Nurture—proper nurture—implies mothering. Clothing, feeding, nourishing, care, devotion, and selfless giving.
But look more closely at the image below. Trickery is afoot.
That's email nurture. Care in disguise.
Care that is actually carefully monitored abuse. It’s the same inbox where you expect to receive the calendar invite for dinner plans with friends or reminders about the family reunion. Only it’s marketers. In suits. Masquerading as if they’ve got your interests in mind.
But they are sizing us, asking, ‘Think this one’s ready?”
You’d better bet along that electric fence between subterfuge and sincerity, your list is all trying to either hide, or dreaming of escape.
I do agree this is going to be a golden age for spam. Buyers caught between AI-rocketfueled scammers and companies like Google and AT&T that want to reduce those scams, but not too much, because it’s how they make money. Enshittification is real.
But it’s not going to work on your smartest buyers. People with real pull are retreating into the walled enclosures of Signal groups and discipline communities.
In these bucolic spaces, nature reigns. It’s just people talking to people.
If you want to be invited in, you need permission. You need to be nature in the inbox.
