Why writing sucky emails will make you rich

A question comes:

“What’s a lousy email you’ve sent (early in your career) that you’re most embarrassed by?”

Honestly, almost every email I wrote more than 6 months ago feels kinda cringe at this point. With writing every day, things evolve quickly. I’m sure that will taper off at some point. In fact, I’m already starting to see myself wanting to re-use past emails “as-is” for other purposes instead of feeling like I need to go back and re-write the whole thing if I want to use it again.

But either way…

Just having the ideas out there, and having written about them from a unique perspective, at a unique point and time in my career, makes writing about those same ideas now…

10x easier.

That said… unless I’m actively looking back through old emails I usually just forget about the bad ones. Like, completely block them out. I don’t even remember they exist until I’m filtering through ‘em. And even then, just by looking at the subject line or title I usually have no idea what’s inside till I pop it open and read it.

It’s the good ones I seem to remember most.

And I often know before I even send ‘em that they’re destined for greatness, at least inside my own mind.

There’s comes a bit of an intuitive sense… like yeah, this one is really good… and I think it’s going to generate some momentum. And usually it does. It’s rare these days that I’m surprised by the effectiveness of an email. Not unheard of, but rare. Now-a-days I can usually read something in a niche I’m familiar with and get a sense right away.

Though there was this one email I sent one time, for a client, that really surprised me.

It was just a simple story that I swiped from an internet forum in the construction niche, and it didn’t include any drama, or pain, or suffering on behalf of the writer or anyone involved in the story. It was simply just a little slice of life, with some little details that mostly only people inside that niche could truly appreciate it.

And it got tons of what I would call “desired response”.

Because in this case we weren’t selling anything yet, but reactivating an old list and just trying to “wake up the dead” if you will and get ‘em back into our world, and our way of talking about things, and our way of doing things.

And it got huge open rates, and something like 80% of the people who opened the email opt-ed back in to receiving emails from us.

For me, that was kind of a big surprise and huge win.

And from that moment forward it really changed the way I write for the better.

So it’s moments like that that I remember most. And this is kinda counter-intuitive to another phenomenon that I write about often which is that “you learn more from your failures than you do from your successes”… which is also true…

But it works best in the context of the whole and continuing to show up each day and trying despite the many failures you’ll incur along the way.

So like, I’ve written dozens, probably hundreds of sucky emails…

But it’s the ones that do well that stand out in my mind, but the reason they stand out is because of how different they are from everything else I’ve done that didn’t get results. How different they are from what everyone else on the internet is doing. How different the results are from doing what “should” work instead of paying attention to what actually works, and extracting what exactly it was that made it work.

So despite the fact these two pieces of advice sound opposite…

Learning from failure, and learning from success, they’re not.

If you try something once, and you get lucky, and you succeed, you can very easily be “fooled by randomness”, which is something I encountered early in my career online where I was teaching workshops during the pandemic and running ads to them and turning out cash positive when I had nearly zero established authority or audience in that particular niche because at the time you could run ads to just about anything and come out ahead.

Whereas that’s definitely not the case anymore…

And I tried the workshop thing for months and even years prior to that, but never got the same results (because I thought I knew what made it work, but instead I was simply fooled by randomness). And it was reflecting on all those failures along the way that truly allowed me to go back to the beginning, and look at what worked and truly understand WHY it worked…

Instead of just assuming that I stumbled onto the secret formula for magic internet money.

So yeah, all to say…

If you keep writing sucky emails, eventually, me thinks it will make you rich.

At least that’s how we operate inside Email Sales Accelerator (waitlist link below):

https://kevinhood.me/accelerator

Best,

Kevin Hood