Boring emails are a curse.
Theyāre a curse for us writers because boring emails donāt get read. No readers = no relationship building, no credibility, no trust, no sales. Too many boring emails and your subscribers quietly quit and just donāt bother opening any more.
Theyāre a curse for our readers because boring emails steal their lives when they could be doing something interesting instead.
And theyāre a curse for the world because great people with a lot to offer donāt get to work with great people who need their help.
In my last message about tiktokifying your email I kind of said the same thing. And I said Iād be sharing my best tips to help you make your emails more interesting and entertaining.
But the minute I sent out that email and read it back I cringed.
It felt like I was saying ālook at me, Iām a god at writing entertaining emails and Iām going to let you mere mortals in on some of my secrets. Lucky youā.
Itās the kind of vibe I get all the time from Twitter and Linkedin these days where it seems every 23-year-old is sharing their deep wisdom on life and business and relationships with a straight face.
Yuck.
But then I realised thereās a different way.
Rather than telling you how to make your writing more interesting and entertaining, Iām going to dedicate myself to learning how to make my writing more interesting and entertaining for the next month.
And Iām going to share what Iām learning as we go along.
Donāt get me wrong. This is not false modesty. I reckon Iām pretty decent at writing emails. So some of what I share will be based on whatās worked for me so far.
But I still have a lot to learn.
So Iām going to do that learning. And share it with you.
And I feel way more excited about upgrading my writing and sharing the journey than I did about pontificating about what I already know.
So hereās the first thing I picked up today, from Stephen Pinkerās The Sense of Style: The Thinking Personās Guide to Writing in the 21st Century.
Start Strong
Pinker starts off by analysing the poetic opening from Richard Dawkinsā Unweaving the Rainbow:
We are going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones.
As Pinker says, thereās no clichĆ© (āsince the dawn of timeā¦ā) thereās no banality (āRecently, scholars have been increasingly concerned withā¦ā). Instead, it begins with the juxtaposition of the most dreadful fact we know with a paradox. How on earth can our death make us lucky?
Now thatās opening strong.
I opened this email with the subject line āBoring emails?ā. I hope thatās quite strong.
Maybe āYour emails are boringā would have been stronger. It would have punched you in the face a bit more. But it didnāt quite feel true to me - Iām a bit gentler. So I toned it down a touch with āBoring emails?ā.
But itās still strong I think.
A good measure of strength is whether it will get noticed as someone scrolls their inbox and cause them to pause. To do that it needs to trigger some kind of gut response - an emotion.
Itās hard to put yourself in your readerās shoes - curse of knowledge and all that - but youāve got to try. Send yourself a test email, scroll down your inbox and see if your stands out. Not just visually - an emoji will do that. But emotionally. Does it trigger a reaction?
It doesnāt matter so much whether that emotion is surprise or shock or desire or anger or pure curiosity. But you need to trigger something or your email wonāt get opened and read.
No readers = no relationship building, no credibility, no trust, no sales.
No good.
- Ian
Awesome, looking forward to learning some things from you over the next month as you dedicate to improvement as you say.
It will go along nicely with a Brennan Dunn course I'm currently going through 'Mastering ConvertKit', which is more about handling all of the tech stuff as efficiently as possible. Cheers and always enjoy reading Ian :-)