The key is to arouse interest and imply there’s a story there. The thing that might’ve almost happened to me.Some of my top-performing subject lines include: Here’s the EFAB version: “3 mistakes you’re making that repel customers”.Īs for the curiosity element, there are lots of ways to inject that. Here’s a formal-looking subject line: “3 Mistakes You Are Making That Repel Customers.” You might even drop punctuation for an extra casual touch. Don’t use title case use sentence case instead. The #1 key to getting an email opened is… the subject line.Īn EFAB’s subject line looks like it’s from a friend, to a friend. It doesn’t matter how great your email is if nobody opens it. 3: Use Informal, Curiosity-Driven Subject Lines How would you speak to the client or customer if you were sitting across from them at a coffee shop? Write like that. You’re always a person writing to a person. You’re never a business writing to a business. I’m often asked, “But what if my business is B2B (business to business), and my audience is more corporate?” Write the way you talk, namely the way you would to a friend, and you’re in business. “You’re never gonna believe who I’m going on vacation with.” Most of us have learned in school or a corporate job that it’s “unprofessional” to write conversationally.īut what human says to another human, “You are never going to believe with whom I am going on vacation”? This is a best practice for all copywriting, and it can be counterintuitive. When building an email newsletter, also collect subscribers’ first names when they sign up so you can address them by name in future communications.
In other words, an EFAB.Īnd that’s the email we click on…and buy from. We all scan through our email inbox deleting the business-y junk and looking for something that feels like it’s just to us. In fact, I call this style of email an EFAB: Email From A Bestie. Over and over, subscribers tell me, “I feel like we’d be friends in real life.” Some even say “besties.” Writing in a style that reveals your personality and personal life-or, if that’s not appropriate for your business, your worldview-creates that “know, like, and trust” factor for your readers. You may have heard the wisdom that we buy from people we know, like, and trust. I’ve told them about the time I illegally split a gym membership, the bad investment I made in a boyfriend’s instructional salsa-dancing tapes, my brother-in-law sending back his fish at dinner, my college roommate and her passive-aggressive Post-Its ( Were you planning to wash these dishes? If not, I’ll do them! ). (Think no one cares what you had for breakfast? Think again!) In these messages, which I usually send three times a week, I’ve written about my: They feel like it’s just to them, because I keep the style and content as conversational and personal (sometimes TMI-level personal) as if I were writing them privately. But to me, and to my subscribers, each one is still an “email to a friend”-because that’s the style I write it in, and how the person receiving the email experiences it. The emails I send might be called newsletters. This is technically called email marketing. Sometimes, those emails sell things-in my case, mostly digital courses and mini-courses for personal brands and entrepreneurs.Īnd the resulting revenue from those emails? Upwards of one million dollars per year. Now, instead of to my close, IRL friends, I write emails to a list of subscribers I think of as my friends. But it was worth it.” (From an actual 2006 email.) A Few Years Ago, I Discovered I Could Make a Living Writing Emails to My Friends “My croque monsieur is giving me the rumbles. I told funny stories and made casual observations. I could be personal, conversational, myself. Writing emails to friends provided the same joy as writing actual mail-mail-remember “letters”?-from sleepaway camp. (That is, back when friends actually connected by email rather than texts, DMs, PMs, and any other private messaging platform prone to “sliding in” from creeps.) That’s what I used to sigh to myself when I was writing an email to a friend. “I wish I could make a living just doing this.”
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