I wish I'd known this about email when I first started

👉 I'd have saved countless hours of agony and got much better results

When I first started sending an email newsletter it was a monthly work of art called “Outside In”.

The name was a weak pun about being client-focused I think. Certainly weak enough that I can’t really remember.

Every month I’d write one big article, a shorter one with quick tips, and then give some book recommendations. I copied the format from other newsletters I’d seen at the time from the professional service firms I was doing marketing and sales training for.

I say every month. In reality I missed the odd month. The newsletter took so much work to write I ended up trying to avoid it.

Back then I thought - like many still do - that emailing too often was the biggest sin of email marketing.

I didn’t realise that when people say you’re emailing too often what they really mean is that they can’t find the time to read your emails.

And that means one of two things:

1. Your email is just too long. My “Outside In” emails definitely were. They were a good 20-minute read.
   
   Over the years I’ve learned that it’s much, much easier for someone to read a 3-minute email every day than a 20-minute email once a week (or even once a month). You can read a 3-minute email as you scan your inbox or if you’re just taking a break from work. A 20-minute email needs you to actually schedule a significant amount of time.
   

2. Your email isn’t valuable enough. If you sent an email 3 times a day but each one had a winning lottery number in it, people would absolutely open it 3 times a day. The more valuable your emails are, the longer and the more often people will be willing to read them for.
   
   And value here means both rational value in terms of helping your readers make real progress, and emotional value in terms of making them feel good.

These days I email 3 times a week with relatively short, valuable, interesting and fun emails.

Some new ideas. Some practical tips. Some stories and jokes.

And cartoons. Obvs.

Add up the words in those emails and they’re probably 4-5 times the size of my big old monthly emails.

But they get a far higher open rate and more people reading and reacting because they’re quite short and easy to fit into your daily routine. And hopefully they’re quite useful.

And because they’re more conversational than formal, they build better relationships too.

If I’d known that back in 2008 I could have saved hours of agonising over my fancy monthly tome and instead just written short little emails that gave a bit of value wrapped up in a story or anecdote.

Much easier to write. Much better results.

And obviously something I teach in the Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters Course. Click here for details.

If you want to get better results from your emails with less effort it’s worth checking out.