How to Write Emails People Are Excited to Receive

Welcome to another episode of Marketing School. I'm Eric Siu.

And I'm Neil Patel.

And today we are going to talk about how to write emails that people are excited to receive. So this is important about emails. I don't know if maybe, Neil, you might remember this, but I think it might've been Perry Marshall or another email marketer that said this: your goal for writing emails should get people to look forward to receiving the next email. And I think I'm guilty of not always doing that. I think Neil, you might be as well in some cases, but that should be the goal, right? If they're excited to receive the next email, what's going to happen, Neil? What's going to happen to their metrics?

You're going to— they're going to go through the roof and people are going to open up your emails constantly, click on the links and eventually buy from you.

There you go. So in terms of how to write people, write emails that people are excited to receive, one thing that you do pretty well, Neil, and From time to time is you will ask people questions, right? You ask people questions and then they engage with you. And that does help with your metrics deliverability-wise and all that type of stuff. But do you want to talk about what you do there to keep people on the hook? Yeah, sure.

So I do a few things. One, I try to write about timely things. So let's say if there's a Google algorithm update or some news event that's related, or when COVID first hit, how marketing was affected by COVID, these kinds of things have a lot of anticipation. I'm answering questions that people may be curious about, but they haven't asked themselves yet. And they're much more likely to read it. Then the next thing I do within my emails, I keep them short and to the point. A lot of people read emails on this. Technically, most of you guys listening through podcasts can't see what I'm holding up, but it's a mobile phone. So I don't try to do emails with really long paragraphs. I try to do short, to the point. My sentences are little, my paragraphs are actually like one sentence, sometimes 2 2 sentences. And then eventually I ask people to click on one link. It's text-based, put my cheers, Neil Patel. That's usually how I sign off my emails and that's it. And I just try to keep things super conversational. I don't give them the exact answer or the solution in the email, but I more so hook them with why they need to read it. And then I said, hey, if you want to learn more or you want this, go here. And that works extremely well.

Master advertiser David Ogilvy has said that, look, when you write the headline, 80 cents is spent on the dollar already. And so you got to hook them to Neil's point, right? And that's how you get people with ads or your emails, because you're in a sea of emails. That's the pattern interrupt that you're looking for. Some people have tried emojis in the past, and I still think if used effectively, they, they can work. What I would say is I'll just share what has been effective on On me, right? So we do send weekly emails. There's a weekly Marketing School Digest that keeps people updated on what we put out there. The click-through rates and the open rates are pretty good on that. What I will say that I open every single morning without fail, and you might get a sense into how I learn, I will read— there's a newsletter, Wall Street Journal CMO. That's one thing. There's Axios Pro Data. I believe that one's really good. It talks about private equity, venture capital deals and all that. It's free. Neil, you'd actually like reading it. Morning Brew, I enjoy. It's really quick. It's to the point, talks about big things that are happening. You can see a snapshot of markets and big news about whoever Salesforce bought Slack, blah, blah, blah. And to Neil's point, what I find effective is things that are short, to the point, and easy to read. Brian Dean talks about this concept of the bucket brigade, right? So you might have 1 to 3 sentences max per paragraph, and you're not trying to overwhelm people because if you give me a wall of text, I'm done. I'm already out. Once I see the wall, I'm I'm out. So Neil's emails are basically like 1 to 2 sentences and click here, and then that's it.

Yeah, that's it. And it works. And then one other thing that I do, and funny enough, I jacked this from you, uh, you probably don't know. So Eric has a software called ClickFlow where he tests title tags for Google, tons of data. Brian Dean actually took a lot of that and turned it into a blog post. I've tested a lot of it in email and I found that it works as well. So some of the things that I've tested, and here's some stats from ClickFlow, is Questions have a 14.1% higher click-through. In this case, it would be open. Power words increase click-through by 13.9%. Another one is, let's see, titles with years end up generating 4.9% higher CTR. So with emails, test out things like how to start a blog in 2021, or the secrets to succeeding with SEO in 2021. Evoking curiosity, that also works 5.9%. Things like the 7 benefits of green tea, number 6 will shock you. I know a lot of this data is from SEO, but what we've seen is what tends to work for search. When people are searching, they're clicking on specific titles, take those same concepts with your subject lines, and you'll find that it tends to also increase click-throughs as well.

Yeah. The final thing I'll add from my side, kind of building on what Neil's saying, is you should look at your other channels too. So if you have a YouTube channel, look at what performs there. And also obviously look at your email metrics too. I don't think enough people From a testing perspective, look at, oh, this is what works. This is what resonates. Why don't we do more of it? Why don't we do less of this? And we're constantly optimizing for it. And I'm not saying be a complete robot, but at least use the data to guide how effective, how you want to write your next effective email. So that is it for today. Go to marketingschool.io/pro for a $1 trial of our marketing community. Lots of goodies in there. Monthly ask me anythings, exclusive content. We're even trying to get discount codes from our favorite buddies who do not necessarily like to discount. We're gonna do it for you. All right, lots of amazing things and a private Facebook group community too. So that is it for today and we will see you tomorrow.