Here’s a quick checklist of elements that make for engaging, effective, and influential emails:
1. Conflict, outrage. We seem to take a constant delight in seeing or participating in a fight. The more real it is, the more engaging it is. The more status the fight participants have, the more engaging it is.
2. Surprising connections between unrelated things, or surprising distinctions in things that seemed simple and unified.
3. Metaphors, analogies, and “transubstantiation.”
4. Angst. All good copy is rooted in angst. As Dan Kennedy likes to say, “The sky is either falling or is about to fall.”
5. Imitation and parody.
6. An engaging character. As Matt Furey didn’t but should have said, “For the email marketer, nothing transcends character.” The email of personality, rather than the email of “value.” Email is not about sharing valuable information. It’s about writing about normal things in a valuable and interesting way. It’s about accuracy of human observation and precision of the observation.
7. All right, enough of this. Let me come clean:
Everything I’ve just told you actually comes from a video titled “Visual Comedy: A Lecture by Rowan Atkinson.”
Atkinson you might best know as the clumsy priest from Four Weddings and a Funeral.
I watched Atkinson’s Visual Comedy guide a few days ago, expecting to be entertained. And I was that. But I found the video surprisingly full of deep analysis of what actually makes for visual comedy. It was like a prehistoric episode of the Every Frame a Painting series, if you’ve ever seen that.
And not only was this video insightful.
I realized that much, or maybe all, of what makes for good visual comedy can be ported very easily to email marketing.
For example, point #1 above is really about slapstick. As the Visual Comedy video says, “We seem to take a constant delight in seeing people hurt and humiliated. The more real it is, the funnier it is. The more dignified the victim, the funnier it is.”
And that Matt Furey non-quote in point #6?
It actually comes from Charlie Chaplin. “For the comedian, nothing transcends character.”
If you like, I’ve linked the entire Rowan Atkinson video below. You can watch it and try to figure out which techniques of visual comedy I mapped to each of my email marketing points above.
Of course, there’s more in this video than just what I’ve written above. The list of connections between visual comedy and email marketing is long and distinguished, and doesn’t just stop at 6″.
As just one example:
Maybe the most valuable part of this video is the detailed discussion of what exactly makes for an engaging character in visual comedy. I found almost all of this applied to email marketing directly, without the need for even the smallest bit of translation. Now that I think about it, maybe it’s a lesson I should apply myself.
So to wrap up:
If you’re a goofy and thoughtless person who enjoys laughing when somebody slips on a banana peel…
Or if you’re a deep and serious thinker who is interested in uncovering the hidden structure of things most people take for granted…
Then I believe you will get value out of this video. Or maybe you’ll just get some pointed human observation. You can find it below. Before you click to watch it, you might want to sign up for my daily email newsletter, and get more insightful things like the essay you’ve just read.