2 easy sources for your next email
--> as long as you take these steps
I have a whole process and set of detailed prompts for coming up with ideas for emails in my Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters course.
But if you’re in a rush (or God, forbid, you haven’t bought the course), here are 2 quick go-to resources that work really well:
Do something interesting
Read something interesting
Let’s expand on them.
Do something interesting means writing about something interesting you did recently that’s got useful lessons for your readers.
It’s fairly easy: providing you’re doing interesting things that have useful lessons for your readers.
So, for example, since I write about marketing - and in particular about emails - I could deliberately try new styles of email, new email tools, new ways of getting new subscribers. Then I could report on my findings.
If you write about leadership, do something “leadershipy”. Maybe at work. Maybe as part of something you do outside work like a leadership role in a charity, or a leadership related skill at home.
If you write about creativity, do something creative in your business.
You get the picture: if you want to write about interesting things you’ve done recently you need to deliberately do interesting things that are relevant and useful for your audience to hear about.
Read something interesting is my favourite. I’m an extreme resource investigator in Belbin terms so I love to research and find out new things.
The trick here is to take those new things and apply them to your field to make them useful to your readers.
Wednesday’s email on Enjoyment > Effectiveness is a good case in point.
It started by me reading one of Michelle Segar’s newsletters where she talked about her experiences walking and how she decided to walk at a faster pace for more health benefits - but ended up not enjoying it so started to avoid her walks altogether. By going back to the pace she enjoyed - even if it wasn’t as healthy as it could have been, she did it more and so got better results.
I immediately thought of the applicability to marketing so I got onto the web and started looking for research and examples that could help to illustrate and expand on the point. That’s when I found Jason Hreha’s 4 Es - which are an excellent way to evaluate the best activities for achieving a goal.
So my reading - then research - then more reading - led to an easy email for me to write.
Here’s the thing…
Emails about things you’ve recently done or you’ve recently read and researched are easy to write because they’re fresh in your mind - and you’re no doubt enthusiastic about them.
Interesting things you’ve done or read are exactly the kind of things you love to tell your friends about.
So you just do the same for your email readers instead.
The important thing though is that they need you to take action to generate the details of what you’ll write about.
You can’t just sit at your desk and contemplate your way to an email about something interesting you’ve done. You have to do it.
You can’t just sit at your desk and contemplate your way to an email about something interesting you’ve read and researched. You have to do the reading and research.
Action leads to filling your head with new ideas.
A head filled with new ideas is primed to write interesting and valuable emails.
What most of us do when it’s time to write an email is sit at our desks and try to pluck something out of our brains. That works so much better if you’ve just filled your brain with something new. Otherwise you end up treading old familiar paths and don’t feel like you have anything interesting to say.
So…want to write an interesting new email?
Quick: do something or read something interesting.
- Ian