The average inbox gets 121 emails a day. Yours is one of them. If your email strategy is "send the monthly update", you're not competing with other brands for attention. You're competing with your subscriber's boss, their partner, their mates, and their bank's fraud alerts. You'd better be interesting.
The brutal truth about newsletters
Most company newsletters exist because someone in 2014 said companies should have newsletters. They're written by committee, approved by legal, and read by almost nobody. The format's not broken. The content is.
Good email content does one of three things: teaches something useful, entertains genuinely, or offers something valuable. If yours doesn't do at least one of those, it's inbox noise.
The 70-20-10 content split
Pinch this framework, it works.
- 70% value: genuinely useful content. Tips, insights, news, stories. Nothing promotional.
- 20% curated: other people's good stuff, shared with your commentary. Positions you as a useful filter.
- 10% promotion: offers, launches, direct asks. This is the payoff for the other 90%.
Most brands flip this. They send 90% promotion and wonder why unsubscribes spike. You have to earn the pitch.
Subject lines: the door nobody kicks in
If your open rate's under 25%, it's almost always the subject line. The body could be Shakespeare, it doesn't matter if nobody opens it.
- Specific beats clever: "3 tools that cut our ad spend by 40%" beats "A game-changer you'll love".
- Curiosity beats clarity, sometimes: works if the body delivers. Dies fast if it doesn't.
- Lowercase feels personal: "quick thought about last week" lands differently than "Quick Thought About Last Week".
- Emoji with caution: they work for B2C, tank for B2B.
- Preheader is 20% of the job: it's the second headline.
The first line is the second headline
Opening a marketing email to "Dear valued customer, we hope this email finds you well" is like meeting someone who greets you with their LinkedIn bio. Skip it. Start with the thing. Your first sentence should hook like the subject line promised.
Writing for scanners
Nobody reads emails. They scan them. Make scanning productive.
- Short paragraphs: two, three lines max.
- Subheadings: if it's longer than 200 words, break it up.
- Bold sparingly: highlight the key sentence, not every sentence.
- One CTA per email: if you ask for three things you get zero.
Voice: sound like a person
The single biggest differentiator in email marketing in 2024 is sounding human. Not "authentic" in the focus-grouped sense. Actually human, with opinions, humour, the occasional typo, a voice that sounds like one person wrote it because one person did.
The corporate "we" dies in email. "I've been thinking about X this week" beats "Our team has been considering X" every single time.
Storytelling beats information
A 500-word case study with a narrative converts better than a 200-word bullet-point pitch almost every time. Humans are story machines. Start with a specific person, a specific problem, a specific outcome, and you've already beaten 90% of the emails in the inbox.
"Sarah runs a bakery in Heaton. Her email list was 4,000 people. Last year she sent six emails and made £18,000 from them. Here's how" is compelling. "Learn how to optimise your email marketing funnel" is not.
Cadence: less is almost always more
Most brands send too often or too rarely. Too often breeds fatigue and unsubscribes. Too rarely, subscribers forget who you are. Weekly is the sweet spot for most B2C. Fortnightly or monthly suits most B2B. Whatever you pick, be consistent.
And segment, obviously. For the how, email segmentation strategies covers the mechanics.
Measuring what actually matters
Open rates are getting unreliable thanks to Apple's Mail Privacy Protection. Click-through, reply rate, and conversion are now the metrics that matter. Reply rate especially, if people are replying, you've written something worth engaging with.
For the broader programme view, email marketing strategy in 2024 pulls it together.
The unsexy truth
Great email content isn't a trick, a template, or a tool. It's just clear writing about things subscribers actually want to know. The brands winning at email are the ones treating it like a relationship, not a broadcast.
Emails getting ignored more than opened?
We'll review your content, your cadence, and your voice, and show you exactly what to change.
Book an email reviewFinal word
Content is king. Tired cliché, still true. The subscriber decides, every single send, whether you stay in their inbox or hit the unsubscribe. Write like you know that, and the numbers sort themselves out.
