George Kao's minimal newsletters with no personal stories hit 45-50% open rates, double the industry average. He spends 10-15 minutes per month because he saves personal content for Instagram, Medium, and YouTube instead. His advice: pick a tone you can actually sustain.
How personable or personal should you be in your email newsletter? You know how you receive some, you sign up for some email newsletters, they literally call it the love letter, the weekly love letter to my audience or whatever. And then they're like, oh, I went shopping the other day and this happened to me, or oh, my dog ran away and got rescued. And oh, I got COVID and, you know, I'm recovering now. And they make it much more like they're sending email to a group of friends. This kind of thing. So that's one style. And if you'll notice, my style is the complete opposite of that. I'm not saying it's right or wrong, but I'll tell you my opinion about this. But let me go ahead and show you on screen my style. This is literally my monthly newsletter, and you'll see this is the June newsletter. I'll show you. And this is the May newsletter. It's exactly the same format. There's no love letter. There's no, hi, I'm doing okay this month. What do you think about, you know, Mercury retrograde, it hit me in this way or that, or my family went to this, or nothing, nothing, nothing. It's my email newsletters are kind of robotic, but guess what? My email newsletter open rates are double my industry average. My industry average, the average in my industry is 20 to 25%. My email open rates for a 5,000-person email list, which is almost unheard of, this open rate, 45 to 50% open rate. For my email newsletters. Almost unheard of at, at this size. So, cuz usually you hear about that size when people have several hundred people or maybe low thousands, but 5,000 is getting up there with that size. So am I saying that my, my way of doing email newsletter is the only way or the correct way? No, I don't think so. I think, and is, and, and, and the second question is, oh, George, does it mean when you build up an audience, the larger you get, the less personal you become and the less you talk about your personal life and, and bring in more personality into your email newsletter? No, I, I don't think that's necessarily the case. What I do, the reason I do my email newsletters, you know, this way that I've shown you, is because it's so easy for me to do it this way. And I therefore, one of the reasons I can be so consistent in sending it month after month, year after year, I have sent newsletters without fail because it takes me 10 minutes, 15 minutes to put together my monthly email newsletter. And same thing with my weekly newsletter, it takes me 10 minutes as well. So I'm very consistent and I don't, I'm not stressed out about it every month. Like some people like, oh, I gotta send my love letter to my email audience this month. What am I gonna say? Is it interesting enough? Am I being, am I showing enough of my authentic personality in there? And they just, you know, so here's my opinion about it. I think that ultimately it is more attractive, it is more nurturing to have more of a love letter type thing or personal letter type thing that, you know, audience gets from me. Of course, it makes sense. You know, you put picture— you— some people put personal pictures in there. But the way I think about it is I put that stuff in my content. I'm consistent in my content on Instagram, Facebook, you know, Medium, you know, YouTube. And if I have something personal to share, I'll share it in my content. That's where I put my personality. And then I— in my email newsletter, I just link to those contents. And, and so that's the way I do it. So I don't have to do extra work for my newsletter. Now, like I said, I, I've, I just said, told you, I think it's more effective probably for building a nurturing, warm, true fan audience to have more personality in my email newsletter. And I have a weird relationship with this whole thing about true fans in that, uh, this is again, probably a separate conversation, but I am almost not trying to push people away, but I almost don't mind being boring in certain ways. For example, in my email newsletters, one way I'm boring. I don't mind being boring because my true fans will overlook it and will continue to lean in. It's like I sometimes say, you know, with my clients, I find that it's more effective relationship if I lean back with my clients, let them guide their own transformation more, let them lean in, I lean back a little bit. And the same thing with my email newsletter. It's almost like I'm leaning back a little bit and let the newsletter readers lean in. And that may be why my open rate's so high, but I still do think generally it does feel better to the reader to have more warmth in a newsletter, more color, more personality. So I think at the end of the day, it's funny, my recommendation, if you are leaning in that direction of being more personal, if it feels weird to you to be cold like I am in my email newsletter, yes, you should put more personality, you should put more of yourself. Authentic business, authentic marketing. Don't, don't fight that. Warmth is always good, you know, nurturing is always good, personality and humor and whatever it is your natural authentic, you know, way of being alive is always good. So don't fight it, let it be in your email newsletter. And for those of us who are already doing that in other ways and just want to save time and don't want to stress out about email newsletter. If that stresses you out, if for me, I'm already consistent being authentic in these other places and it would feel a bit of a waste for me or too much work to be this kind of authentic personality in my email newsletter, then I just say, you know what, to heck with it, I'm gonna be robotically boring in my email newsletters so that I can be more vibrant and alive. I was gonna say flamboyant, but in my other areas, in my videos, for example, I can have my, my background be boring, or my background's kind of interesting, but I have no editing. But then that, I compensate for that by letting myself come alive in my energy and my hand movements or whatever. So that's just, anyway, I hope this is interesting and helpful. And as always, I'm open to your comments and questions below.
