I have been saying for years that email is the only marketing platform left that works. I think long-form video has potential as well, but you must be exceptional in the content you produce. For most people writing is a lot less effort and a lot more natural than creating an engaging video for YouTube. It is also substantially cheaper.
Don’t Outsource or Delegate Email
Email should come from the brand or business owner. You can outsource the design (more on that later), the technology, and the results, but generally you should never send a marketing mail you did not write.
Consumers’ Brains are Fried
I used to stay up until 3am reading almost every night when I was young, but I find it very hard to concentrate on reading now. This is important, because I am not alone and you cannot compete with media designed to tickle a tired mind. Emails full of smarties (images and calls to action) can’t compete with the latest viral short. Long form emails that expect your customers’ undivided attention will probably get a few extra days in the inbox as the recipients promise themselves to give it the attention it deserves. They never will.
In my opinion what works is a hybrid. Text that doesn’t need too much concentration and a simple design with lots of white space.
But not so Fried they will put up with Bad Content
Don’t sell me something, tell me something. I am busy, my brain is fried, if I am giving you the time I want the reward. If the reward is not smarties for my rotten brain, then it should be medicine to heal it. Educate or entertain and your emails will be read.
Wednesday at 11am is the Best Time to Send an Email
Everyone knows it. That is because across the planet at exactly 11am every Wednesday five billion adults stop everything and read your email. The second-best time to send an email is when you have something to say. If that is twice a year, then so be it.
A few of my clients now rely heavily on AI (yes, you are reading this) and all of them have said to me at some point recently “did you not read the email I sent you about this matter?”. My reply has and will continue to be “No, if you didn’t bother writing it why would I bother reading it.”
The same applies to marketing newsletters. If you don’t have the time and respect for me to make the effort when writing it then good luck asking me to read it.
Writing is Time-Consuming
If I get criticised for anything it is my communications. The disconnect is that I communicate to inform, but most people communicate to be liked, to impress, or to control. I use sharp short sentences that are (if I get it right) precise, concise, and unambiguous. I have been accused of being argumentative, but I never am. Most of what I do for work is either science (right until proven wrong) or educated opinion (right until I learn otherwise). My communication style is to bring the person I am communicating with to the point where my expertise is theirs. That takes considerable time and effort.
I don’t know what your marketing emails should be trying to achieve, but writing that tries to achieve anything takes a lot of time and effort. Spend it.
Do You Know What Your Marketing Emails Should be Trying to Achieve?
My dad always says “work is a four-letter word”. None of us does this for the love of it – if I had all the money in the world I wouldn’t be writing this email – I would be out taking photos or driving my old van. I am writing this right now because I need you to realise that email is the absolute dog’s danglers of marketing technologies, and when you do you will pay me to help. Let’s accept we are all sending marketing emails to make money.
The person reading the email doesn’t want to give you their money. This means that your email being about making money is a given, but asking for it is a big bad mistake. I could have sent an email today and said “Remember we do Klaviyo, starting at 19.99” with a big Klaviyo logo and a photo of a happy customer with a speech bubble saying: “Perfidious Albert helped me pay for my yacht in Barbados with their email marketing expertise. 5 stars. Mandy from Athy”. It probably would have worked to some extent. If you had a need and I could fulfil it there and then maybe you would have replied. But it is more likely that you would have deleted it, notched down the respectometer for Ruairi Browne by a degree or two, and after another few emails hit unsubscribe.
I know what I am trying to achieve – I hinted at it in the last section. I am transferring some of my expertise and learning to you. That is what I do, it is what you pay me for. You need to think about what your email recipients want and find a way to provide it. When you stop selling you will start selling – I am sure of it – I see enough marketing emails to see what works.
Ask Not What Your Customer Can Do for You
We all know what that means, so instead of explaining it I want to point out that the heading of this section has a capital letter at the start of every word except one – and Microsoft Word says that is simply perfect!
Be Consistent, Send Emails Whenever
I am revisiting the 11am thing a little here. I subscribe to around 1,000 email newsletters from across the alcohol industry in Ireland. I am subscribed to every whiskey company newsletter, probably every off-licence, and many wine blogs and magazines. I did so to train an AI on trends, analysis, and basically to gather data. I use a special email address to subscribe with, but I do see the emails in my Outlook. There is endless dross – there really is. The ones that catch my attention are infrequent, educational, and mostly plain text.
So be consistent – send emails when you have something worth saying – twice tomorrow and not again for three months is perfect (although with the caveat that for large email lists that can trigger spam filters).
So, Don’t Sell?
If you have put all this work into educating and entertaining your audience, then they can occasionally suck it up when you need to pay the bills. If you have a new product in your store, send an email saying, “We have a new product in our store, you might like it, thanks and buy/bye.”
If you want to sell then sell, don’t end every email with a call to action, don’t educate a little and sell a lot, don’t pretend you are being entertaining when you are just trying to shift some old tat. Sell or don’t.
Divide and Conquer
One of our clients has 25,000 subscribers. They never send an email to more than around 3,000. The revenue per subscriber is eye-watering. It was our idea, but frankly the results caught me off-guard.
I see this in action most with companies that sell parts for old cars (my passion). I own a 1971 Volkswagen Van. I get lots of emails from companies that sell parts for old Volkswagens. At first, they send me everything – parts for Beetles, parts for full restoration jobs, parts for annual maintenance, parts for WW2 German Kubelwagens. But as I click, read, and buy they get sharper and more in focus until after a while the only emails I get are trying to sell me parts for 1969 – 1974 Volkswagen vans.
Klaviyo makes this very easy to do. Their AI will even make a good attempt at it: “Build me a segment of subscribers that are interested in expensive scarves”.
Build It and They Will Come
Anyone who has spent 5 minutes with me knows how much I use that phrase. Not because it is true, but because it ain’t. They won’t come.
When you open a shop in Main Street, Dundalk (population 15 thousand) and do no marketing or advertising the chances are you will get passing footfall and make some money. Open a shop on the world wide web (population 6 billion) with no marketing or advertising and Shopify will make some money from your monthly fee. The internet has no footfall. If you want subscribers for your mailing list, you need to go out and get them. It’s the big irony that the best marketing tool needs to be marketed, and the one tool you can’t use to market it is the best marketing tool. But figure it out, because otherwise you won’t have a mailing list to send to.
Do make sure you have a sign-up box on your website at a minimum.
Wednesday at 11am is the Best Time to Send an Email
You can reuse content for new subscribers or across different segments, but saying the same thing to the same person twice is a shortcut to an unsubscribe. Too many emails is also a great way to shrink your list, and if you find yourself sending emails at 11am on a Wednesday just because it is 11am on a Wednesday then that is also a great way to get unsubscribes.
Remember, when you lose a subscriber, they are not coming back. They are gone and so is their wallet.
Email is Decrepit
Email is a very old technology – older than me which is saying something. I had my first email address in 1995, and it was old technology even then – so old in fact that most people were predicting its demise as the world wide web started to take off. Why would anyone send an electronic letter when you could communicate in real time through comments, message boards, and your very own website? In around 2016 I was teaching web development to disadvantaged yoofs in Ballyfermot. I asked them if they could share their email address with me. They sniggered. “Check out this stupid old man”, they guffawed. “What even is email?”, they sneered. Ten years later and all the kids now use email because they are fed up with the old people on Facebook and Instagram including the creepy assed billionaire who owns it. Email is the technology that refused to die, but it also has refused to do much keeping up with the modern world.
This matters, because fancy fonts don’t work in email, buttons don’t click, images don’t scale, big words split in two, and making an email look nice is like putting lipstick on a geriatric pig.
So, I like plain text emails. Work with what you have. Leave the pig alone.
You might like or need branded and beautiful emails. That’s ok too, just be aware that they need specialist design skills, extra care in coding, and lots of testing. And that’s after you are sure the design supports the message and brings something useful to the party.
Subscribe to Emails
I mentioned I subscribe to around 1,000 emails from across the Irish alcohol industry. I bet you think I am going to tell you what I have learned. Well, I am, but the answer is nothing. They are almost all terrible. If I learned one thing it is that a good email list is a rare and beautiful thing. You should subscribe to every one of your competitors, and I bet you will come to the same conclusion: snooze. That should inspire you to do better if nothing else.
These are my People
In our back garden here outside Dundalk, we have a Glasnevin Potato Plant. I planted it in spring on a north-facing wall near a corner to an east-facing wall. I planted it in a massive famine pot that must weigh 200kg when full of earth. The plant shot up the north-facing wall, decided it was too cold, shot out sideways, found the morning sun on the east-facing wall, and then diverted everything towards that direction. By September the 200kg pot was on its side, and the bush was practically after relocating to the other wall. It reached at least 8 foot in height and twice that in width. I cut it back to nothing and righted the pot. In year two it just went straight for the sun. The bloody thing has a memory. By August it was sprawled across the drive, and the pot was on its side. In year three it got to its sideways position by early July. If I had read the instructions, it did say to plant in full sun.
Your mailing list is a potato plant. If you have the wrong conditions prune back hard. It will recover. Set up sunset flows (to get rid of stale subscribers) and find the people who you need to talk to. 1,000 obsessive fans is better than 100,000 disinterested people who never read your emails. Don’t just make it easy for people to unsubscribe (a legal requirement) – get rid of them.
Engage
People talk about the importance of engagement in email marketing. I agree, but they have it wrong. Don’t worry about your subscribers engaging with your emails. Worry about engaging with your subscribers. Be interesting. The rest will follow. Which sounds a bit like build it and they will come, but it’s more like build it and when they come, they will stay if you don't bore them.
Grow
If you have found your people and you are engaging with them, you will grow. Your subscriber numbers might not rapidly increase but your engagement and revenue will.
Wednesday at 11am is the Best Time to Send an Email
Apparently, it really is, and consistency is powerful in email marketing. Just make sure you have something to say.
How to Write an Email
I am no expert, but here is how I do it.
Be personal. Pick someone you love and respect and pretend the email is to them alone. In my case that person is me. If it amuses me and sounds interesting to me then that’s fine. Narcissistic? Well, if you are as good-looking as me you can afford to have some personality flaws.
Be funny. Look, the chances are most people think you are not very funny. There are enough people in the world that the minority who like your humour will pay your mortgage.
Be yourself. Whether it is brand, energy, personality, humour, irreverence, or just a slight mental imbalance - be someone and make sure that someone is you. There is nothing worse than keeping it professional in an email newsletter. Boring.
Be clear. Say what you mean, make sure when you read it again it still says what you mean, and then ask someone else to read it to be sure it says what you mean.
Be focused. If you ever read Jeremy Clarkson’s newspaper “car review” columns they usually were 5,000-word rants on everything from airline ticketing to that princess lady from Suits. They often but not always ended with a sentence or two about the car. I have often said that there are two types of people to avoid – those that love Jeremy Clarkson and those that hate Jeremy Clarkson. They are both weird. But at the risk of dropping myself into the former camp I personally think his writing style is genius. However, he wasn’t trying to sell cars – he was and is a pure entertainer. He was paid to be the village idiot. Unless your mailing list exists for pure entertainment don’t drift into side rants or other things that interest you. Don’t mention politics, don’t talk about your children, don’t start a campaign. Nobody cares and if they do, they will join your other mailing lists that you started about those topics. If they don't join your other mailing lists that you started about those topics then you have your answer.
Be useful. Give, don’t take.
Be nice. Just because.
Finally (A), or Not (B)
I am tired of writing this now, and A/B testing is probably the most important part of marketing with email. Therefore, my final words to you are that if you take nothing from this article then remember that the thing I didn’t tell you about is the most important thing you should know about.