1. I send out an email to my subscribers saying "Hey, what do you guys want to see improved with your Uptown Coffee experience?"

2. Customers respond with responses ranging from things like "cheaper coffee lol" to "I really like the atmosphere but I get frustrated because sometimes there isn't anywhere to sit!"

3. I can respond personally to these emails and get more information, at which point I get to make business decisions that result in happier customers and (hopefully) more revenue.

Mixpanel is one of the worst offenders of faux-personalized email. "I see you logged on today - were you able to accomplish what you wanted?" "I noticed that you were checking out the funnels feature. Can we set up a time to chat?" Go away.

[1] https://www.taskrabbit.com/sf-bay-area/search?search=handwri...

If you were on the other side of the equation, how would you deal with trying to get real feedback about your product? To me, it's fair to thing a company that's goes through the expense and effort to have a real person (taskrabbit or not) contact me deserves just a bit more consideration.

Funny results of this are the fact that I'll be working on something over the weekend, trigger one of these automated messages, and email a response: "Oh yeah, I had a question, thanks for noticing!" Naturally I don't hear back until some time the following week.

It is always hard getting real feedback about your product. But a message like "Hey, you just joined, and I think you could do a better job with the way you structure your sales data" - because a human had looked at our business, looked at the way we used their product, and spent a moment trying to come up with a way to be helpful - would be way cooler to me than an automated tripwire.

For me, part of the reason the handwritten notes (shifting away from email for a moment) resonate with us is because we feel like an employee of the company - a grateful, hard-working employee - decided to spend their time painstakingly writing me a personalized note. That's why we write cards to our loved ones over the holidays.

But when you can pay someone to do that, then the CEO doesn't care - they're just factoring it into the customer acquisition cost. Which is totally okay. But it is equivalent to saying "I don't mind paying higher prices for Apple products because the unboxing experience is so great."

It's definitely relationship building at scale, and while I know it's "write once, send N-times", myself and most of the people on my list see a distinction between my newsletter and a grid of items on sale.

What sticks out to me (because they sent me an email today discussing gmail's new layout and how to ensure I kept getting their emails) is my comic shop. They go through effort to know what I like, what to recommend to me, etc., etc., and are super friendly to boot (not affiliated plug, Third Eye Comics in Annapolis are AWESOME).

I genuinely want the emails they send me, even their most basic one-way emails provide me active value, and the relationship does transcend a more traditional marketing relationship, like the one I have with Amazon.

In short, it would not surprise me to know that there are other businesses that share more personal relationships with their customers than the merchant-customer model.

If you drag those messages from Promotions to Primary, Gmail will ask you if you want to do the same thing for all messages from that sender.