Newsletter

Wayne’s Food Hacks: 8 Ways To Get Your Email Opened

Will Work For Food Policy

NEWSLETTER ISSUE NO. 9

Wayne’s Food Hacks:
8 Ways to Get Your Email Opened

Thanks for opening my 10th newsletter. This week, I’ll coach you on the how-to, strategies, and principles behind subject lines that get your emails opened. 

Crafting an email subject line might seem mundane. But it’s typical of the skillful tricks of the trade that successful Good Food planners and organizers use every day.  It’s an everyday life skill rich in complexities and rewards. 

It’s the email version of winning ways that open minds and doors.

The standard email open rate for non-profits is astonishingly low — 20 percent.  That leaves a lot of room  for improving skills that yield a solid Return on Investment for your time.

I  spend 300 seconds every day deleting 50 of my 200 emails. I figured out long ago what doesn’t work as a subject line. Now I know what does. 

Double your skill at a seemingly petty detail such as email subject lines,  and in the flash of an eye, you double the impact of the time it took to prepare the message that would otherwise have been deleted. The next step to success goes to the person with the skill to write a great headline and then an inviting lead for the email … and on and on along the chain of action until we celebrate a successful campaign built on everyday leadership skills.

 GOT SKILLS?

The newsletter is about leadership skills needed by activists, actionists, entrepreneurs, managers, and leaders in the food sector. In my view, a commitment to skill-building expresses the commitment to engagement and empowerment  at the heart of food movements — and the corresponding pivotal role of servant leadership, as summarized here.

People doing Good Food work need and deserve the results that grow from widely-distributed skills. My newsletter covers a different skill in every issue. I’m already planning for 100 newsletters from now – after I’ve updated event management, outreach, negotiation, partnerships building, policy research, fundraising, listening, and on and on. If you practice and convert about 20 of these learnable skills into habits over a year, some experts say, you can double your productivity and impact. 

So invest some time into skill building for servant leadership. You’ll catch up on your time and get much more back in return!

“To invent, you need a good imagination and a pile of junk.”

— Thomas Edison

THE DEEP SECRET OF GOOD SUBJECT LINES

Novelists are good writers. Economists, sociologists and food analysts are the opposite. People who write emails about Good Food have usually learned to write from economists, sociologists and food analysts. As a result,  the open rate for non-profit emails is worse than half the rate for all emails – 20 percent versus 47 percent.

It’s hard to find a better example of a self-induced, skills-based problem.

What does it take to double down, and work up the open rate to 47 percent, and then do better than average?

It’s hard to find a better example of what self-directed skill building could do for productivity and impact in the food sector. 

I’ve come to the conclusion that the problem with getting Good Food emails opened and read has little to do with writing skills, and even less to do with the subject matter of the emails—the tantalizing world of food.

Nor will the problem get better by people learning to write in more interesting and engaging ways, or by asking Good Food people to act in more colourful ways – not that either would cause any harm. 

Nor is good copywriting  that succeeds in getting opened and read necessarily well-written, in the novelist sense of the word, or exciting or suspenseful in the way a novel is. 

The power of copyrighting in good emails comes from being practical, understandable, clear and persuasive – down to earth, much like yummy home-cooked food. 

These virtues are a byproduct of sound strategic thinking about what’s on the reader’s mind, and what it takes to lead the reader to decide and act.



Good emails and email subject lines about food issues are humble. But they get to the heart of why people come to see themselves in a food-related way and make a food-related decision.   

The penny only recently dropped for me on that — after some 50 years of trying to make a living partially on the strength of my ability to write about why I promoted certain forms of action. I called myself an organizer who writes.

Let me save you from my 50 years of learning the hard way.

Like most people who are anxious and fearful about writing, I used to think that writing had to be clever in its own right. I imagined that people would only enjoy and read my writing if I met a certain quota of  wordplay or entertainment.

I didn’t understand that non-fiction readers of articles about everyday life want someone to explain a problem to them, outline some possible solutions, and present some thoughts on how we might get to the promised land of solutions.  The clearer, the better. The sooner, the better. No suspense, no diversions asked for or needed.

 As simple as possible, but no simpler — as Einstein brilliantly put it. 

As soon  (50 years later!!) as I grasped that, I quickly settled into a sense of ease as a writer. The quality of my writing took a huge leap. And people started asking me how come I got to write so easily and quickly. 

Like other overnight successes, it was only 50 years in the making.

A few months ago, I read a book that caused the penny to drop, and then led me to write this editorial. It’s Jim Edwards’ book called Copywriting Secrets. I read 74 pages in one sitting, and then stopped abruptly. His writing is really mediocre, I said to myself. And then the penny dropped.

His secret about copywriting, like my deep secret about email subject lines, is based on a strategy. You need to understand the problem faced by your readers, the obstacles and frustration faced by your readers as a result of the problem, and the measures that the reader can be persuaded to take that will lead toward a solution. 

Once you figure that out, you can be as boring as you want. 

This is a tough nut to crack for people in Good Food movements and organizations. We’re used to being empathic about other people, working to solve the problems of other people. We’re not particularly empathic about ourselves. When we ask for money, we don’t ask for money so our organizations can function better and smarter and we don’t have to work 60-hour weeks. We ask for more money so we can serve others more.

Anything less would be considered self-serving, which is –shall I say it? – sinful. 

We have to break that habit. Because the essence of a good email, and of a good email subject line that leads people to read the email, is that it solves a problem that you otherwise didn’t know how to solve. That’s the insight we need to gain in order to increase our relevance and our ability to serve.

Once you accept that, the rest is technical details and skills. The same insight will also help you with headlines. And with the leads to your stories and with your elevator pitches and speeches. As my communications mentor Barry Martin puts it, the insight is generative.

I hope the eight helpings below provide you with the technical details and mindful skills that go along with this trade secret.   

8 Helpings for Your To-Do List

Digital Marketer provides an A-list of 2019’s top email subject lines. The best one-liners feature 8 themes: self-interest; curiosity; free offer; urgency/scarcity (only 8 seats left!!); humanity; news; social proof (endorsements); a storyline. Word on the street has it: “Put the benefit and impact early,” as in “how to ace your job interview.”

Here is Red Website Design’s list of do’s and don’ts of strong opening lines.

Because so many people check to see if the email is from someone they trust, develop a good email reputation by using these tips to email like a boss.

This post helps with what I always find the hardest skill of subject lines: how to sum up a topic in one short line.

An exec coach gives great advice, esp. on questions to ask yourself before drafting the email. 

Do you have a clear picture of who you’re pitching to and what they like and need, as this writer advises? For example, solutionaries are high on my list of who I’m writing for, and that audience will see itself in my subject line. 

If you want a checklist, here are 19 points to check off. I like Number 9: Be punchy when spelling out the benefit to the reader.  As in “Increase your open rates by 50% today,” not “How to increase open rates.” 

For a shorter but still useful checklist, try this.

 Shout Out

I think Living Architecture Monitor promotes a cutting edge notion – that green infrastructure (green roofs, green walls, forest gardens, school gardens, balcony gardens, home gardens, rain gardens, pollinator gardens, and much more) can nest urban agriculture and a host of projects that express the reintegration of human and natural environments, to the benefit of all beings. You can subscribe to the digital edition for free here.
 

“Over and over we’ve gotten scientific wake-up calls, and over and over we’ve hit the snooze button. If we keep doing that, climate change will no longer be a problem, because calling something a problem implies there’s still a solution”

— Bill McKibben, New York Review of Books

Request for Action

If you like what’s here, please share it on social media and subscribe to this newsletter. If you would like to support the volunteer hours and expenses that go into this newsletter, please consider purchasing my low-cost e-book,
Food for City Building (an Amazon-free experience)

If you would like my help on food-related social media, career guidance, or organizational development, please drop me a line and ask for my free one-hour consultation. There’s a reason my company is called Will Work for Food Policy!

Share Share
Tweet Tweet
Forward Forward

Dr. Wayne Roberts is best-known as the manager of the world-renowned Toronto Food Policy Council from 2000 to 2010. But he did lots before (see his Wikipedia entry) and has done lots since.

Wayne speaks, consults, coaches, tweets, links in, Facebooks, and blogs to promote the macrobiome and people-friendly food policy.

Reach him at
wrobertsfood@gmail.com

Want to change how you receive these emails?
You can update your preferences or unsubscribe from this list.

Copyright © 2019 WAYNE ROBERTS, All rights reserved.







This email was sent to *|EMAIL|*
why did I get this?    unsubscribe from this list    update subscription preferences
*|LIST:ADDRESSLINE|*

*|REWARDS|*

About Wayne Roberts

Wayne Roberts is a Canadian food policy analyst and writer, widely respected for his role as the manager of the Toronto Food Policy Council, a citizen body of 30 food activists and experts that is widely recognized for its innovative approach to food security, from 2000-2010. As a leading member of the City of Toronto’s Environmental Task Force, he helped develop a number of official plans for the city, including the Environmental Plan and Food Charter, adopted by Toronto City Council in 2000 and 2001 respectively. Many ideas and projects of the TFPC are featured in Roberts’ book The No-Nonsense Guide to World Food (2008). Since 1989, Roberts has written a weekly column for Toronto’s NOW Magazine, generally on themes that link social justice, public health and green economics. In 2002, he received the Canadian Environment Award for his contributions to sustainable living. NOW Magazine named Roberts one of Toronto’s leading visionaries of the past 20 years. In 2008, he received the Canadian Eco-Hero Award presented by Planet in Focus. In 2011, he received the University of Toronto Arbor Award for his role in establishing food studies as a field of study at University of Toronto. Roberts earned a Ph.D. in social and economic history from the University of Toronto in 1978, and has written seven books, including Get A Life! (1995), a manual on green economics, and Real Food For A Change (1999), which promotes a food system based on the four ingredients of health, joy, justice and nature. Roberts chaired the influential and Toronto-based Coalition for a Green Economy for 15 years. He has also served on the Board of the U.S.-based Community Food Security Coalition and Food Secure Canada. He is on the board of Green Enterprise Toronto, an organization of local eco-businesses that’s associated with the Business Alliance for Local Living Economies across North America. He has been invited to speak around the world on strategies that combine food security, community empowerment, environmental improvement, social equity and job creation. Prior to his involvement with environmental issues, Roberts worked for two decades in the fields of community organizing, university teaching, media, labour education, industrial relations and union administration.
View all posts by Wayne Roberts →