Struggling to write banging email subject lines?

My watch buzzed for another kilometre ticked off and 18 minutes into my run yet I’d barely broken sweat.

Yeah, it was 6 am but it wasn’t cold.

2 minutes later I looked like someone had chucked a pint of water in my face.

30 minutes later, I looked like someone had chucked a bucket of water over me for letting Flash pish against their gate.

Every run is the same, it takes a good 15-20 minutes for my body to gear up and all the systems to come online.

Probably why the minimum effective dose for aerobic work is 30 minutes…because it takes 10-20 minutes for your body to get into gear so anything less than 30 minutes means you’ve not done any real work.

And there’s a marketing lesson in there too.

Just like with exercise it takes a bit of time for your brain to get into gear, to get those creative juices flowing.

One strategy I use is to pick an area I want to improve and focus on this for 15 minutes.

If we take emails as an example.

Most PTs emails don’t get read, not because they aren’t interesting, though many aren’t, but because the subject lines suck the boaby.

Usually, because they only write one and write it before they write the email (I’ll cover why you shouldn’t do this in another newsletter).

Having picked email subject lines to work on you set a timer and start churning them out.

This solves two problems.

1. I get to work on a weakness

2. By the time the 15 minutes is up my creative juices are in full flow.

One thing to remember here is that for every 10 subject lines you write 3 or 4 will indeed be shit, 4 or 5 will be ok, and 1 or 2 will be quite good.

Yet, the weird thing is that the better you get at crafting your subject lines, or whatever you’re working on, the ratio doesn’t change.

3 or 4 will always be destined for the toilet.

4 or 5 might do at a push.

1 or 2 will jump out at you as being absolute bangers.

But if you compare the subject lines from day 1 with those of day 5, then all of day 1 will be getting flushed.