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How to stop procrastinating and write your email already
Recently, I wrote an email titled:
“The art of the 6 minute email.”
It was an idea I had while walking along the river near my house one day.
And I thought, “What if I just go to my office, set a timer for 6 minutes, and commit to having my email drafted, edited, and ready to load into my email marketing platform by the time the buzzer goes off.”
In that email, I simply wrote about the occurrence of the event, and inside I’m sure I probably wrote about some good reasons to consider trying it yourself.
That email, got a lot more interest and replies than many of the other emails I sent out around that time.
And till this day, when feel spicy, I can put out an email in 5, 10, or 15 minutes (whatever I feel like I’ve got time for)… whenever the mood happens to strike. Otherwise, I tend to give it a good bit of time and effort because I believe the act of sitting down to write, create new ideas, and refine existing connections in the brain serves many purposes, but two in particular.
One, I’m literally generating value of thin air…
Pretty cool.
And two, I can re-use that content later. First, it will likely live on my blog. But second, I can later expand, repurpose, refine, synthesize, turn into short form content, paid products, etc… And I can do all that in such a way that those ideas become unique and different from all the content you tend to see on social media where it looks like folks are just kind of copy/pasting each other.
Which, no offense. That’s totally fine, imitation is a great way to learn when getting started…
But eventually, it’s generating your own sticky ideas, frameworks, and solutions that are going to add real value to the lives of the people around you.
Now those emails where I take an hour, or an hour and a half to write, aren’t necessarily always better from a straight direct marketing point of view. That is, on their own, they might not get the best response. But as a part of the whole, where I’m mailing my list regularly on a daily basis, in addition to creating real value for my business, they tend to build a lot of trust with readers as far as I’m concerned.
Those are the emails that get responses like, “I love reading these emails!”, which doesn’t necessarily amount to clicks or sales or whatever metric you might be optimizing for.
Because that’s kind of an irrelevant metric to look at on a per email basis.
You can have your suspicions, but you never know how the email that went out just before, or two weeks ago, or even years ago had an impact on someone (unless you have the opportunity to ask).
And if you ask me, that’s what marketing is all about.
Making an impact. Being memorable. Giving people sample sized benefit in their life, so they can see for themselves…
“Is this kinda of thing going to be useful for me or not?”
All to say…
That today, my goal was the same.
To write a 6 minute email, more or less… and just have it be whatever it will be.
And if for some reason this email makes you feel like springing into action, you can fill your details in the form below to learn a bit more about what it’s like to work with me on a regular basis:
Best,
Kevin Hood