A couple days ago, I got a newsletter email from a well-known marketer. In what follows, I’m going to pick on this marketer, but as per usual, I don’t want to come across as picking on well-known marketers just as a way of getting exposure.
So let me refer to this guy by the impenetrable alias Arthur Lang.
Arthur used to send only one email a week, on Sundays. I would always read Arthur’s Sunday email, because it very often had interesting stories and interesting offers. I also took up Arthur on his offers, on three separate occasions, all in all totaling somewhere north of $700.
A while back though, Arthur upped his mailing frequency, and started sending a second email, on Fridays.
Pretty much since that happened, I find I never read Arthur’s emails any more. For example, I didn’t read his email from last Friday, and I didn’t read the Sunday email before that.
The reason I didn’t read either email is because the two emails are the same, just with a different subject line.
Arthur must be using some clever functionality in his ESP to re-send his Sunday email five days later to people who didn’t open, while camouflaging it with a new subject line.
Only problem is, I used to open and read Arthur’s Sunday emails. And yet I still got the Friday emails. And I used to open and read those too, until I realized, fairly quickly given how slow my brain works, that this is the same email I had read a few days earlier.
After a few weeks of this, I stopped opening both emails. Not out of any kind of irritation or spite, but simply out of confusion and a desire for hygiene. “I must have read this already. This isn’t fresh.”
So my small point for you is, beware of making key business decisions based on email opens. Those decisions can include re-sending emails, kicking people off your list, or determining which content resonates or not.
Opens were always flaky. But today, they are more flaky than a pretty 21-year-old girl in a big city on a Saturday night in July.
My bigger point, in case you want it, is to keep your emails fresh or even raw. That doesn’t mean you can never resend or reuse content. But few things are worse for an email newsletter than if your reader imagines, even if he has to squint to do it, that he’s having a real one-on-one interaction with you, only to find unquestionable proof that it’s really not so.
Today being Sunday February 19 means I will likely get a new email from Arthur Lang, which I will most probably ignore.
Today being Sunday February 19 also means I’m already several weeks behind schedule in releasing my training on journaling and taking notes.
I initially planned to call that training Insight Juggernaut, but I decided to rename it Insight Exposed. The reasons for that will become obvious if you keep reading my fresh and even raw email newsletter.
In the meantime, since I’m behind schedule, I don’t have anything planned to promote for you. So let me go back to my Most Valuable Email training. It’s a daily email-writing strategy that helps your emails stay fresh in two ways.
First, because of the actual Most Valuable Email trick, and the kind of content it produces, which tends to read fresh.
Second, because this trick is actually fun to use, at least for me, and therefore it makes it easy and even inviting to write a new email each day.
In case you’d like to find out more: