Want to send better emails?
It’s simple, get over yourself.
Emails with information hailed down at you, where a company is only talking about themselves to you – a prospective client, will only get you miffed, and dashing to the delete key faster than your pal’s sprint to the toilet tissue aisle!
Beginning with generic hi’s and hellos won’t score you any brownie points, instead get crafty with your greetings and ditch the generic one liner ‘hope you are well.’
Try something else like:
If this message ruined your "zero" status in your inbox, I apologize...
To avoid playing phone tag, I'm sending this email to discuss...
Next, choosing boring or generic subjects won’t excite any potential client! Instead, you want to think about the subject as your kind welcome and opportunity to establish a bond with your email recipients almost momentarily.
This week, I received a few catchy emails and I chose to open and read them, and as someone who doesn’t get their attention grabbed quickly, that’s quite a big deal. So, I’ll be telling you why they worked for me.
First off…
ProWriting Aid chose to get in touch with me after I had accidentally missed my pre-booked course. They sent me this:
1. “We’re sorry you were not able to attend our webinar”
What was good about it?
1. It was personal, and I got a massive FOMO.
2. Also, ‘apologies’ soften the tone and make any robotic sounding email sound a lot more human.
2. “Haneen, got quarantine blues? Give yourself something to look forward to!”
1. I am a travel junkie, and if there’s any aisle I'm looking forward to walking down it’s the next Ryanair alley so the play on words is tactful here.
2. Rhetorical questions engage with your audience as your'e volley-balling the thinking to your reader.
3. Rattling a quarantine-ers cage with the theme of adventure is the kind of wound you want to be playing on.
4. “It’s starting. We’re chatting in 15 mins!”
1. The word "chatting" forges a great bond with attendees for courses that have more attendees than you can count.
2. The use of the collective and inclusive pronoun 'We're' creates a communal spirit and bridges any gaps between the speaker and their prospective client! "You/Your" on the other hand is useful when you're forging a direct, and singular bond with a client.
5. “Your Marketing Sucks: Why You Need to Think Local.”
1. "Your Marketing Sucks" it certainly a much-needed grab-you-by-the-shoulders-and-look-you-in-the-eye moment of real-talk which great speakers or copywriters need to do more of. Such an attitude also defies Levinson's theory of politeness of claiming the positive rules of social interaction but ironically create the contrary effect. As the world renowned Life Coach Tony Robbins found that cussing wakes his audience and builds a raw and trusting bond between him and them.
2. Why's are the heart of what we're all trying to get to the bottom of and trying to 'hack.' Include more Whys and Hows in your email subjects.
3. The sentence is categorised by what I call the "problem- solution dichotomy" in marketing. This is when writers pose the problem and solution in close proximity to get customers psychologically engaging and feeling they need a quick-fix. Here, the writer takes the brave approach by dissing his audience's limited marketing skills and using that insult as a launch pad to propose his solution of thinking "locally".
The aim of any marketing material is to get readers worked up about a detrimental problem so they can be joint to you by the hip when looking for solutions.
6. “10 jaw dropping drift videos on YouTube”
1. Including numbers in headings, subheadings and subjects are brain candy, as they work to organise information into logical order! Structurally speaking, they also break information into bitesize gen.
2. They’re also a great way to add substance to your clients by bringing in a tangible, countable promise!
7. “Going…Going.. 80% of ultimate sales is almost gone!” – creating impact is not only about words, but punctuation too. Something I encourage my writers to do is to strangely punctuate sentences to grab reader’s attention. Plain and simple, when sentences divert from the norm, they stand out like a sore thumb!
This was my first slip from my boss, and I remember it till today!
Here is your first payslip! Well done for a great start and here’s to many, many, many, many (many, many) more months with Druthers Search!!!
As humans, we all connect with words emotionally, before we do logically; that goes for anyone, regardless of how rational you may be. Other than turning an otherwise simple sentence into an ecstatically and melodically string of words, my boss fully acknowledged a milestone I had overcome as a fresh graduate and that made it a memorable email for me. So kudos to her!
Finally, storytelling, storytelling! You want to learn the art of therapeutic metaphors to transform basic worlds into more complex, relatable worlds. More on this in a separate post!
So, to summarise the pointers. Get over yourself, write with impact, focus on the numerics, vary your punctuation and make your words personal and timely.
What was the catchiest email you got this week, and what did you like about it?