Lessons

Lesson Info

Strong & Engaging Email Signature Tips

Email signatures. Now, I love this one. Like I said earlier, your email signature is another opportunity to surprise and delight the reader. And it's also an amazing thing to do, and it's often overlooked. So if your signature rocks, it will work for you. Because so many people's signatures are like they might as well not even be there. So first thing is don't include every single way to contact to contact you. Pick the one way that you want to be contacted. So that might mean a phone number. You don't have to put your email in your email signature, because you've emailed them, so they can reply. But you can put a website or a website contact form, sometimes people need people to schedule a complimentary consultation call. That could be what you put in there, or whatever. There's no right or wrong answer. Just please only pick one, and the best one. And then inject personality into your sign-off. So I think my old sign-off used to say, to your sizzle, spark and stardom. And that's beca...

use I used to help people a lot with infusing publicity in their business. And people loved it because they're like, that's really fun. I never see, you know, most sign-offs are like, non-existent or they're like, warmly, warm regards. You know, something like that. So think of something fun. Even for those of you in business to business, right? Think of something that you can put in there that shows a little of your personality or your brand's personality, your business's personality, right, just something that's not like warm regards, that we see all the time. Clear always beats clever. So yes, so don't try to get too over the top clever with your email signature, or really anything. I see this a lot where like people will try to weave so much like fancy language, or they'll be like, I don't want to be a life coach, I want to be like a soul alchemist warrior. And I'm like, well that's great. I mean I honor you that you want to be that, but like really, it's like no one else knows what that is. So if I see that I'm like, I don't know, I don't know if I need you. Like, I don't understand it. So you want to say what people are gonna understand. I appreciate like all of the ability to want to like do something fancy, but for your email signature, like, just make sure they get it. Don't use too many flowery things or ways to reference yourself. And then have a call to action int he P.S. section. The P.S. is so powerful. We often miss it, but especially when you're selling. Any email that you're selling, you have to repeat your offer in the P.S., because a lot of people just scale. They do not read the whole thing. It often works better because of the serial positioning effect, which means that people recall the first thing they see and the last thing they see. So lots of times people just see the cool subject line, they read the first sentence, skim, skim, skim. I'm kind of like half invested, all the way down to the P.S. So if you don't put the P.S., the last thing they're gonna look at is your signature, and they're gonna be like ah, I'm done. Right? They don't even know what you're offer is, they completely missed it. So our goal is not to have people scrolling that fast. We want them to read our emails. But realize it's just human behavior, and so why not take advantage of it and do something special in your P.S. by adding a call to action for whatever that is. It doesn't have to be a sales call to action, either. Like we said earlier, it might be like, consider this story next time you're struggling with this. So it could just be that. Doesn't have to be a sale. And I don't want any of you to be intimidated. We went through a lot of information today, and very quickly. So don't feel intimidated like oh, I am never gonna be like writing this email in this way. Just try out two or three of the things that we talked about today. Like, don't worry about sitting down and doing one email and going through the entire class and trying to do that. Just work on two or three things at a time. So start with making your subject line better, and adding a few fun words in, right, if that's good for you. You could start with whatever you want. Start with adding a P.S., right? Just take it incrementally so that you don't get too overwhelmed, and then just know that you can constantly add and improve and improve. With any type of writing, we're all improving. Even when you're a professional writer and you're standing up here teaching about writing, I am constantly a student of writing. So don't worry about having to do everything right and perfect. There is no such thing as perfection in writing. Just start out small, don't do too much. And if a story is in you, it's gotta come out. So you all have things worthy of talking about, whether they are your own stories, your business stories or your clients' stories, whatever. We all have great things in our life, so don't have that feeling of like, no one's gonna care about what I say, because it's not true. People absolutely will. And then just to wrap up, if you guys want to stay in touch with me, I have a couple different places to do that. So you can follow me on Instagram is usually where I am the most, so it's just melissa.cassera. I'm on Facebook, not so much. But you can come and play with me there. And I'm on Twitter, but usually I only talk about screenrwiting on there, but if you just want some fun stuff, I'm at casseracomm. I found myself thinking a lot about blog topics and posting when you were talking about the email topics and the synergy between those two connection points. Do you have any rules of thumb or guidelines for length of the email versus the blog, and then how those two either push or pull to one another? Yeah, well, the first thing is I would not recommend doing two different things. I think your blog content should also be your email newsletter content. Because if you keep them separate, it's a lot of work for you, unless you have a big team that's helping you with this, that's different. Some of us have different business structures. But if you are by yourself or maybe you have just a couple employees, I would keep it simple. I do this personally. I send out my newsletter, and then I post that same thing on my blog like three or four days later. So my newsletter people are getting a jump on the content, but I'm repurposing it on my blog. It's way too much work to do two separate things, in my opinion. I would say for length, I'm not a big stickler on something being short or long, per se. If it's a good story, and if its structured in the way that we talked about today, then people will read. I've written like huge sweeping emails that were telling the whole behind the scenes story of my business, and I've written things that were two paragraphs. And one doesn't perform better than the other. Because I'm still using the same story structure. I'm still building conflict and excitement. So I would worry less about length and more about writing stuff you care about. So write from the heat, right. And that's gonna make a huge difference, just doing that alone. And then incorporating these other tips like making your language more vivid and making sure there's no repetition. And just rattling through some of the things we learned today, and then the length becomes obsolete. So as an end-user of emails from various industries, I do actually already have a gmail account set up and they all get funneled into there. But I never really read them, and sometimes people post like every week. And I'm wondering what you think of frequency for different industries or anything you can tell us about how often we should be doing things? Yeah, sure. I mean, I send mine weekly, but people look forward to it. So it's different, right. I've worked hard to create obsession so that people are like, they'll email me if a week goes by and they don't get something. So that's ultimately what you want, right. Ultimately you want people to be like, desiring and craving your emails. So honestly, I've seen it work all over the place. There are people that send daily emails that do really well, because of the way it's structured, because their end user wants that. So have you ever seen Tut Notes from the Universe? So those go out daily. It's like one sentence, like a little life lesson or something inspirational. Works great, right. But again it breaks the rule of like no one opens emails, we all shuttle it to here. No, their end user craves that and desires that. So I think it's just a combo of it's not industry specific, it's specific to your business. So number one, knowing who your ideal client is and having conversations with them. Do surveys. Talk to them one-on-one. See how their life is. If they are a busy woman, whom works 50 hours a week and has four kids that they're shuttling all over, like no, they're not gonna read your emails every week. But you'll know that because you'll understand their lifestyle. So, maybe you say I'm not gonna write, I'm gonna create audio content. And I have a client that does this, because she has that client. And she will record all of her email, she will read them out loud and record them in like Sound Cloud or something, and then just put the little link in the email. And at the top it just says, if you'd rather listen to me, click here. And that works really well, because she has like a split audience of some people that love reading, and some people that like listening, simply because they have no time. You only learn that by digging into your ideal client. So I'm not a fan of going by industry stats and everything because we're all so frigging different, and also it's small business, so it's even more different than what the stats are showing you. So just dig in with your clients, and you'll also know by testing. When you send out emails, you can see your open rates, you can see the engagement, right, you'll get people writing back to you. Like, oh my God, I love this, or not. And if they're not, then you know maybe I'm not hitting the mark. I need to space them out more. So all of this is like a consistent test. And I would say, you know, give anything like six months to test out, right. So give it a try, but give it time. Don't just like do it three times and think this sucks. I don't want to do this anymore. So give it a shot for a longer period of time. Give time to build that trust and that excitement. Erin asks, how do you combat the ongoing frustration of Clickbait in regards to emails? I just want to delete these emails the second I see them. Yeah, I think she's talking about what we talked about in the one lesson where it was like, people are assaulting you with last chance, like, limited time only, everything's gonna explode. If you get those emails, delete them, right, because ultimately the person on the other end of those emails is eventually gonna realize this isn't working, and they're gonna stop sending them. So then you can just, I just unsubscribe from anything that does that. And I think from our perspective as business owners, like, don't do that. There is a better way. There wasn't one lesson today where we talked about doing anything like that. There's none of that. If you are creating urgency, you don't have to do it in that Clickbaity way. You do it in a better way. And it boils down to choosing narrative and good story telling, and caring and creating emotion, over like the industry says that I should use this word in my email. You will see those articles everywhere. You will probably even see classes on them. They're not intended for us as a small business audience. They're not about emotionally engaging people through email. They're just going by bigger, global stats. So we don't do business that way. That isn't how our businesses operate. So we're operating on a different plane. Our communication has to be so much more personal and engaging so that we can exist in a small business marketplace. So that's what I would say. Ignore, unsubscribe as the user, and from the business owner, just choose to do a better job and choose a different way.