Because one of the major goals of your email should be to build a connection with your audience so that they’ll view you as a friend and trusted advisor, you need to construct your approach to email to serve that goal.

That means you need to start acting like a friend and trusted advisor.

And, I’m not talking about using the word “friend” to address people or just using a bunch of chummy language.

I’m talking about engineering everything about your email marketing from the perspective of how a friend and trusted confidant would approach it.

It’s about the tone of your emails… but about everything else too.

Let’s talk about what that means.

Your Emails Should Sound Like You Talk

Not sure about you, but when I’m jotting a note to a friend (whether by email, text, or letter), I don’t worry too much about making it perfect. I dangle participles, end sentences with prepositions, include sentence fragments, and invariably have some run-on sentences.

Guess what?

The best emails look about the same.

Now, I’m not saying that you should intentionally screw things up in your email. And I’m not saying you should include my particular style of screw ups in your emails.

I’m simply suggesting that if you read your emails out loud, people who know you well should think they sound about the same as you do when you’re just chatting around the table.

My emails have lots of side notes because I go off on tangents.

My emails have lots of choppy sections because I often talk like a preacher when I’m making a point.

My emails contain some four letter words because I drop them in real life.

My emails are littered with ellipses because my natural speech pattern often adds Christoper Walken style pauses in places they might not belong… while also not giving enough pauses where sentences should end.

Your emails should sound like you. Not like someone with perfect grammar.

When’s The Last Time You Sent A Friend A “Pretty” Email?

If you’re like 99.999999% of humans, you don’t add fancy formatting or a template to the emails you send to your friends.

So… why would you format marketing emails that way?

Seriously, why?

Probably because the email service provider you signed up for has templates and acts as though that’s how your emails should look.

The trouble is that stylized emails hurt the performance of your email marketing.

And that’s not just me making crap up…

Hubspot has this great post about this issue. Interestingly, people say they prefer emails from brands to include images, but the stats show otherwise. Including images, HTML coding, or other template formatting reduced open rates and click-through rates considerably. And more formatting led led to worse performance.

The statistics are clear and consistent, the simpler the formatting in your email, the better. Even adding a single GIF to your email will reduce its effectiveness.

Although Hubspot’s study can’t answer the question of why this happens, I’ve got a pretty good hunch.

Ask yourself a quick question…

What happens to you as someone receiving an email when you see a stylized template?

Your brain immediately recognizes it as a marketing email.

Given everything we’ve experienced in life, we are pretty much all conditioned to have our guard up when someone is marketing to us. Email templates send a message that readers should treat those emails differently.

So ditch the pretty and send emails that are just plain ole text!

You Don’t Trick Your Friend… Although You Might Play Tricks On Them.

For the love of all that is holy, don’t listen to anyone who suggests you should use anything misleading in a subject line to get people to open your emails.

The most obvious examples of this are adding “RE:” or “FWD:” at the beginning of your subject line so that people getting your emails will think you are responding to them or forwarding them an email.

(Side Note: I initially started to type “receiving” instead of “getting” in the last sentence, but edited myself because “receiving” is not a word I would use in normal conversation. We’re getting meta here!)

But there are subtler variations of these kinds of tricks people play with subject lines. Things like “About our meeting this afternoon…” when they are inviting you to a webinar.

The reality is that people are suggesting that you lie to your audience.

Don’t do that.

Now, if you want to have some good fun with pranks, I’m here for that… just don’t freaking lie.

Building trust is hard freaking work as a marketer. Although there aren’t polls that include “marketers” as a category, the closest profession (advertisers) are among the least trusted professionals. Seriously, people trust marketers less than they trust lawyers… and that’s saying something!

If you manage to build some basic level of trust with your audience, you can lose it in a heartbeat (and lose it forever) with one instance of tricking your audience by lying to them.

Instead of trying gimmicks or hacks or any fancy tactics, just try treating your audience like human beings that you like. You’ll be amazed how easy it can be.

The core component of email marketing that doesn’t suck is writing great emails. It’s a shockingly simple idea… and what you should be striving for.

The good news is that writing great emails really isn’t that hard. You don’t have to be Ernest Hemingway or Mark Twain here.

Writing great emails is about writing emails that serve everyone involved. It’s really that simple.

In this section, we’re going to talk about what it means to write great emails, a simple framework you can use for the vast majority of emails you’ll write, and how to pick stories for your emails.

What Makes An Email Great?

There’s no single objective standard for what makes an email great. An email that is great coming from me would likely be really crappy coming from someone else.

An email is great if it serves your audience, serves your business, and is aligned with why your audience came to you in the first place.

Let’s take a look at each component.

Great Emails Serve Your Audience

The most important rule for a great email is that it adds value to the lives of the people in your audience. An email that doesn’t add value to your subscribers’ lives pretty much, by definition, sucks.

So how can you add value to your audience members’ lives?

The best emails do this in TWO ways: (1) they serve your audience in the moment and (2) they include a lesson or message that will serve your audience long term.

The first element generally involves providing some kind of emotional response. A great email could entertain, inspire, or even motivate your audience. The point is simply to elicit a reaction in the moment to what people need.

Since I’m a naturally cheerful guy, I tend to go with entertain. My goal is to bring a smile to my subscribers face (or maybe even a chuckle). As fleeting as it might be, that moment of happiness is a service to my audience.

Providing immediate value is what most people aren’t doing with email.

The trouble is that the immediate gratification is what tends to keep your audience opening! If your emails are all simply about content that might provide value over the long term, there’s no real reason for someone to open your emails NOW.

Give people a reason to open now.

But, immediate gratification is not enough.

Your emails should teach subscribers an important lesson or include a deeper message that they can apply to their lives.

If my emails were just about entertainment or humor in the moment, subscribers wouldn’t stick around very long. There are certainly people who are way funnier than me.

The immediate gratification is the hook. It’s what makes your emails stand out from the rubbish everyone else is sending. But ultimately, the lesson is what keeps people interested.

The message doesn’t have to be profound. For me, the message is often something as rudimentary as “the best businesses are simple.”

While entertainment value fades, the value that people get from learning from you will ultimately be what keeps them reading your emails for years to come.

Great Emails Serve Your Business

An email that serves your audience but doesn’t help your business is not a great email. I’m all for bringing a serve-first mentality to business, but that does NOT mean that you should not also be serving your business.

If you don’t take time to make sure your email marketing is serving your business, you won’t be in business very long!

So, you need to make sure that the emails are serving your business.

Ultimately, that means that the emails either help you to build a connection or relationship with your audience or sell your products or services.

Outside of active sales periods, you’ll be focused on building a connection with your audience, but the messages you deliver should also be moving people closer to wanting to buy from you. Not in a salesy way… but by qualifying them as buyers.

Part of relationship building is letting people into your lives, which is why personal stories work best. You can’t connect if you don’t let people in.

But, not all personal stories will help move people to potentially want to buy from you.

Truly great emails will couple connection with either building your authority or helping your audience see things differently so they’ll be primed to buy from you when you make an offer.

Are you starting to notice a trend, here?

Kind of like the structure to serve your audience, the structure that serves your business will have a personal connection and a lesson or message that pushes people along the buyer’s journey.

The Addictive Story-Based Email Framework

Although we can’t give you a fill in the blank template for emails, there is a repeatable framework you can use to create great emails week in and week out.

We call it the Addictive Story-Based Email Framework.

These emails have four of five parts, depending on where you’re using them in your email marketing:

• The Hook
• The Story (or Analogy)
• The Message (or Lesson)
• The Call To Action
• The Curiosity Hook (for sequences only)

If you’ll follow this framework, you’ll be writing emails that serve your audience and serve your business.

Before we take a deeper dive into each section, if you haven’t yet, download our email resources. One of the resources is our Super Addictive Story-Based Email Framework Guide!

The Hook

Writing emails that your subscribers will actually want to read starts by grabbing their attention. That’s where the Hook comes in; it’s your attention grabber!

Your Hook will almost always be the subject line. This is the first opportunity to grab their attention! So you’ll want to be very creative at hooking them into the email story right from the beginning when they see it in their inbox.

The Story (or Analogy)

This is the heart and soul of your email! There’s a reason we call these “story-based” emails… the story is the main attraction in your email. The story is what gives people the immediate gratification and it’s what helps you build connection.

The best news is that stories and analogies are actually one of the best ways to deliver messages and lessons too! Think about “the tortoise and the hare” or “the three little pigs.” Chances are that just seeing those titles made you think of the lessons (slow and steady wins the race and hard work pays off).

Drab, boring emails that focus on content or information don’t get read. People want real life. And stories are an excellent way to deliver it to them! The story you tell in your email will directly relate to the message you want to share.

Sometimes, instead of a story, you’ll use an analogy. This typically happens in a Nurture sequence when you’re teaching a lesson rather than delivering a message.

The Message (or Lesson)

This is the lesson or message that will serve your audience more long term. In other words, this is the meat of the email… although the stories are the heart and soul. This is where you bring everything together and deliver the “why I’m telling you this story” part of your email.

You want your audience to leave with value, and this is the place to deliver the value of the story.

Sometimes, you’ll be using your emails to drive people to existing content (e.g., a podcast episode). In that case, the message section is short and sweet. This is the bridge where you connect the story or analogy to the central message of your content.

Other times, you won’t be driving to stand alone content. Emails that are part of your Nurture and Welcome sequences are prime examples of this. In that case, you’ll use this section to deliver a lesson to your audience. The story or analogy should flow seamlessly into that lesson.

The Call To Action

Every email you send should invite your subscriber to take action. That could be simply a reply, a click, a sign up, or a sale. There are a lot of different kinds of actions you can encourage your subscribers to take. But ultimately, you should be training your subscribers to take action when they read your emails.

Remember, your emails are meant to serve both your subscribers and your business, just as with most other parts of your marketing. Emails are no different.

The Curiosity Hook (Sequences Only)

When you’re writing emails for your nurture sequence or welcome sequence, you know the topic of the email that will come next. When that’s the case, you want to include a hook to the next email at the end of the email you’re writing. That way, your subscribers will be anxiously awaiting that next amazing email.

Examples

Click the buttons below to view real emails I've sent to my list broken down into this framework:

The Process for Writing Your Emails

Because it’s always a good idea to begin with the end in mind… well that applies to writing your emails too. You can’t figure out the Hook or Story if you don’t know the lesson or message you want to impart!

So, you have to start there.

If you are sending a weekly email highlighting new content, this is relatively easy… you tease a lesson, message, or theme out of the content.

For example, if your content is about the 5 Mistakes your audience is making… you could use “mistakes” as the message. Or you could go deeper and pull the lesson or message of ONE of those mistakes.

Ultimately, however, when you are emailing about new content, the message or lesson relates to that content.

But what about when you aren’t talking about content?

Your emails should STILL have a message or lesson. That is a big part of what makes it valuable to your audience.

This is where you step into your authority and come up with a specific nugget of wisdom you want to share with your audience.

That nugget of wisdom is the lesson or message for your email, and you build the rest of the email around that. Once you know the message, you can identify a story that will deliver that message and the hook for that story.

The key takeaway is to start with the message or lesson and build around that!

Finding The Right Story

While the email writing process starts with the message or lesson, these emails tend to live and die based on the quality of the story you choose. Mastering the addictive story-based email framework is a matter of mastering the work of finding the right stories and crafting them well.

Personal Vignettes Are Best

Because the goal of these stories is to build a connection between you and your audience, personal stories are best. Telling stories about other people might let me serve my audience… but it won’t tend to serve my business well.

And you aren’t looking for epic stories. You are looking for stories about the brief moments in your life. Your subscribers should not have to invest a ton of time to read the stories, which means you’ll want to focus on stories that are short and sweet.

More Seinfeld. Less Game of Thrones.

Some of the classic stories I’ve told in emails are about things that took 15 seconds of my life. It’s not the length of the story that makes it valuable… it’s your ability to pull a message out of it.

That brings us to the next thing to look for…

Pick Stories That Can Be Parables To Teach A Lesson

Chance are that if you you’re reading this page, you don’t consider yourself a professional entertainer. You aren’t looking to tell stories simply to entertain people. You want to build a list of people who are engaged with your message and would potentially be customers or brand advocates for what you offer.

In other words, the entertainment element of your stories is a means to an end… not the end in itself.

That’s why in addition to having an emotional impact (whether to inspire, entertain, or motivate), your stories should also have a lesson or message.

You should be using stories as mini-parables.

For example, I tell stories about overly complicated beers being horrible to make the point that the best businesses (like the best beers) are simple. That drives home one of my larger messages that you shouldn’t be chasing ridiculously complicated strategies but should instead focus on the marketing fundamentals.

When your stories drive home an important lesson, they help to move members of your audience one step closer to buying what you have to offer.

Don’t Tell Stories To Your Audience For Your Own Therapy

While your stories should be personal, you should only tell stories that will serve your audience!

In the name of radical transparency, some entrepreneurs have started to share stories of all their low points and vulnerabilities in almost real time as they are working through those issues.

I’ve heard people use various descriptions of when you should share the hard parts. For example, people suggest that you “share your scars not your scabs” as a way of saying to wait until you’ve healed a bit before sharing.

But that prescription misses a more fundamental question…

Should you be sharing the story at all???

A simple prescription for this is that you should only share painful stories if you can pull a universal lesson that will help your audience and that relates to the problems they come to you to help them solve.

Telling painful stories might be good therapy…

But if you need therapy, may I humbly suggest working with a therapist instead of trying to use your email list as therapists.