An email about emails

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Hey folks, it's your content friend Eric here.

It only recently occurred to me that email is my favorite marketing channel. The content itself feels the most like the small-b blogging that made me fall in love with marketing.

Even with more transactional email, there are so many little puzzles to solve with each email—getting someone to open it, then read it, then do or feel something. It’s part of why I love writing this weekly email so much.

To open up my Superpath email brain to you:

As a rule, I avoid writing too much tactical content advice in this newsletter. My primary goal is to give you a taste of the Superpath community from the outside. And the main benefit of the Superpath community is—to steal a line from our website—”a sense of belonging among peers who are working on the same [content] problems you are and are open to sharing honest learnings.”

For that reason, I try to focus on the softer mushy-brain parts of working in content. Honest reflections on what I’m going through. There’s enough tactical marketing advice available elsewhere on the internet.

However… last week, I wrote some quick AEO observations and tips and got a flood of positive reactions and helpful replies. Because I crave your validation, I have a few tips for writing better marketing emails.

There are so many possible email formats/intentions—cold email, promotional email, newsletter—so it’s hard to write one-size-fits-all tips, but these should generally apply to all of them.

Okay, stream of consciousness thoughts:

1. Break patterns with subject lines: Every popular subject line trend gets old fast. I have 1,000 “quick question” emails in my inbox every week. It’s more important not to blend in than to follow a “best practice.”

1b. But then don’t: Once you’ve earned your place in someone’s inbox, it can be sometimes helpful to keep a consistent subject line structure. For Dock customers, I start all Dock product launch emails with “New in Dock:” and all webinar emails with “Dock Live:”. For non-Dock customers on our marketing list, I do more experimentation.

2. Share the value in the subject line: Not all subject lines need to be clever. I sent an email from Dock last week that was just “Webinar Invite: [topic]”— it had a great open rate because it was impossibly clear and the topic was valuable to them.

2b. Don’t bait and switch: On that note, if your subject line is really clever or click-baity and then the email content is a webinar invite, the bait-and-switch will feel like a letdown. You’re better off having a slightly lower open rate and higher engagement with the email itself.

3. List quality impacts open rates more than your subject line: When we moved the Superpath newsletter to Beehiiv, we didn’t import subscribers who hadn’t opened our emails in a long time. Our open rates suddenly shot up to well above benchmark levels. It was a good reminder that who is on your list is the biggest variable in how well your emails will be received.

4. Make the ask/value impossibly clear in the first line: It’s tempting, as a writer, to try to build intrigue with a meandering intro. But email, especially, has to be as clear in its purpose as early as possible. And the more direct the ask of the email, the more your first sentence should spoil it. In this newsletter, I teased that I’d be writing about emails. In my webinar invite email, I put “We’re hosting a webinar on [topic]” in the first sentence, and then wrote a bunch of compelling copy to sell them on that webinar.

5. Include your link a whole bunch of times: When I want someone to click something, I do not shy away from giving them the link in many formats. I’ll link the thumbnail/cover image, a video play-button thumbnail, the first time I mention it in the text, in a button above the fold, and a button below the fold. Clicks are pretty evenly split across these things because folks decide to click at different points in the email.

6. Length is earned with familiarity: In a cold pitch email, you get 1-2 sentences max to prove your value because you’re a stranger. You can only write long newsletter-style emails when you’ve earned the audience’s attention/respect/etc.

7. Use emojis like a logo: I always use a 💿 emoji at the start of the subject line for Dock’s Grow & Tell newsletter to give people a visual cue in their inbox. I use the 🔵 emoji for all Dock webinars. Otherwise, I’ve stopped including one-off emojis in email subject lines because they feel too marketing-y. But that’s mostly a personal taste thing. You do you.

8. Make your email about one thing: Unless you’re writing a newsletter, keep every email focused on one ask. Sign up for a thing? Click a thing? Read the thing?

9. Just put the content in the email: If your goal is just to get your audience to read something, emailing your audience a teaser to a link is silly—it’s unnecessary friction. Yes, share the link for those who want it, but please just include the content directly in the email (i.e. zero-click).

Most of my other email content tips are pretty standard content advice: make them skimmable, write for different layers of engagement, have clear headings and signposting, etc. I don’t need to teach you that stuff.

I am, however, extremely disappointed that my list was not a nice, round 10 tips long. If you have any great email tips that you swear by, send them to me, and I’ll share them in the newsletter next week!

Cheers,

- Eric

📧 Podcasts with beehiiv (week 2)– After moving our podcast (Content, Briefly) to beehiiv last week, we now have our first couple of episodes up. I'm already finding the analytics much better than our previous provider. Here's a look at the dashboard. - Alex

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🎙 New on Content, Briefly: Give your content a (different) job with Ronnie Higgins

This episode is part of The Art of Content series hosted by Rachel Bicha, where Rachel brings on guests to chat about big-picture content marketing theory. Each conversation is centered on a recent piece that person wrote for The Art of Content blog.

This week’s guest is long-time community member Ronnie Higgins, who talks about his recent post, Seeking: B2B content with range.

Most B2B content has one job: inform. Ronnie Higgins thinks that's a waste. He dug up a forgotten BuzzFeed framework where data scientists mapped why people actually share content, then applied it to B2B.

The result is a way of thinking about content through the lens of human needs: identity, connection, and emotion.

Rachel and Ronnie also talk about:

Listen here.

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