How to keep people interested in your emails

👉 you need more than just value

We’re over in Hong Kong at the moment celebrating our eldest son’s wedding and visiting new family.

(Bear with me, I promise this will link to email newsletters at some point)

One of the strangest, but nicest parts of the trip was travelling up to a little village in Sai Kung to meet our daughter-in-law’s grandmother and seeing a picture on the wall of the kids on their prom night standing in our garden.

The exact same picture we have.

Something so familiar, so far away from home.

Of course, the reason the photo was on the wall wasn’t because we have a lovely garden. It was - of course - because of the people in the photo.

People are interested in people. We covet things but we care about people.

If you think about your newsletter or regular emails, there’s an important lesson in there.

Your subscribers will have signed up for a “thing” - a lead magnet or the value promised by your newsletter.

But since most of them won’t be ready to buy from you straight away, you need to keep them reading your newsletter long after that initial signup.

We tend to assume their willingness to open your emails and stay subscribed over the long term is because of the value you deliver in those emails. But that’s only partly true.

Nobody needs new ideas and insights each and every week. Most of the time we’ll be focused on other things or heads down implementing what we’ve already learned.

And sometimes your emails will be valuable - but not necessarily for everyone who reads them. The insights might not apply, or that great tip might be something they’ve already done.

So to keep people as engaged subscribers you need to provide more than just valuable information.

A bit of that comes from goodwill and the expectation of future value. They stay subscribed because your emails have been useful to them in the past and they expect them to be useful in the future too when they need them.

But a big part of it just comes from being interesting.

If someone reads an email from you and it makes them smile, or gets them to think, or just distracts them from the awful monotony of the rest of the emails in their inbox, then they’re much more likely to open the next one too. Even if they didn’t get a brand new idea or insight they could use from this one.

And as my story alluded to earlier, if you write about people rather than just things or ideas, then your emails are going to be a lot more interesting.

“People” could just be a simple introductory story like I used today about something that happened in your life. Just a few sentences to set the context and introduce an idea.

Or you could talk about clients and what they’ve done. Or well-known people from sports or entertainment or business.

Each of these options has its benefits. Talking about yourself builds your relationship and can demonstrate your experience. Talking about clients shows that people who work with you get results. Talking about famous people shows a bit of creativity.

But more important than which type of people story you use is simply that you get that human element into your emails somehow.

People are interested in people.

- Ian

PS