Ever wonder why you're getting ever-decreasing returns on your e-mail marketing efforts? Check out this post by Kevin Holland: Our Emails Are So Pretty, Our Messaging So Consistent … I Wonder Why Everybody Ignores Them? Like Kevin, there are some organization's whose e-mails are absolutely recognizable and always deleted from my in-box before opening. Who knows what I may be missing, but in the flood of hundreds of messages I get daily, a little variety definitely stands out. A little humanity would stand out even more. When I read his examples of two events-related messages Kevin wrote in response to a commenter, my eyes automatically skimmed the first, started skimming the second and stopped as soon as it started getting a little personality.
I know I'm a data point of one, but why not test different ways of e-mailing to small pieces of your list and see what happens. It might be something good, like actually getting their attention.