Email Tip: When Composing An Email To Your List, Think Of One Person

Peo­ple who teach pub­lic speak­ing tell their stu­dents to pick out one per­son in the audi­ence and speak to them, to increase their focus and the per­sonal feel­ing of the message.

Cold callers are coached to smile when mak­ing a call, because it makes a big dif­fer­ence how you feel when you are mak­ing the call, even though the recip­i­ent can’t see you.

Design­ers of web appli­ca­tions come up with a few char­ac­ters, whom they give names to, so they can per­son­al­ize the expe­ri­ence they imag­ine their users will have. “So then Judy comes to the buy page. She looks around… but, I’m not sure if she would be able to notice the but­ton right away; it’s so small.”

In the same way, when you are com­pos­ing an email to your mail­ing list, pick out one per­son in the list, and write to that per­son. Imag­ine what their needs are. Where they are sit­ting. What other tasks they are fac­ing that day. The com­puter they’re read­ing it on. Now, imag­ine what they would want to know about right now, to help them solve a problem.