Posted by I read a lot of marketing material every week. Obviously, after promoting Nick James’s products since 2007, I still do. Lately I have noticed something a bit worrying: most of it reads the same.
Predictable marketing has become the default rather than the exception, and readers can spot it from a mile off.
Walk through any inbox and you will find the same headline shapes, the same three-bullet lists, the same closing line asking for a reply. It is not that any one email is bad. It is that none of them is different enough to remember by the following week.
If you run your own list or website, that matters more than it might seem. A subscriber who can guess your next email before you send it has very little reason to keep opening it. The businesses that get noticed today are usually the ones prepared to do something slightly different from everybody else on the shelf.
This is not about being outrageous for its own sake. It is about giving your reader one small reason to pay attention, then giving them another next month. That is the whole idea behind what follows.
The Trouble With Sounding Like Everyone Else
For years I managed supermarkets before I ever touched a computer. One thing you learn quickly in that trade is that shelves full of near identical products rarely sell themselves. The ones that got noticed were the ones with a bit of colour, a different shape, something that made a shopper stop and look twice.
A shelf of ten identical tins sold slower than a shelf with one tin turned to face the aisle differently. Customers noticed the odd one first, picked it up out of curiosity, and often bought it simply because it had caught their eye.
Online business works the same way, though the lesson took me longer to apply there. Every email in a subscriber’s inbox uses the same subject line formula, the same stock phrases and the same promises. None of them stand out, and predictable marketing blends into wallpaper.
A subject line that reads like fifty others in the same inbox earns nothing extra, however well it is written. Two competitors selling almost the same course can send emails that differ only in logo and colour scheme. A reader who has seen one has effectively seen the other, and neither gets opened twice.
Some of the other articles I have shared recently have looked at the mechanics of getting found in the first place. This one is about what happens once you are found, and whether anyone remembers you afterwards.
Consistency in your message is useful up to a point. Past that point it becomes something else entirely: predictability. And predictability, however professional it looks on the page, rarely gets talked about.
Why Predictable Marketing Gets Ignored
There is a simple reason for this. A reader’s attention is not idle. It is being pulled at from every direction, all day, by businesses that have all read the same advice about branding and consistency.
If your reader can finish your sentence before you do, they have already stopped listening.
That is not a criticism of following good practice. Clear branding, a steady tone and a reliable format all matter.
The trouble starts when consistency becomes the only thing on offer. Nothing about the content itself then gives anyone a reason to mention it to somebody else.
I have noticed this in my own newsletter over the years. The issues that got a reply, however small, were rarely the polished, careful ones. They were the ones where I said something a little more direct than usual, or tried an idea I had not tried before.
None of those direct issues were reckless. They simply were not the safest version of what I could have written that month, and that was enough to make a difference.
Predictable marketing plays it safe. Safe rarely gets shared.
A Simple Monthly Exercise For Standing Out
Here is something worth trying once a month, whatever you sell.
Set aside fifteen minutes and write down ten ideas for your next email, post or promotion that would make a regular reader sit up. Do not judge them as you go.
Some will be silly. A few might be entirely useless. That is fine.
Then look through the list and find the one idea that still sounds unmistakably like you. It should feel different from what you would normally send, but recognisably yours. That is usually the one worth trying.
One month the idea worth keeping might be as small as writing a subject line in the first person instead of the usual formula. Or it might be telling a short true story instead of listing five bullet points. None of that is dramatic, and it is simply not what the reader was expecting, which is exactly the point.
A second idea that often survives the cut is admitting something that did not work, rather than only listing what did. Readers remember the honest line far longer than the polished one.
When I ran a contract cleaning business, the contracts that lasted were rarely won on price alone. They were won because a client remembered something specific about how we worked, not just that we turned up on time.
The same principle applies to a newsletter or a website. Reliability gets you kept. Something memorable gets you talked about.
You do not need to overhaul your whole approach to make this work. One slightly bolder idea a month, tried properly and watched carefully, tells you more than a year of playing it safe.
Where This Fits On A Small List
You might be thinking this sort of thing is fine for a big brand with a marketing department behind it. It is harder to justify, you might assume, for a newsletter with a few hundred readers. I would say it matters more for a small list, not less.
A large business can afford to be forgettable in one email because there are ten more chasing the same customer. A smaller list cannot. Every issue you send either builds a reason for someone to keep opening the next one, or quietly teaches them they can skip it.
On a list of a few hundred readers, one flat month is not invisible the way it might be for a company sending to a million inboxes. It shows up directly in who opens the next issue, and who quietly stops.
A large brand can lose a thousand readers in a quiet month and barely notice. A list of three hundred cannot afford to lose thirty of them the same way, one unopened issue at a time.
That is the actual cost of predictable marketing on a small list. Nobody unsubscribes over one dull email. They just stop opening, a little at a time, until the list looks healthy on paper and does almost nothing in practice.
Find The One Idea That Is Still Unmistakably You
Before you send anything different, ask one question: would a subscriber who knows me well be surprised by this, or confused by it?
Surprised is good. Confused means you have drifted from what really makes your business yours, and that is worth noticing before you press send.
This is not a test you pass once and then forget. Every month brings a fresh crop of ideas that sound too ordinary to matter, and one that does not. Finding it takes the same fifteen minutes each time.
Predictable marketing is easy to produce and easy to ignore. The alternative does not have to be loud or expensive. It just has to be a little less careful than what everybody else, including your competitors, is already sending this week.
Try it once. Then decide, from what really happens to the replies and the opens, whether it is worth doing again next month.
Building a business that people notice and remember takes more than one monthly exercise. If you want a structured plan rather than scattered tactics, Serious About Six Figures is worth a look. Nick James put it together for people ready to grow an online business properly.
It will not write your bolder emails for you, but it gives you the wider framework this kind of thinking sits inside. If you want to go further than this month’s exercise, that is where I would point you next.
Predictable marketing will not lose you your business overnight. It will just make you a little easier to forget, one careful email at a time. Try the exercise this month, keep whichever idea sounds most like you, and see what happens to the replies you get.
Jim