The downside of the “magic email”

“The Magic Email” is such a strange tool to me. It’s so simple, yet it’s so effective. If you’re not familiar with it, this link explains what it is. I’ve used it a good bit over the years, and the results have been amazing. In the past six years I’ve used it 44 times (once every few months), and 25 of those have generated a response. It’s fantastic!

In my case, I only use it on leads that have reached out to us, we had a positive conversation, and then they went dark. This works to get a response in a shockingly short period of time. Here’s a real example:

• Emailing back and forth with a potential lead and things were going well.
• On August 25, I sent an email and didn’t hear back.
• I followed up again on September 6 and didn’t hear back.
• I followed up again on September 23 and didn’t hear back.
• I sent the magic email on October 17 and heard back 13 minutes later.

The fact that this helps restart the conversation is excellent, but I’m learning that when someone is that bad about responding, things never really work out very well in the end.

I took a closer look at the 25 people that responded to the magic email and found the following:

• “Let’s resume the conversation”, but then they disappeared again – 18 people
• “Let’s resume the conversation”, but they eventually went with someone else – 4 people
• They eventually became a small, brief client of ours – 2 people
• “Thanks for reaching out, but we’re not moving forward with this project for now” – 1 person

The bottom three bullets are great. Even if they ended up with a different company, I was able to get to a resolution. The problem is that none of those are really very worthwhile to us in the long run. By the time I need to use the magic email (after they’ve dipped out of the conversation), there is almost no chance that they’ll later become a great client of ours. There’s nothing wrong with that, but I need to stop wasting my time.

Ultimately, I really just need to walk away from dead conversations. The magic email might briefly bring it back to life, but it’s just delaying the inevitable. Some people are just not good at communicating, and those people generally won’t make good clients. In looking at the 37 people that disappeared (the 19 that never replied plus the 18 that replied and disappeared again), almost none of them have moved forward with anyone. A few years later and they still have the same broken website that they reached out to us about in the first place.

I’m trying to look through this with two lenses:

1. I like to think that I wouldn’t ghost someone like that. If someone spams me that doesn’t count, but any legit conversation that I have won’t end with me ignoring their follow-up.
2. They might be frustrated by my repeated attempts to reconnect. It’s odd to me that we’d have a good conversation going and they just stop responding, but I can also see how my repeatedly checking in could be annoying from their point of view.

The Magic Email is an amazing tool, and you should try it sometime if the situation warrants it, but I think I’m going to hang it up and just start letting dead conversations stay dead.