I subscribed to a range of blogs and newsletters from a variety of sources. Recently, because of the sheer number of subscriptions that I have, I've starting clearing out these emails using my smartphone. There has been a trend to my behavior, and it is formulaic.
For some emails, I just hit delete, never getting past the subject line. Other emails, I skim through to the end, and still hit delete. There are a few that I'll actually click the links and read more.
Everyone will have their own criteria for hitting the delete button, and it really can be as simple as a mood factor. However, there appears to be some things that I honestly believe are person-independent.
Maybe it's time to break this right down.
What are you using an email list for?
Content marketers have known for some time that if you want people to actually buy things off of you, you need to be in their email inbox. Social media is great for finding the new patrons, but email lists are really about the repeat customer. (And we all want our readers to become fans that buy all of our books, right?)
For writers, a repeat customer tends to be someone who just follows your blog. So few of us have a mountain of books out there where readers can read one book after another. I certainly don't have that many books. (I'm a perfectionist — much to my detriment.) So, what can we do? One of the nice things about blogging is that it doesn't need to be perfect, and you can barf your thoughts up if you need to. For me, blogging is one of the ways I deal with writer's block and get my creative juices flowing.
Like a blog, when building an email list, we need to think about what the purpose is behind what you are doing. Understanding an email list's purpose will dictate how you structure messages that are sent out.
Is it a newsletter, with highlights to recent posts, upcoming events and other information? Is it intended as a blog post announcement? Is it just a "I'm the best, and look at why" type thing? Or is it just a sales pitch?
Each have their different formats, and will appeal to different people.
For me, I've found that the sales pitches and the "I'm the best" emails get deleted before they're even opened. I can tell from the subject line if you are trying to sell me something that I don't want or need. The messages that find my inbox that are repeatedly of this nature eventually find the unsubscribe pile. I didn't sign up to those lists to have a used-car salesman in my email inbox.
That leaves the newsletters and the blog announcements.
Let's start with the blog announcements.
Capturing Attention for Your Blog
The blog announcement emails seem to come in three different varieties.
"I've written a new blog post. Here's the link." No additional information is included.
With these ones, most of the time, they get deleted. It tells me nothing about what is actually in your blog post. There's nothing there to grab my attention.
I can think of only one exception where I still click the link when I get these emails, but it's coming from a particular person who I followed for a particular reason. Personally, I would love to get my hands on his email messaging system and give it a spruce up. The links accompanied by boring text drive me a little batty, but he is who he is, and I will continue to follow his posts—but only because it's him. (And no, I'm not going to tell you who it is. A girl is entitled to some privacy.)
"The Latest Blog Post is here. Here's an excerpt. Click the link, if you want to read more."
There are two camps about this one. The first group loves the shorter email that gets to the point, leaving a taste of what's to come. Whereas the others hate these emails, because they prefer the full post in their inbox. However, the point about this particular type of messages is to drive traffic to a website.
Here's the way I see it. If you send an entire blog post to an inbox, you might get statistics about how many readers opened that email (depending on the email list system you're using), but you don't know how many actually read through that email, or found themselves in a situation where they deleted one message and the email editor automatically opened the next one in the list. (When on a smartphone, this happens to me ALL THE TIME.) By encouraging readers to read your full blog post from your website, you will gain the statistics that you need about the blog post itself, including information about when the post was read, and in what country your readers come from. (At least I get these statistics, and I use WordPress.)
Personally, I prefer to receive the shorter emails — they take up less room in my inbox. However, that doesn't mean I'm going to click on the link and keep reading. As the writer of that blog post, you still need to work for it.
You will need a catchy title, getting me to open the email in the first place — and that title does need to give some sort of indication as to what the post is about, even if it's cryptic. Then the excerpt will need to possess a voice that calls me in, demanding that I read more.
And the final variety of blog announcement emails...
"Read my full blog post from the comfort of your email reader."
As with above, there are two camps about this one. I prefer the excerpt approach, but I have a secondary reason for that too.
What if I thought your post was so awesome that I wanted to share it on my social media. If I'm reading the post on your website, you likely already have share buttons ready to go at the bottom of the post. (If you don't, you should.) Or I can just copy the URL from the web browser and paste the link in my Facebook or Twitter post. I can't do that with an email. Sharing a post takes a little more effort, and guess what... I often put that "share this post" task in the "I'll do it later" pile, and it never gets done.
However, there is another flaw with this particular type of blog announcement that is harming so many awesome blogs. The emails are using formats that are unresponsive and can't be easily read on smartphones.
ALL communications needs to be legible from a smartphone.
In today's society, we have become so dependent on our smartphones that we are doing EVERYTHING from our these tiny devices with 4-inch screens.
Web designers have noticed this trend, and have developed easy-to-use website layouts that will change and adjust elements, so content can be read on any device. These responsive layouts are the only way to go. However, not all email distribution list providers have caught up with the play.
It is beyond frustrating when you have to zoom in on something just to read it, but then you have to scroll back and forth to keep reading. And it's just as frustrating when a writer's carefully chosen feature image dominates the email and you spend forever scrolling around just to find the text to read.
You know what... I don't have time for that mess. It's just a blog post. I'm sorry, but your precious email was just deleted.
Text is TOO small. Feature images dominate the post.
Some of the full blog posts that find my inbox are so tiny when it comes to the text. I have a Samsung Galaxy S20. It's not like it's a dingy phone. Even so, the screen is only 2.5 inches across. How do you honestly expect me to read your carefully crafted words if your emails insist on using microscopic text? Perhaps, I can turn my phone sideways, making the text slightly bigger, but that doesn't give me much gain in size.
And the surprising thing... At the time of writing this blog post, ALL of the emails that come from lists maintained by FeedBurner were the same. We're now in 2023 and Feedburner doesn't exist anymore, but even with emails coming from Mailchimp and MailerLite, I have encountered tiny font.
I don't know what setting people are using that is making their emails use tiny fonts, but people, if I discovered that my own emails to my email list were in mouse print on my phone, I would be rushing to the computer and sorting the problem out. Emails are getting deleted, unread, because I can't see them.
I would have loved to have shown you what happens when the email is dominated by the feature image, but sad to say, any blogs that I had subscribed to that had that issue on a recurring bases, all found the unsubscribe pile long ago. I just couldn't be bothered with them.
Newsletters need to be legible on smartphones too.
There are two different forms to the newsletter that commonly find my inbox. You have those that are fancily formatted using HTML, or the plain text with hyperlinks.
It seems to be 50/50 as to whether an HTML formatted newsletter will be legible on my phone or not. I've come to accept that. For the ones that I can't read, I often put them in the look-at-them-later-when-on-the-computer pile, and often forget about them, because another 20 emails have come in since.
The plain text emails with hyperlinks... About 8 times out of 10, these emails are actually used-car salesmen in disguise. DELETE!
When setting up your systems, check ALL devices.
So, what is the moral of this blog post? Just like your website, you NEED to check your emails sent to your email list on ALL devices, not just a computer. You might have the most beautiful email on a computer, but can someone read it on a smartphone. And you know those "read on a browser" links. Yeah, same problem there too. If someone was unable to read your email in their email reader, not only are they unlikely to read your email on a browser, but the browser version often has issues too.
15 seconds an email is all you've got — and that's generous.
In 2018 (when this post was first written), I did an experiment, just to see how long it would take me to got through my inbox. I recorded that experiment, just to make a point. It took me just under 17 minutes to got through over 60 emails. That's approximately 15 seconds an email. That's not a lot of time, folks. You need to make it count.
People, I beg you. Protect your platforms, and your email list is part of your platform. You don't was people to unsubscribe from your lists just because they can't read your emails.
P.S. I'd love to meet you on Twitter or Facebook.
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© Copyright, Judy L Mohr 2018