Three Fundamentals To Avoid “Email Bloat”
How To Ditch The Curse of Over-Stuffed Copy and Write Compelling Emails Your Audience Can’t Wait To Open
I vividly remember my first “urgghh I ate too much” moment. I was eleven and I’d gone to a friend’s birthday party at the local outdoor swimming pool. With the sunlight sparkling on the water, and a whiff of chlorine in the air, the tables were laden with foil trays of sandwiches, donuts and biscuits.
Having worked up an appetite from swimming, we gorged on the goodies, returning time and again to fill our paper plates.
Then the birthday cake came out – a rich chocolate concoction with dozens of sweets studded in the soft butter icing. Even though I was already full to bursting I couldn’t resist a generous slice of that cake too. And as soon as I licked the last morsel off my fingers I felt stomach-churningly sick.
A miserable night followed as the consequences of my greed played out. No matter which way I lay in bed I couldn’t ease the bloated feeling, and perversely although I felt sick, all I could see in my mind was that slice of oozing chocolate sponge.
And the problem is that all too often your emails can end up having the same effect.
Unless you have the right foundations your emails can leave your audience feeling overwhelmed because they’re over-rich, rather than a satisfying snack which delivers just the right amount of value.
The days of “You’ve got mail” being an exciting event in the day have long gone (although it’s OK to admit we all had a Meg Ryan crush).
Now you’re competing with an email tsunami hitting your reader’s inbox every day.
So if you’re in business, and you use email as part of your marketing (and you should be – don’t believe the ‘emails is dead’ mischief-makers) it’s time to step away from boring rambling emails which have no point, and become a master of writing compelling relevant emails instead.
Be the person whose emails your list look forward to receiving.
Because you can’t bore people into doing business with you!
The good news is that most of your competitors still think a dry-as-dust monthly e-newsletter is #winningtheinbox. So if YOU make the effort to improve your emails, you have a very good chance of standing out, for all the right reasons.
When I’m writing emails, for my own marketing and for my clients, there are 3 strategies I use to prevent email bloat. (And therefore avert the dangers of overwhelm-sickness for the reader.)
- Planning
- One core idea
- Editing
Let’s dig in…
Fundamental #1: Planning: Fail To Plan…Plan To Fail
Yep – this is the part which most people completely miss, because they think it’s too boring.
But let me tell you what IS boring. Staring at a blank page, taking forever to write an email, and then knowing that what you’ve just hit ‘send’ on is a rambling wasted opportunity to be properly useful to your email readers.
Ask me how I know?
Because I used to resist planning, thinking it would be easier to just dash something off when inspiration struck. But the reality was that when I tried to write an email I would be as easily distracted as my dogs when they see a squirrel, and the whole exercise would become ever more frustrating!
Once I embraced the idea of spending a little bit of time planning though, everything got easier.
The beauty is that it doesn’t have to take long.
It can be as simple as this:
- Intro to the core idea you’re sharing –
- A story or anecdote to illustrate the core idea
- The meat of your idea (e.g. teaching a new concept, shifting a belief, deepening a world view you both have, sharing good practice, educating them on solutions etc)
- Segue to your call to action (e.g. reply to the email, click a link, sign up for something, buy something etc)
- Wrap up, with a reminder of what you told them, why it matters and what to do next.
Use the Who, Why, What, Where, When and How guidewords to get more depth.
For example: Who your core idea applies to. Why it matters. When and Where your strategies work. How to apply what you’re sharing.
When you spend a few moments writing a sentence or two for each of those 5 sections you now have a plan Stan!
A nice framework which then just requires fleshing out.
Suddenly the blank page and hours agonising over what to write becomes a distant memory. And the great thing is that you can whip up a plan in just a few minutes when inspiration strikes (walking the dogs for me…which is when I dive into the notes app, or send myself a quick voice message) and know that you have a decent framework ready to expand on when it’s your email writing time.
Fundamental #2: Hey – What’s The Big Idea?!
Planning will go a long way to cutting out the bloat from your emails. But another critical element is sticking to ONE core idea.
When you know a lot about your subject matter, you might be tempted to try and cram as many points as you can into your email.
But all this does is confuse the reader, and give them brain-indigestion.
Remember, the joy of someone being on your email list is that you have time to gradually share all that useful know-how with them. It’s not a one-and-done deal! You don’t have to overload your readers with everything you know about a topic in one go.
When you’re planning you’ll probably notice other ideas start sprouting up from your core idea. This is a great opportunity to drop them into an ‘Ideas’ note in Evernote, and you’ll see you quickly have a raft of ideas for future emails.
You’ll notice that I haven’t wandered off into side-shoots of ideas in this article, to start nattering about subject lines, how to spice up your story, or how to make the segue to selling feel natural. Yes, those are related and relevant topics, but if I included them the article would quickly spiral out of control.
Instead I have stuck to just ONE key point (how to avoid bloat) and given you 3 tidy steps to follow.
Fundamental #3: Editing Like A Scalpel-Wielding Surgeon
So you made your plan, you stuck to your core idea, and now you’ve just typed the last sentence at the end of your email.
Time to load it up, hit send, and enjoy a celebratory cup of tea, right?
Wrong.
There’s one final step to your bloat-blitzing, and that’s editing.
But uuurrghhh! I hear you groan. Isn’t that a bit OTT? It’s an email not a Pulitzer contender.
OK, I get what you’re saying but if you want to be better than your competitors, do the things they’re not willing to do.
Starting with giving your email time to breathe, and giving it a quick edit to add polish.
Ideally with any copywriting it’s a great idea to step away from it and then come back to it with fresh eyes. It could be for a coffee break, or leaving a 24 hour gap – just know that editing is much more effective after a break.
The quickest way to edit is to read your email aloud to yourself (yes, aloud, not in your head!) Although the office pets might think you’ve gone cray-cray, doing this allows you to see clearly where the flow is wrong, which phrases are making you stumble, and where you’ve mistakenly written pretentious marketing-speak rather than relatable human-speak!
You’ll easily see exactly what needs tweaking and this final step helps makes your emails much more succinct and compelling.
One round of editing is usually all you need…because I don’t want you to use editing as an excuse for perfectionism to stop you sending the email!
Edit, and then send. Remember, you’ve always got another chance to improve.
So there you have my 3 foundational steps to help you avoid inflicting your list with bloated, rambling emails.
Plan…Focus on One Core…and Edit.
Use this for the next few regular emails you write and let me know how you’ve got on.
And if the whole topic of email marketing strategy is leaving you perplexed, or you know yours could be getting better results (ya know…more opens, more buy-in, more sales) and you’d like my help, get in touch.
Tanya
Dedicated to helping you get better results from your marketing endeavours one email at a time!
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