Copywriting
How to open an email when nothing interesting happened this week
Short answerYou don’t need something interesting to happen. Open with the plain, true thing from your week, even if it’s small, then shift straight into the point. If there’s truly nothing, open with a question people ask you, an opinion you’d defend, or the idea your audience never gets tired of hearing. What you never do is invent a moment. A made-up opener costs more trust than a boring one.
Some weeks nothing happens. No big win, no client breakthrough, no funny thing at the grocery store. You sit down to start a marketing email and the cursor just blinks at you.
So a lot of people reach for a scene. “It was 11:47 PM and the dashboard was glowing red…” Or they borrow one. “A client told me last week…” when no client told them anything.
Please don’t. A cinematic opener is one of the fastest ways to make an email read like it was generated, and an invented story is worse than no story at all. Vague but true beats specific but fake, every week of the year.
The good news is you don’t need an interesting week. You need a true first line and a quick path to the point. Here’s how I handle it.
Step one: stop looking for a story and write a dispatch
My emails open like a dispatch, not a movie. What actually happened, said plainly. Sometimes that’s a student’s message, a test I ran, a call I had. Sometimes it’s just a long weekend.
The reader doesn’t need your opening to be exciting. They need it to sound like a person. Plain and real reads as a person. Dramatic and polished reads as marketing, and people scroll past marketing faster than they scroll past “hope your weekend was good.”
So when you start a marketing email, lower the bar for the first line on purpose. It just has to be true and short.
Step two: use the small true thing, then shift gears
Here’s how one of my real emails opened, the week after Memorial Day:
Hey crew,
Hope you had a relaxing Memorial Day weekend.
I’m still struggling to get back into the swing of things (extended weekends and holidays are hard for me – Mondays are my most productive days).
Anyways.
That’s it for the warm-up. Nothing happened. I had a long weekend and I was a little slow getting going. Plenty of people on my list could relate to that, and it took three lines.
Then “Anyways.” on its own line, and straight into the lesson. That little gear shift is doing real work. It tells the reader, okay, small talk’s over, here’s the useful part.
The mistake is stretching the small true thing into a big false meaning. You don’t need to turn a slow Monday into a metaphor for business. Say it, shift, move on.
Step three: open with a question people actually ask you
That same email went from the weekend straight into this: “One question I get asked a lot is: ‘What would you do when you start a new ad account and campaign for a new offer?’ Excellent question.”
If nothing happened this week, something was still asked. In your DMs, on a call, in a reply to your last email, in a comment. That question is a perfect way to start a marketing email because it’s real, the reader probably has the same one, and it promises an answer right away.
Keep a running list. Every time someone asks you something, write it down word for word. On a quiet week, you just pick one.
Step four: open with an opinion you’d defend
Another real opener of mine: “Here’s the crazy reason I don’t use any tracking tools for ads, and no one has ever been able to give me a great counter to it …”
That opener doesn’t lean on any news. It’s just a position I hold, stated plainly, with a bit of a dare in it. Opinions don’t need news. They need you to actually believe them and be able to back them up in the next few lines.
If you’ve got a take on how your industry does something that you think is wrong, that’s a Monday email. Just make sure you name the exceptions instead of pretending your take is true in every case. People trust a strong opinion more when you admit where it stops working.
Step five: say the thing they can’t hear enough, again
This is the one people resist, because it feels like repeating yourself.
Every audience has one to three things they really want to hear over and over and over again. For the freelancer crowd I’ve spent years in, it was how to get clients. They could buy a hundred programs on it and still want more. Your job is to keep reinforcing those things from new angles.
And repetition in email is useful. It drives points home and gets people invested in taking action. You’re not tired of your core message. Most of your list hasn’t fully heard it yet.
So on a week with no news, start a marketing email with a fresh angle on one of those core ideas. A new example, a new objection, a new way of saying it. That’s plenty.
Step six: get to the point fast
However you start a marketing email, the reader should know what it’s about within the first few lines. One email, one goal, one clear thing to do, whether that’s clicking or replying.
If your opener is taking more than a few lines to get anywhere, it’s not an opener anymore. It’s a wind-up, and people bail on wind-ups. Put a P.S. at the end that adds one small useful thought or sets up the next email. And if your subject line is working hard, make sure the opening pays it off, which is most of what earning the open without tricking anyone comes down to.
Either way, boring and true will outlast clever and made up. It also takes a lot less time to write.
What to do this week
Start a note on your phone called “email openers” and put three things in it today: one ordinary true thing from this week, one question someone asked you recently (word for word), and one opinion about your industry you’d defend. Write your next email from whichever one feels easiest, keep the warm-up to three lines or fewer, and shift into the point with one short line.
How do you start a marketing email?
Plainly. Open with something true from your week, a question a customer asked, or an opinion you hold, in a line or two. Then move straight into the one point of the email. Skip dramatic scene-setting openers. They tend to read as generated or salesy, and they delay the part the reader came for.
What do I write in a newsletter when I have no news?
Answer a question someone recently asked you, share an opinion about how your industry does things, or revisit one of the two or three ideas your audience never gets tired of, from a new angle. What your list needs, news or not, is something useful from someone who sounds like a real person.
Is it okay to repeat the same message in emails?
Yes. Repetition drives points home and gets people invested in acting on them. Most subscribers haven’t read every email you’ve sent, and the ones who have often need to hear a core idea several times before it sticks. Just change the angle, the example or the objection you’re answering.
P.S. If you ever catch yourself typing “a client told me last week” and it didn’t happen, delete the whole line. Your readers will forgive a plain opener a thousand times before they forgive one they can tell was made up.
