Co-founder of Customer.io, Colin Nederkoorn
Teaches the Essentials of Writing Great Emails

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey everybody, so in the last lesson you learned how to build an email drip or autoresponder course, and today I want to talk about the content of the emails in that course, and so how to structure those and how to kind of approach writing great emails.

A bit about me. My name is Colin Nederkoorn. I’m @alphacolin on Twitter, and I’m the cofounder of a company called Customer.io. We’re an email product for web and mobile businesses. The way we work is we plug in and collect data about what people do and don’t do when they’re logged into your site or when they’re using your app, and then we make it really easy to use that data to send them transactional emails like Drip and Autoresponder courses as well as marketing emails.

To give you a quick idea of what’s inside this class. First up we’re going to break down your email into its component pieces. You’ve got the from address, the subject lines, the voice, and the structure. I’ll give you some actionable tips on like how to approach each one of those things so that you have a really clear understanding and you’re able to go and execute tonight after we finish this course.

First up is the From address. I want to show you what not to do with your From address. Here’s an email that I received from a company and when anyone’s receiving an email from you and looking at the various emails in their in-box, there are a few questions that they’re asking; who is this, why are they writing to me, and is this spam or is it important? Based on the information here I couldn’t figure that out, so I’m looking at this email and I’m thinking WTF, who is this person and why are they writing to me? The subject line Aspen Sunsetting makes it sound like it a romantic walk, so I have no idea what’s going with this email. Based on opening it and understanding what it actually was about, it turns out it was this guy, David, from a company called Heroku, and it was an important email that I needed to know about where I had to migrate my Heroku app to new infrastructure.

Based on the From address combined with the subject line as well, I would have probably missed this email, and I’m sure a lot of people did. So when you’re thinking about your From address, there are a couple of rules that I’d encourage you to follow. There are a couple of options that you really have.

One is to do something like above, where you have your name + from your company. I often use Colin from Customer.io when I write, especially if it’s a marketing email or something from our application. Another thing you can do is have your team or your company. When I previously did a course with Joanna and with Patrick McKenzie, we were kind of like collectively the email boot camp team, and every email that we wrote came from The Email Bootcamp Team.

The goal of this is so that someone can look at the subject line and they’re not confused about who’s writing them, or sorry, someone can look at the From address and they’re not confused about who’s writing to them. So I’d certainly encourage you to think about that and review what you have for your from address and make sure that it’s really obvious who you are and where you’re from.

So next up we’ll take a look at subject lines. Subject lines are always fun. I really enjoy trying to write clever subject lines. We’re not going to talk about the transactional email subject lines. These are really marketinG-email subject lines, and the strategy for marketing emails is that you really want to use intrigue as a way to write your subject lines. Here are a few examples that I found around the web.

The first one, This is what someone who makes $200,000 plus sounds like. Now what’s curious about this is that it’s not who they are, it’s not how they made their money; it’s what they sound like, which is a pretty unusual thing to think about for someone whose made $200,000. Why does that even matter? …That might be why you end up opening that email.

The next one on this list, What would you do with an extra hour every day? So what’s curious about this one is it really starts getting your creative juices flowing thinking about what it is you would do with this extra time. It’s not how to get an extra hour every day, although that’s really the next logical question, and that might be why you end up clicking to open the email.

So to think about some real tactics here. There are a couple of things I think you should know.

One of them is that iPhones cut subject lines at 35 characters. In general this is good practice anyway but that’s just another reason to front load your information, so put the key information that you want to convey in the subject line at the very beginning.

Another thing that you should know is a lot of email clients show preview text, and you want to at least be aware of what yours says. I found four examples of really good preview text, and I’ll highlight one here. So the subject line of this email is, “The truth is out, I’m a desperate fraud,” and the preview text continues that thought and it says, “I haven’t received hate mail in so long I’m starting to wonder if people still get my emails.” So, it’s this really clever play between the subject line and the first line in the email. So you just want to be aware that that’s actually happening.

Then the next thing on the list is voice. How you come across and how you sound in your email and also how you speak to your customers. So, this guy, Claude Hopkins, is the father of modern advertising, and he has this quote about this, and don’t actually read this while I’m saying this, it’s a bit too long-winded, but this other guy, Neville Medora, has a much shorter version of this quote, and he says, “People don’t care about you. They only care about themselves,” and it’s really, really important to understand that.

So what I’d encourage you to do is when you’re writing your emails just to try to get rid of all of these words like I, me, my, we, us, and our, and for every sentence that you use one of those words see if you can rewrite it and re-frame the sentence around your reader and your customer and why does that thing your writing benefit them. If you can write as if your writing just for them, people are going to respond a lot better to the emails that your sending. I want to show you a quick example of that.

This is from a company called Circle CI. It doesn’t really matter what they do, but this was, a bunch of people had signed up to get notified when they launch, and these are notoriously poorly received emails, because a lot of times people collect emails before launching, but then they never email them for months so there’s a lot of inactive people by that time, and these guys got a 55 percent click through rate on this email, which is really amazing. Part of that is because it’s all about the recipient. It’s all about how it benefits them and why it’s going to awesome for them to use the product.

Another thing to think about is how you structure the inside of your email and all of the content that you’re writing. The way I really like to think about this comes from the early days of direct sales, so this is like, this knowledge is like 100 years old. It’s really breaking down the structure of your email into these three sections, or four sections rather: attention, interest, desire, and action. Let’s look an example to see how that works.

So, this is an email from one of our customers, Shopify.com, and you can see the section at the top is meant to grab attention. The subject here is really like why email marketing is the key to E-commerce success. They have an image that reinforces that, and then they jump into the intro-section. The intro-section, it’s actually really common to have bullets in here, like they’ve done. That’s really where you have all of the factual information and you start educating people about the topic, about what you’re writing. Here you see some facts, like 80 percent of the people say they receive marketing messages along side their personal emails. Seventy percent of people make use of coupons or discounts they learn about from email and so it’s just like supporting that initial attention grabbing thing with a bunch of facts in the intra-section.

People should feel really educated. They should feel like they’ve learned something. Then in the next little bit you’re building desire for them to take the next step. Here you can see the last sentence is here, And if these stats don’t convince you, here’s some other factors that might motivate you to start building your mailing list today.
Then after you’ve got the person frothing at the mouth and they’re ready to take the next action you’ve got that action right there for them, and here the button text is read more. I might re-frame that as like, “start email marketing today,” or something like that, which is more benefit driven or it’s clearer as to what’s happening or like, turn your list into more revenue today, which is a lot better and more focused on the benefit that the person will get by taking the action.

So that’s AIDA, and that’s kind of the meat of this course here.

So what I’d encourage you to do is take one of your emails and spend about 40 minutes on it. You can look at the From address, look at the subject lines that you’ve got there, and then look at the voice that your using. If you’ve got sentences that are all me, me, me, re-frame it to focus on your recipient, and then see if you can write that email in using an AIDA structure, leaving the call to action at the bottom and really, really build up towards that call to action, and if you feel comfortable with it, if you’re happy with the results, push it out today and get it into production – and start getting feedback from your readers.

One other thing I’d like to leave you with is this: I write an email every single week about how you can be better at writing email. It’s kind of an awesome little metatopic that I’ve been able to write for about a year and a half, and we put all of that content on our blog. So, what I’d encourage you to do is to go to customer.io/blog and fill in your information here, and sign up to get my articles by email every week.

So, thanks again for watching, and good luck with the rest of the class, and I’ll talk to you soon.