Someone once told me that putting a dog in your email would make people like it more. As an analytical person, I couldn’t understand how a dog was supposed to improve a winback campaign, a Valentine’s Day sale, a welcome email, or your odds of getting a response from the boss who keeps ghosting your “Can you approve this?” pleas.
But people form emotional opinions about your emails before they ever read that super-polished copy you wrote six times and then reverted back to the original. The hero section, typically everything at the top of the email through the first CTA, isn’t there to explain everything. Its job is to make someone feel the right thing before their rational brain clocks in for work. It needs to incite curiosity, inspiration, delight, or urgency.
Getting the hero right only solves the first few seconds. After that, you still have to close what Ethan Norville calls the “Messaging Gap,” which is the distance between what your company wants to say and what the person opening the email actually gives a crap about.
Your subscribers don’t need another brand elbowing its way into their inbox and demanding attention. They need a reason to care, click, and keep opening.
Here’s how to give them one.
