Email and newsletter

Email lives or dies on the subject line, which is the headline of the medium. No open, no read. The subject earns the open the way a headline earns the first line, with a clear benefit or real curiosity, and it must not over-promise, because the body that fails to deliver trains the reader to stop opening you.

Inside, the rules tighten. One idea per email. One thing you want the reader to think, feel, or do. A newsletter crammed with five topics gets skimmed and forgotten. One sharp idea, told well, gets remembered and gets a reply.

One call to action, too. If you ask the reader to do three things, they do none. Decide the single action this email is for and build everything toward it. Everything else is a distraction from the one move you actually want.

Keep the chunks short. Email is read fast, often on a phone, often half-distracted. Short paragraphs, white space, a rhythm that pulls the eye down the screen. And use the P.S., because in email as on a sales page it gets read when the body does not. Put the one link, the one ask, or a restatement of the single idea there.

INTERVIEW EWOUD: What's the one idea your best newsletter issue carried? How did keeping it to one thing change how people responded?

INTERVIEW EWOUD: When you write a subject line, what makes YOU open an email versus archive it unread? What's the honest test for whether a subject over-promises?