The "I did a weird thing" email hook
👉 and why it's my favourite
Your email’s hook - the vital first few sentences that get people to read the full email - is one of the real keys to it’s success..
And the “I did weird thing” hook is my favourite type. Not necessarily because it’s the best (though it is good). But because…well, I’ll tell you why in a second.
But first, let me explain what the “I did a weird thing” hook actually is.
What you’re going to do is open your email by telling your readers about something weird or surprising you did recently and say that you’re going to explain why you did it or what happened next.
For example:
Last week I stopped doing any marketing. Here’s what happened next.
or
Last week I posted out 200 toy cars. Here’s why.
You then go on to explain what you did and share useful tips and insights you got from it in the body of the email.
The weird thing you did has to meet two key criteria:
It needs to be relevant enough to your audience that they think they’ll get some value from it.
Most importantly, it needs to be unusual enough that curiosity compels them to read on to find out more about it.
That curiosity factor is the big driver. You want people to read that initial sentence and think “woah…I have to find out what’s going on here”.
It’s difficult for me to say exactly what makes a “weird thing” weird enough. You’ll know it when you see it. You just have to brainstorm enough ideas to finally get a good one.
So what you do when you’re planning this email is one of two things.
Firstly, you can look back at the things you’ve done over the last couple of weeks to try to find something you did that could be classified as weird and interesting enough to form the basis of a “weird thing” email.
Or…and this is the reason I love this hook so much…you can think to yourself “what can I do next week that would be weird enough to make a brilliant “weird thing” hook?”
And then do it.
Of course, I’m not saying that you should let your desire to write an interesting hook for an email completely determine what you focus on in your business.
But you can do a bit of brainstorming and come up with a few things you could do that would be hugely interesting and instructive for your audience to read about, and wouldn’t take a lot of your time to do.
And they’d be fun for you too. And you’d probably learn something useful.
Experimentation. Trying out new things.
The sort of thing we know we should be doing, but often get stuck in the daily grind instead.
Planning to write a “weird thing” hook gives you a good excuse to have a bit of fun and experiment a bit.
Not a bad thing at all. Especially as it will get more people reading your emails.
- Ian
