2 Easy Tricks Of The Email Trade

How To Write Emails With Hooks

This guest post comes from Jason Kadlec of Kadlec Consulting. As one of the first Topspin Certified consultants, Jason provides the advice and assistance needed to create and implement direct to fan businesses for artists and brands.  You can follow Jason via his blog or Twitter.

Today I was emailing with a musician who had sent me a better than average email blast. It a nice layout with the content in the left column, a list of tour dates on the right and good graphic / color scheme etc. A nice design. It was also clearly and unmistakably the writing of the artist, starting with an opening paragraph with a personal note, and keeping that same voice throughout the email.

But I couldn’t help trying to improve it to make it great. The one thing it lacked was that it did not lack for information. It was all in there. Every last thing you could possibly tell someone about what was going on last month / this month.

To be totally honest with you (and with the artist should he read this post) is that I didn’t read the whole email. Why? It’s not because I’m not a fan, in fact his music is quite good. It was because his email looked like way too much work to read.

It was so long that just I read the first paragraph, tried to skim the rest and then moved to the next task of my day. Unless the point was just to read the first paragraph, then I don’t think the email succeeded in accomplishing its objective with me.

I’m sure mega fans who line up around the block to see their favorite artist would read every last word. But if that is the case, then I’m sure they would do this as well:

They’d take a hook and click it.

So the email doesn’t need to be targeted to just your super fans. Instead you can broaden the appeal of your email with these two simple tricks.

Easy trick 1: Make a hook and link it

The first easy thing you can do is the hook link. Want to know more? Click here….

(that’s an example….it’s not a link) But if you’ve read this far you kinda wanted to click there right?

So here’s the deal, focus your email on one main thing. Take everything else and put it into a blog post. Write a good lead sentence that ends with “Click Here.” and link those words to that post where now you can fill in all that other info that most people would not have read in your email anyway.

Your super fans will click and read it. And because “curiosity killed the cat” you may actually hook more normally passive readers into it as well. They won’t tune out all that info when it looks to them like your email is a short novel.

And you will Track the Link won’t you?

Easy trick 2: Put WIIFM in your email

The other super easy trick is to put WIIFM in there. “What’s In It For Me.” One of my clients and I bet which email subject line would get more opens and more click throughs. The looser did not have the word YOU in the subject line. The winner DID have a subject line with the word YOU in it.

Re-write those emails and see if you can take out every “I” and “we.” Find out how to write in the 2nd person. ( I /we is 1st person, they/them is 3rd person).

Do YOU want a topic written about something specific? It’s just a comment away. Leave a comment below and I’ll hook you up with some free info if I can.

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