Light in effort, heavy in substance

Email is the closest thing we have to a digital channel that the sender owns.

If you have 500 email subscribers, each of the 500 will receive your next email.

And if someone consistently opens your emails, they get into a rhythm of absorbing your thinking. They form positive associations around how you approach a frustration they want to solve.

That doesn’t happen with followers or subscribers on any other digital channel. Algorithms dictate who sees what, which makes email both precious and delicate.

Because nobody gets overwhelmed in a LinkedIn or podcast feed by your content. Social is largely passive consumption. If you hit a cold streak, you simply slip into the background noise until you publish something that resonates again.

A cold streak on email leads to your content becoming inbox clutter, which gets permanently cut.

The best shot you have of people opening your emails is to make it easy to consume.

I learned this as a reader first. There were people whose thinking I genuinely valued, but I stopped opening their emails. I knew it’d be a 15-minute read. I’d save it for later, but later never came. Eventually I just stopped opening.

Then I realised: I was writing 1,000+ word emails. I was probably doing the same thing to my readers.

It doesn’t matter how good it is. If you’re asking too much of the reader (and their reading habits on this particular channel), you’re decreasing the likelihood of them consistently opening. And the consistency part is the magic, because what you sell isn’t always top of mind. It rises to importance at certain times in their life. You miss that moment if they stopped reading 10 emails ago.

You’re not trying to keep everyone. Anyone that’s not the right person can unsubscribe. You’re minimising unsubscribes of the right people.

And the byproduct is that you discover what resonates.

Every email is an experiment.

The ideas that hit hardest receive replies and get referenced back to you on sales calls. Double down on those. They become the beats you’ll eventually hang together to become your signature work.

Carl Richards has been doing this for years with his napkin sketches. One idea, one email.

An email doesn’t need to cover everything. The full picture emerges across beats, not within a single beat.

You want the email to trigger that Pavlov’s dog “ding-a-ling-a-ling.”

They see your name in the inbox, they know a treat is coming.

Light in effort, heavy in substance.

Any attempt to write with concision requires two things:

1. Clarity on who you’re writing to. Have a selection of people you write to, then write the email in question to one of those people.
2. Trust that this reader is smart enough to read between the lines.

When I’m struggling to keep an email succinct, it’s often because I’m bringing in a second or third tangential idea. Cut those ideas out and save them for another day.

And the filtering process of getting to the heart of one idea carries disproportionate value. It forces extreme clarity on that single beat.

The Gettysburg Address is 272 words.

One idea, clearly expressed, doesn’t need much more than double that.