Today represents a shift in this Substack.
To be honest, I’m not really comfortable airing my personal isht in public. Besides, there are scores upon scores of people who are far better than I at writing soul-baring, autobiographical pieces about personal struggles and successes.
What I do like to write and talk about are topics relevant to what I actually do for a living - sales, marketing strategy, GTM, RevOps, CRM business technology and strategy.
I have always had a special place in my heart for email and email marketing.
I saw my first emails in 1992. Not especially early but certainly before AOL made email accessible to everyone in 1993. We used Darpanet in a closed communication with a partner company.
For those interested, here’s a quick-and-dirty 50 year history of email.
In late 2000 (aka Dotcom 1.0 collapse) after being pink-slipped from a B2C startup with no job prospects after sending 100 resumes, my Plan B was to become an entrepreneur and market myself as an email marketing consultant.
After all these years, I still believe that email is the 800-lb gorilla. Done right, it still delivers about $40 for every $1 invested, only slightly down from the $47 delivered more than 20 years ago.
Your email address is unique to you and recognized world-wide. What other unique identifier can make that claim?
So, WHY is it…after all these years…do so many people do email so badly?
Welp, for one thing, there are so many different ways to f*ck up email. Every element of an email is critical to its success. And that doesn’t even take into account the mood of the recipient when they see your email in their inbox (hopefully!).
I remember giving a presentation to a small Meetup group in San Francisco about 20 years ago. I’d been invited by the Meetup organizer to speak about what it takes to craft a successful email that people will open. (Nothing’s changed….)
I decided to start by breaking down each field of an email and why it is important to do each right.
This was not what the group was expecting or wanted. What they wanted were quick fixes for content, fail-proof CTAs, the perfect closing sentence.
Afterwards, the organizer kinda-sorta thanked me and then, a man from the audience came up and proceeded to tell me everything I did wrong and that he’s be happy to coach me, for a fee, on how to improve. (I will refrain from going off on a man-splaining tirade.)
So…finally… to get to that headline!
Yesterday, Business Insider published the article “When Someone Important Emails You Without A Subject Line” that tells the story of
, a comedian and writer (Mrs. Maisel) receiving an email from Anna Wintour sans subject line.While in this instance there was no reason for trepidation, this is something that can still cause your heart to beat faster and your blood pressure to rise.
Even though Emily Post’s great-great-granddaughter gave Anna a pass and I might be so inclined if Anna’s Email From line proved authentic (see, there’s that email address thing again, wink, wink).
People love to complain that writing a good Subject line is PiTA and is time-consuming.
It should be!
I believe we should consider it a bit of social and professional courtesy. Even spouses can get cranky over missing subject lines. While it make takeyou a few extra moments, it gets attention in the Inbox, saves the recipient time which is always appreciated, and often gets quicker and more positive responses.
It’s the nice thing to do!
It’s also a critically important element of a well-written, well-received (think higher open rates) email.
If you think you might like to work with me on your email strategy and more, drop me an email at: lksugarman@venntive.com