What to send on a Tuesday
Pick a repeatable format once rather than deciding every time. Four that work, one that never does, and the forward test before you send.
The question that stops most small lists is not how to send but what to say on a Tuesday when nothing has happened. The businesses that keep going have usually decided this once, in advance, rather than deciding it every time.
Pick a format and repeat it
A repeatable shape removes the blank page, and it also tells the reader what they are getting, which is what makes them open the next one. Four that work for a small business.
- One question, answered. Take something a customer actually asked and answer it properly. The supply never runs out, and the subject line writes itself.
- What changed. A rule, a price, a platform behaviour, a deadline. Valuable precisely because the reader does not have time to track it.
- One thing you did, with the reasoning. Not a case study with results, which you should not invent, but a decision and why. People read this and almost nobody writes it.
- A short useful list. The five things to check before X. Easy to write, easy to keep, often forwarded.
What does not work as a format: company news. Nobody subscribed to find out that you attended a conference, and a list that receives company news stops being opened within three sends.
How often
Less than people say and more regularly than people manage. The honest determinant is not an optimal frequency but what you can sustain for a year, because an irregular sender is a sender people have forgotten by the next message.
Monthly, reliably, beats weekly for six weeks and then nothing. If you do change frequency upwards, say so, because an unannounced increase reads as a business that has started marketing at you.
Selling in it
You may. People know they subscribed to a business. What they object to is not being sold to but being sold to in a message that pretended to be something else.
- Make it obvious which messages are selling and which are not. The reader should never feel they were led into a pitch.
- Sell specifically. A dated offer with a real reason beats a permanent reminder that your service exists, which is noise.
- Keep the ratio honest. If most of your sending is promotional, your subscribers are receiving advertising and will treat it as such regardless of what you call it.
- In the EEA and the UK, if you are relying on the soft opt-in rather than on consent, you may only market your own similar products, which constrains what you can put in front of those subscribers specifically.
Length and form
Plain text, or close to it, outperforms heavily designed templates for most small senders, for three reasons that have nothing to do with taste: it looks like a message from a person, it renders correctly everywhere, and it loads for people who block images. A template full of images is also the pattern filters treat with the most suspicion.
On length, the only rule that holds is that it should be as long as the one thing you are saying requires and no longer. A short email with one point beats a long one with four, because four points is the same as none.
Never running out, as a system
The reason people stop sending is not that they have nothing to say. It is that they have to think of something at the moment of writing, which is the worst time. The fix is to separate collecting from writing.
- Keep one file and put every customer question in it, verbatim, as it arrives. Not a summary. The wording is the subject line.
- Add anything you had to look up this week, and anything you explained twice.
- Add every rule, price or platform behaviour you noticed changing.
- When it is time to write, do not think. Open the file and take the oldest item somebody is still likely to care about.
A business talking to customers generates more material in a month than it can send in six, and almost none of it is captured, because at the moment the question arrives you are busy answering it rather than noting it.
The second benefit is that everything in the file is known to interest at least one real person, which is a stronger guarantee than any amount of thinking about what an audience might want.
Work to do
- Start the file today and put the last three customer questions in it, in their own words.
- Choose one format and write the next three in it. The decision is the hard part and it only has to be made once.
- Set a frequency you could hold for a year, and tell your subscribers what it is.
- Apply the forward test to your last send. If the answer is no, work out what would have made it yes.