My inbox is constantly filling up with requests from people asking ‘for just 15 minutes of your day’ for a phone call, or a brief introduction to their services that they are trying to sell me. Most of these emails are immediately archived or trashed, never to receive a response from me. I have honestly stopped reading most of them as people spell my name wrong, email me from a gmail account instead of a company URL, or are clearly cutting and pasting from previous emails to other people (it shows up in blue people! Come on!).

Recently though, I have had a few people actually take the time to get to know me as a person and send me emails that I not only responded to, but felt a desire to respond to.

Yes, I realize he was asking me for something, but he was also sharing an event with me, which made me want to respond. I emailed him back with some suggestions of events and told him I would let him know if I heard of any others. I also enjoyed the frankness of his comment “I’d carve out some time for you, but I assume that if you had any interest in —-, we would have spoken by now.” Which was very true, I had researched his company and services in the past and determined they were not right for me at the time.

I just love that they are showing me a side of themselves that make them more human as opposed to sending me some copy and pasted text that they have emailed to hundreds of other people (we can tell).

Now just because these people took the time to get to know me more personally, it does not mean that I will be using their services. I will, however, remember them and be more likely to continue a conversation with them later (which may lead to me doing business with them in the future).

It is just nice for an email to show up in my inbox with something different from the ‘normal’ emails that start out with ‘Hello Monica’ or better yet, ‘To whom it may concern’.