Some Thoughts on Email

In the last four years, I’ve probably sent over 100,000 emails to Write Software, Well readers. In the process, I’ve learned a few things about email marketing, made a few mistakes, and developed a real respect for email as a marketing and promotional medium.

If you’re tired of marketing on social media, where you don’t even own your audience or your reach, and you’re looking to promote your product, services, firm, or even yourself on a solid, reliable, trusted platform like email, here are some notes from personal experience.

Start with permission

The most important word in email marketing is permission. If you’re sending bulk emails and you don’t have permission from the reader, it’s spam. The goal is to have a list of people who want to hear from you. Better to have an audience of 100 right people who signed up than a list of 100,000 random people you bought who don’t care and will mark you as spam, hurting your deliverability.

Email is less about quantity and more about quality. A good email sent once a month will be more effective than sending spam every single day.

Sound like yourself

It’s cliche to say at this point, but your emails should show your personality. It doesn’t have to be a person, even companies and brands have a personality. Whether you write them yourself or outsource it to an agency, your emails should reflect your brand and voice. Don’t try to sound too professional, and remove the jargon. The more real it is, the more people will engage with it. And don’t polish your emails too much.

Why are you emailing? Ultimately you want to sell your product or services, or promote your firm. But asking for it directly is not really that effective. Build on previous conversations and set the stage for future ones. Try to address a need they have, an issue they’re having, or a problem they want to solve. The reader should not feel like the only reason you’re emailing is to get their business, but more like you’re sharing something they care about or want to learn.

Have a clear call to action. What do you want the reader to do after reading this email? Email you back, visit your website, follow you on socials, and so on. Though not every email needs to have a CTA.

Subject lines do half the work.

You can write the best email in the world, but if the subject line is boring, no one opens it and it doesn’t matter. Write the subject line like you’d say it to a friend, not like a headline trying too hard. Don’t do clickbait either, the kind that promises something the email doesn’t deliver. People remember being tricked, and they stop opening. Say what’s inside, make them a little curious, and leave it at that.

Signing up and leaving

Make it easy for people to sign up to your email list. Equally important, make it really, really easy for them to unsubscribe. This is important. Use double opt-in so you know they’re the ones who signed up, not someone impersonating them. Don’t use services that provide one-click signups. You’ll get spammed and reported into oblivion.

Having incentives for signing up, like subscribers-only articles or PDFs, can encourage people to join. Although I prefer having everything open and accessible to everyone, whether or not they sign up. Why restrict your good stuff from people who might be potential clients?

The first email someone gets from you, the welcome email, is the one they’re most likely to open, because they just signed up and you’re fresh in their mind. Don’t waste it on a boring “thanks for subscribing.” Tell them who you are, what you’ll send, and how often. Maybe point them to your best stuff. First impressions count here too.

Segment your list

If you have different audiences, don’t write the same email to everyone. Have dedicated pages on your website where people can sign up, e.g. for events or presentations you’re giving, and use that as an incentive to let people know and join the mailing list. Segment the list, so you know who came from where and what they’re interested in. The bigger your list gets, the more this matters, because your emails should reach the people who actually care about that particular thing.

If you’re going to launch or announce something, it’s good to have a waiting list so people can get notified as soon as possible. Have a landing page where people can enter their email to get notified. This is useful when you’re not ready to share everything yet, but want to start with an initial audience.

Keep the email simple

Don’t try to have too many fancy animations, images, videos, GIFs, headers, footers, and so on. Keep the email simple. Text-only is better. No need to fill it with your brand logos and stuff it with images. Less is more when it comes to email. It loads fast, it works in every inbox, and it reads like a note from a person instead of an ad.

Before you hit send, send the email to yourself first and read it. Click every link. Email goes out to thousands of people at once and you can’t take it back, so a typo or a broken link is out there for good. A two-minute read-through saves you the embarrassing follow-up email apologizing for the last one.

Show up regularly

Pick a rhythm you can actually keep and stick to it. Once a week, once a month, whatever you can sustain without burning out. People get used to hearing from you, and that consistency is what builds trust over time. Disappearing for six months and then showing up out of nowhere is a good way to get people to forget who you are and mark you as spam.

It’s better to promise less and deliver it than to promise a weekly email and go quiet after three.

Tools and automation

Spend some time thinking about which email marketing platform you’ll use. But not too much. If you don’t like it, you can always export your email list and import it into another one. It’s not like Facebook or other social media rented audiences in walled gardens. Whichever you choose, make sure it’s simple enough for you at your current skill level, provides segmentation, automations, and email sequences, and can be embedded on your website.

Once you’ve picked one, set up a drip sequence that’s automated. Meaning, once someone signs up, your email platform will automatically send them a pre-defined list of emails at a specific frequency, e.g. a week from now, two weeks from now, and so on. This lets you reuse old content, and it primes the reader for future posts. Set it up once and it runs on its own.

AI won’t do it for you

Don’t think AI is going to solve all your marketing problems automatically. It’s just technology that amplifies you, but you still have to use it effectively. It won’t do your marketing for you, without you. Anyway, you don’t want to remove yourself from the marketing, because what’s the fun in that? Your emails are going to real people, so you have to put effort into writing them, engaging with your readers, replying to them, and helping them.

And read your replies. When someone writes back, that’s a real person telling you what they care about, which is worth more than any open rate. Reply to them. Those conversations are where the actual business comes from.

Play the long game

Don’t give up after writing a few emails and seeing no engagement. It’s a long-term, slow process, but it works. Don’t send one email and expect instant results. Don’t post a few times here and there and give up after seeing no one is liking them. Do not measure your worth based on social media engagement. And do not think you are worth less just because a few people unsubscribe.

If you want help setting any of this up, that’s a lot of what I do. Send me an email and tell me where you’re stuck.