Email is not dead. A sentence repeated so many times across the internet. It sounds like a mantra, a self-reassuring slogan meant to ease email professionals’ fears about their livelihoods. It is also something we tell clients obsessed with ridiculous social media trends and whatever else is taking over the marketing space. Yes, the “$40 return for every dollar spent” line usually accompanies this motto of immortality, too. Nothing wrong with that. Email is alive and well, and we wish it a bright future.
But what about email marketers? What about creativity? What about the constant pressure to generate revenue while keeping up with increasingly strict mailbox provider requirements? What about the frustration you feel each time you write great copy and a captivating subject line, only for your email to land in the wrong tab or, worse, end up in a spam folder, where it withers and dies without ever reaching its intended reader?
When email marketing wears down your creativity
And the longer you work in the field, the more you understand how much has changed and how hard the job has become. You’re no longer competing only with other emails in the inbox. You’re competing with more marketing channels and increasingly intrusive, attention-seeking media. You’re struggling to get attention, fighting your way through spam filters and gateway rejections. And when you finally reach the inbox, your email still needs to be noticed, opened, read, and engaged with.
It can feel impossible to create fresh content that excites your subscribers, makes them laugh, or brings them joy. That is why it’s crucial to nurture your creativity, so that the effort you put in produces something meaningful that your recipients can appreciate.
The longer you fight, the more your creativity can suffer. Maybe you’ll kill some ideas before they even have a chance to live. You may start doubting yourself and lose your way in the process. So how do you come up with fresh, interesting, useful, meaningful ideas? How do you perform CPR on your creativity? How do you nurture it back to health and make it a driving force that benefits your readers, recipients, and customers, enriches their experience, and ultimately boosts revenue?
How to nurture creativity in email marketing
For a start, give your brain something other than email to work with. If your entire day consists of dashboards, campaign calendars, and other people’s newsletters, what exactly are you expecting your imagination to feed on?
Spend more time with your friends. Have conversations that have no agenda, no action items, and absolutely no follow-up email. Listen to what makes people laugh, what annoys them, what they care about. These are people, much like the ones behind the addresses on your mailing list. You might even enjoy their company without turning the experience into a marketing insight.
Go outside. Enjoy nature. Walk, ride a bike, do something physical that you actually like. Give yourself permission to spend an hour without checking whether someone clicked something. The campaign will still be there when you return. Unfortunately, so will the spreadsheet.
Read literature. A novel, a short story, a poem. Notice how a writer makes you care about a person who doesn’t exist, or keeps you reading when you really should have gone to sleep. There is something to learn there about rhythm, surprise, humor, and knowing when to stop. And sometimes you can simply enjoy a good book without extracting five actionable lessons from it.
Try to become more of a producer than a consumer. Write something you don’t have to publish. Take a photograph. Cook something without following the recipe exactly. Make room for small acts of creation that nobody needs to approve. When an idea for an email comes along, write it down before you start listing all the reasons it probably won’t work.
Then give some of those ideas a chance. Try a different angle, a different story, a little humor where your audience might appreciate it. Leave room for a small, thoughtful test. Every experiment does not have to become your best-performing campaign ever. Sometimes it gives you a useful clue about what to try next.
Revenue pressure and room for better ideas
Of course, none of this will cure management’s insatiable appetite for revenue. You can return from a long walk full of ideas and still be greeted with “Great. Can we send twice as many?” Learn to tolerate some pressure, but learn to question it, too. Ask for room to test, and explain what sending more might cost. If every discussion ends with “send more,” there is very little discussion left about what is worth sending.
And yes, psychotherapy is an option. There is no shame in talking to someone about what work is doing to you. You don’t have to arrive with a diagnosis, and you certainly don’t have to present a business case. For once, the person asking how you feel probably isn’t about to request another campaign.
Sometimes a job change deserves consideration, too. You can take walks, read wonderful books, and collect a hundred new ideas, but you still need somewhere to use them. If every idea is rejected before it can be tested, take that seriously.
Perhaps the next email you put your heart into will have your CV attached.
Email is not dead. Let’s leave some life in the people writing it.