I just started reading Upgrade Your Life: The Lifehacker Guide to Working Smarter, Faster, Better penned by Gina Trapani, the founding editor of the blog Lifehacker.com. The book is described as a mashup of a computer user manual and a productivity system. It is neatly segmented into 11 chapters and 116 “life hacks” (workarounds or shortcuts that overcome the everyday difficulties of the modern worker). Chapters range from “Control Your Email” (Hack #1 - Empty Your Inbox; Hack #3 - Craft Effective Messages) to “Automate Repetitive Tasks” (Hack #61 - Automatically Back Up Your Files Online; Hack #65 - Make Google Search Results Automatically Come to You).
I’m only a few chapters in and have already found parallels between managing your own inbox and managing the inboxes of your subscribers. Think of it as personal emailer meets email marketer.
Similar to what any email marketing expert would tell you, Upgrade Your Life stresses the importance of composing a good email. The 3 suggestions they provide under the “Composing a New Message” section can easily be applied to an effective email marketing message:
- Determine Your Purpose
- Use an Informative Subject Line
- Be Succinct
Looking at each recommendation in detail…
Determine Your Purpose
According to Upgrade Your Life, “every email message has a very specific purpose” - convey information or request action. They recommend not sending a message until you know and understand the purpose. How often do we, as marketers, send out a sub-par email because we’ve committed to a weekly (daily/monthly) message. Think about your goal for every email you send out. Remember what your mom used to tell you, “If you don’t have anything good to say, don’t say anything at all.”
Use an Informative Subject Line
We’ve talked about the importance of a strategic subject line several times (Original BrontoFire and First live BrontoFire) on the Bronto Blog. Upgrade Your Life challenges you to “Think of yourself as a newspaper headline writer, tasked with telling the whole story in just a few words to grab the reader’s attention.”
Be Succinct
I encourage my clients to subscribe to the KISS principle when crafting their email marketing campaigns. Put yourself in the shoes of your recipients. Remember, often you (the marketer) are the same person as you (the consumer). Would you read what you wrote? As Upgrade Your Life suggests for personal/work email, “The shorter your email, the more likely it is that it will be read and your request filled.” For those who are saying “short is not always better,” I agree that this does not hold in every instance. There are times when a long message gets many clicks throughout, has very high conversion rates, etc; however, I’d argue that typically shorter IS better.
The best advice I can give clients about effective email creation (subject line, design, copy, creative, etc) is to ask your peers, friends, co-workers, family, yourself:
Would you open, read, click and convert this email?
DJ Waldow
Account Manager at Bronto
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