Personality
Previous topic: The human voice
Next topic: Where to feature personality?
The human voice alone is a big step in the right direction. But the final touch that creates a powerful, influential newsletter is personality.
Personality is the sum of all the distinctive characteristics that make your newsletter's voice and writing unique. It's your style, tone, humor, emotion, vocabulary, attitude and more. It's the wrapping paper around your content. The paint on your canvas. The lines that join up the dots.
Why personality?
There are two reasons why personality is so important.
First, it adds to the human element of the newsletter - the element that resonates best with the readership. Most of all though, personality is often the only way you can distinguish yourself from the other emails and newsletters desperate for space and attention in that inbox.
It is relatively easy for anyone to produce a professional publication.
It is relatively easy for someone to come up with content that is useful, timely and relevant.
It is very difficult to come up with content that is unique.
And that is where personality helps - it gives you that uniqueness that makes you stand out from the run-of-the-mill, dime-a-dozen "yet another newsletter" mails you're competing with.
Personality has a couple of other advantages too:
- it can complement the image of a brand, product, service, website or company, reinforcing whatever impression you're trying to create.
- it can keep a newsletter interesting for the publisher or writer, even when the content itself may be a little mundane or repetitive.
The two biggest arguments cited against personality are:
- I don't have the talent to create this personality?
- What if people don't like this personality?
Let's clear those up. First, introducing personality doesn't mean you have to create some magical, all-singing, all-dancing, witty, "I am Elvis" type publication. You can put in as little or as much personality as you want. Additionally, if you inject your own personality, then this must surely be a manageable task? You just have to be you.
Regarding the second argument, well, the personality you employ should be attuned to your audience anyway. But even then, you may well find people who don't like the way you write, or your sense of humor, for example. You'll lose them perhaps. You may even find that your total subscriber levels drop.
But whatever happens, you can be assured that those who remain are more loyal, more influenced and more impacted by what you say.
In other words, the sacrifice of a few subscribers is a small price to pay for the additional impact you have with those you gain or who remain. It's not total subscriber numbers that matter, but the total number of active, enthused subscribers.
OK, so personality is crucial, but there are inevitable questions about when, where and how to introduce personality. Let's take a look.
Need more email marketing guidance? Try the email newsletter.