One
thing
you
should
do
every
so
often
is
experiment
with
the
format
of
your
newsletter.
If
you
constantly
send
the
exact
same
“thing”
to
your
list,
then
you
run
the
risk
of
boring
your
readers
and/or
giving
them
“banner
blindness”.
Banner blindness
is a phenomenon
in advertising where
your audience consciously
or unconsciously ignores
your advertising (yes, this includes your emails or newsletters)…
Sometimes due to previous bad experiences with your advertising (including sheer BOREDOM).
Of course, there’s a case for being consistent.
And I do believe you should consistently – despite the physical format – check all these boxes with each email:
- Deliver value in some capacity (note: a dose of entertainment or emotional stimulation can be valuable)
- Infuse your personality into your emails
- Offer a pitch for a paid product or service – even if it’s a soft-sell. (There are some exceptions to this like if you’re linking to a piece of content that “sells” your list on YOU as an authority…)
- And generally honor the upfront expectations you set for your fans near the opt-in stage of the user journey. (Don’t bait-and-switch people.)
See, I titled this email “email format experiments” for a reason.
You can treat each deviation from your regular format as nothing but an experiment. A two-way door.
If it works, great! If not, nbd – just revert back to what you were doing before.
~~~
“But why would I change the format of my emails if they’re working well as-is?”
~~~
Smart question.
I’ll answer it with a teeny-tiny case study that illustrates the business case for this mentality (or, as Jay Clouse would call it, this “experimentality”):
One of my retainer clients runs a thriving e-com biz.
Each week we were sending out 1 “type” of email to his list. It produced ~47% of his email-based sales every week.
Suddenly, I had an idea: “Let’s A/B test the length of the email body. Perhaps this list would respond better to a shorter, more direct email.”
So I:
• Sent 50% of the list Version A (the existing format);
• Sent 50% of the list Version B (a shorter format).
The results?
Version B produced…
• Twice as many orders, and;
• 1.5x as many clicks
…as Version A.
And it has outperformed the “original” format on THREE SEPARATE EXPERIMENTS over the past few weeks.
So guess what?
The client now has a new “baseline” format!
And it’s faster to create AND more prof-itable than what we accepted as the status quo prior to this experiment.
I’ll leave you with this…
If you want a good starting point for how to write emails that are unique, valuable to your readers, generate orders, and fast to produce, then look no further than 30-Minute Emails.
Then, once you get the hang of it, I encourage you to break all the rules with an “experimentality” and see what sticks.
I’m rooting for you,
Dylan Bridger
P.S. here’s a random photo of me as a kid just to shake up this email’s format a bit more: