What's the secret to writing email copy that matches your brand?

I just sat down in a calm place with my cat and asked myself: - What matters most in life to me? - What do I hate about the way normal things are? - What problems have I overcome that I can share the solutions about? Out of those questions came the foundations of my brand. Who I am, what I stand for and against. Who are the people that would be passionate about the same things.

Think of your brand as a group of people. What common theme is there? How do they talk? How do they think? Make sure to have a very clear picture in your head of what this group looks like and it will make it very hard for you to deviate from that, because you'll always try to fit in that group.

The easy way to solve this is ask questions in all your social interactions. Then offer a limited 30 "ask me anything" calls. Record the calls. Solve the problems on the spot if you can. But take all that info and those are the pain points of your audience. Use them responsibly :-)

When writing email copy, don't focus too much on the purpose of it. No one wants to read a 5-page essay about a certain problem you're tackling. Email should serve as a mean to get your audience to land on your platform. that's where you can write long essays.

If you know your market then there will be ideas floating around in your head all the time that you want to share. Write a story about how you learned the lesson or truth and in the final 1/3 of the email, tie it into whatever goal you want. It's all in the turnaround where you relate the story to the goal outcome you want. Then just put the link.

Try to have a consistent format across all of your brands, so that your audience doesn't get confused. A welcome email should feel completely different to a promotional email, just like a short form newsletter should feel different to a long form one.

A lot of the format is answered by what type of work you do. I'm a personal brand so I write in a familiar manner. For those I stick with a story style and the content changes depending on location in the email responder sequence. If I was doing something for a professional supplement company then I would switch styles.

I'm not at the skill level where I can change my tone on demand. I AM the tone and voice. This is why its hard to do freelance work for one-off jobs. There is a huge learning curve and you have to be a good "writing actor" to become something and someone else.

Your audience is the best judge for your content. Just look at their feedback and adjust based on what they say. Email copy is generally straightforward to test out, because people will either open the email or they won't. Just make sure you don't change multiple variables at a time when running tests, or else you might end up being misled by the data.