year purchase cycles and nobody is on a five-year yoga cycle, they're on a "saw a flyer, feeling ambitious" cycle, but the shape of it holds: almost every person reading any given email was never going to buy that day, no matter what I wrote.

If an email was never going to sell today then selling was never its job, its job is to be in somebody's head on the random Tuesday they decide they're finally ready. That's what the schedule email was doing. Nobody bought a membership off it, it was just useful for ten seconds to almost half the people who opened it. Stack enough of those little touches and you're the obvious answer the day somebody moves from the 95 into the 5. That's where the 134 came from, not one great email, a pile of forgettable ones.

Once that clicked, the rest got easy. Send when something changes: schedule, staff, hours, a class filling up, the parking situation. Changes write the email for you, which kills the what-do-I-even-send problem that keeps everybody stuck at whatever cadence feels polite. Lead with useful instead of clever, and stop grading every email on what it sold that day, because judging each send like it has to pay rent is perfectionism with a spreadsheet. Grade the month instead.

One more, because your data will probably tell you what mine told me: if 90% of your engagement is people who already know you, quit writing like you're introducing yourself to strangers. They signed up because they like you, so talk like it.

The other thing that kept me from hitting send wasn't really a belief, more an anxiety, this nagging sense that nothing I made was ever good enough to ship. And not just emails, any copy: social posts, print, all of it. I'd sweat the wording and the design way too long before letting anything go. Then I read a book about making art, and a story in it kind of snapped me out of it.

The pottery class that beat the perfectionists

A ceramics teacher split his class in two. One half got graded purely on quantity, just make as many pots as you can, he'd weigh the pile at the end. The other half got graded on quality, make one pot and make it perfect. When he graded them, the best pots all came out of the quantity group. They'd cranked out pot after pot and learned something from every wobbly one, while the quality half sat around theorizing about the perfect pot and handed in one mediocre lump.

— from Art & Fear, David Bayles & Ted Orland

You don't get good at pottery by overthinking one pot, you get good by making a hundred of them, and email is no different. The more you send, the faster you learn what your people actually open and click, and rationing yourself just slows down the education. The humbling part is that the emails I agonized over performed about the same as the ones I knocked out between classes, and the best one of all was a schedule.

The TLDR

• Just send the thing. The one you're nervous about is almost always fine. Like I always say, this is PR, not the ER. Nobody dies if an email flops.
• Send on triggers, not vibes. New instructor, new schedule, new hours, somebody's been gone three weeks. If something changed, that's an email, and you never have to invent content again.
• Make it worth opening. A promo, a fun fact, an at-home workout, a heads-up on what to bring to the next class. Useful beats clever. A plain schedule out-clicked everything else I sent in my best month.
• Grade the month, not the email. Most sends are doing memory work, not sales work. My best month was 134 memberships and no single email deserves the credit.
• Trust clicks, not opens. Apple's been auto-opening email since 2021, so half your opens are bots now. Clicks are real people.
• Sound like a human. A little messy and real sticks; too polished slides right past. Leave your weird phrasing in, use ALL CAPS when you mean it, let the extra exclamation point live. AI made polished cheap, so the human fingerprints are the whole advantage now.

None of this means blast people with junk, obviously. But that line where you genuinely start bugging people sits way further out than your nervous brain swears it does. For me it came down to one dumb thing: I quit going dark on people for weeks at a time, and that's the whole reason it turned around.