I sign up for a lot of things to check them out, so I’m on a ton of mailing lists.  I’m not complaining, because it certainly doesn’t take me very long to zap through my inbox and delete 25 emails from Shutterfly, Expedia, Orbitz, Travelocity, Art.com, etc… who obviously have a spreadsheet that says, "If we send 1 million emails per week, 10,000 people will open them and 100 will buy something."  Such is the world of anonymously blasting your email base.

But today I got an email from the folks at Lumosity, a "brain games" site I wrote briefly about a few months back.  I had forgotten about them.  They sit in my favorites bar, but the link is dusty from lack of use.  So getting an email from them was an actual pleasure.  I *wanted* to read that email because I had forgotten about them. And they had new things to tell me, so I appreciated hearing them. 

So here’s a lesson to take from everyday life and apply to Direct Marketing. "Don’t talk unless you have something to say."  After all, it’s free to talk too, but you rarely see people coming up out of the blue to start a conversation about nothing with you.  And "Special 20% off sale" is not something to say. "New package discounts to Fiji" does not count as something to say either.  Lumosity’s message was, "You joined our beta program, now we have new games for your brain, do you want to check them out?" That counts as news in my book.  Now if they hit me every week about their newest game, they’ll go in the "Annoying yet not Spam category."  But for now, they get a plug.