Email people open

The idea

I think the subject line and the preview text are the whole decision. Nobody opens an email to find out what it says. They open it because two short lines in a list already told them enough, so I write those two lines together, as one thought split across two rows, and I write them last, once I know what the email is for.

Personalising for real means using something the reader did, like the last coffee they bought, not pasting a first name in front of a newsletter. One email gets one job, and when there's one action I lay it out as an inverted pyramid: the point, the reason, then the button. Before it goes out I split the list by what people bought, send it at a time that fits their day, and send a test to myself first, because a test send is the cheapest place to find a broken merge tag.

What the lab is showing

The weak pair fails twice. First, the subject spends its first eleven characters on the sender's name, which the row already shows, and the phone cuts it before the news. Second, the preview is the default line a lot of email templates put at the top, so the second row of the decision says nothing at all. My rewrite puts the news first and uses the preview to say why this reader should care, from what they bought last.

The greeting is the other half. A merge tag pulls whatever sits in the field (and a sign-up form collects blanks, single spaces and typos). Set a fallback for every tag you use, and send the test to an address with an empty name field on purpose. If a tag is misspelled, I'd rather see the braces in the test than have the tool quietly drop them.

Where I used it

• The Yard, Email 2, for a group project. The client matched brands with student creators. My part was the second email in the sequence: a follow-up whose subject put the brand's own name in front of "your creators are getting booked", with merge tags for the brand and its industry, 15% off through Friday, and one button. An early version quoted an engagement figure nobody could source, so it came out. Group work, my section
• "The Rhythm of the Collective", the launch email in a spec launch for Lululemon. It opens on the carousel's question, why your hardware should be the hurdle, and ends on one call to action: early access for members. Spec work

What I'd do now

A course email project asked for a landing page and two emails, a welcome and an offer, and I never shipped it. I'd do it now for Kiln. The landing page promises one thing, first pick of each new roast, with one field for an email address. The welcome email keeps that promise the minute someone signs up, because that's when they're paying attention. The offer goes a week later, only to people who haven't bought, on a weekday morning near the first cup of the day. That timing is my guess, so I'd test it against an evening send before trusting it. Before either email goes out, the button and text colours go through the contrast check in Chapter 16.