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

 GOT SKILLS?

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