Pseudovalidation is a major goal of marketing and advertising. Actually validating a claim is expensive and often boring. Why not just make people feel like they’re important in some way?

But once you recognize it, pseudovalidation feels disrespectful: these people are lying to me and don’t even care if I know it:

In the last few years, email marketers have started sending streams of messages that reference each other, apparently attempting to induce a feeling of an existing relationship, and then shame that I am somehow not carrying my end of it.

This does not work anymore.

Suppose that you are sending out email to all of your customers, letting them know about a thing that you are sure they will want to know about. Then you decide to send it from a fake email address, one named “no reply” or similar. You have immediately eliminated a route for your customers to ask you questions about your thing.

What was the point of your announcement if not to generate interest in the thing? Don’t do that.

Send your announcement from an account that routes into your customer support ticket system (you do have one, right? if you have more than five customers, you need a ticketing system) and prepare your customer support staff with a list of answers to likely questions, and a way for them to contact the experts on the thing.

Every time you close a method of contact, you lose an opportunity to talk to your customers. If you don’t want to talk to your customers, maybe you shouldn’t be sending them email at all.