I'm sure you've heard the famous Aristotle quote “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.”

Except it turns out that the quote is actually from English Philosopher Will Durrant in his 1926 book The Story of Philosophy where he artfully combines a couple of Aristotle's rather longer and differently-worded passages into the quote.

But pedantry aside, the quote is very true when it comes to email marketing.

If you want people to open your email you have to establish a reputation for your emails to be valuable.

And that means they need to actually be valuable. Consistently.

That doesn't mean each one has to be a work of genius or you have to slave over it for days.

Just that each one (or at least the vast majority) must have something useful for your readers, and it needs to be different to what they've heard before.

Being useful is probably the easy bit. As long as your writing is based on the big problems, challenges, goals and aspirations of your ideal clients then you're on safe ground.

And when I say “big problems” that means both objectively big and psychologically big. If something really annoys them it’s worth addressing even if it isn’t actually a big issue in the grand scheme of things.

Making sure it's different to what they've heard before is perhaps a bit more challenging. So I'm going to devote the entire next email to it.

As an exercise before then, try thinking about and writing down where your advice and ideas are different to the mainstream in your field. We'll use it later.

PS Thanks to Caelan Huntress for the insight into the real source of the Aristotle quote.