Make It Awesome

What does your inbox look like every morning when you first open it up? I'm guessing you embark on a mission to decide what's important, what's not, what can wait until later, and what gets deleted immediately.

Maybe I'm alone in this, but this is exactly how it works for me.

I heard Joe Pulizzi of Content Marketing Institute recently refer to this process as the "daily purge" - that process of reading, filing, and deleting emails each day.

Especially when it comes to email newsletters or marketing emails in general, we all go through the morning purge, often wondering "How in the world did I get on THAT list?" or "That sure was a waste of time." If you can relate, then you know the people who are getting YOUR email are doing the same thing!

With all the emails coming through an individual's inbox, yours must stand out, or you're destined to be the recipient of the dreaded "DELETE" button.

There are two major things that will ensure your email gets opened and clicked:

If you're not producing the BEST CONTENT in your industry, you're already starting at a disadvantage. You might say, "The BEST in the industry? That sounds like a stretch." But, to that I'd say: "It's no stretch at all."

It doesn't matter if it's a blog post or a video or an image on Instagram - no matter what type of content you're creating, your goal MUST be to provide the BEST in the industry. That means every single piece of content you publish needs to be awesome! And by "awesome" I mean relevant, educational, and entertaining to your ideal customer and/or prospect.

You want your audience to look forward to your content because they know it's going to be awesome!

Ask yourself this question: If I/we stopped producing content, would anyone know or care? If you can't answer that in the positive, you need to go back to the drawing board and make it AWESOME!

Stop producing content just to produce content.

Now that you have the best content in the industry, you have to let people know about it and convince them to open your email and click through to experience that awesome content.

It starts with an enticing subject line.

They grab attention; they generate curiosity; they incite emotion.

The key, though, is your content has to DELIVER on the creative subject line that pulled the reader in. Otherwise, you may get them in once, but then you'll lose them forever.

Even the content in the body of the email has to be awesome. Getting the reader to open the email is just the first step; you need to give them a reason to go beyond the email; give them a reason to click through.