Should You Send the 9-Word Email?
Have you ever heard of the 9 word email? Today we're going to talk about what it is, when you should use it, and what happened when I sent this email to my list.
What is the 9-word email?
The 9-word email is something that I have heard about from multiple different people, but the person that it originated from is a guy named Dean Jackson.
Here’s a video of Dean Jackson explaining the 9-word email in-depth, but I’ll give you the basics of it.
The 9-word email is a way to revive “dead” leads. It's a really simple follow-up email where you're just asking people, “Hey, are you still looking for…” ← that blank being whatever they reached out to you for in the first place.
I've seen Dean explain it where people were selling houses in a specific area or luxury yachts and they sent an email out to someone that had expressed interest in the past, but had never bought. The email just says something simple like “Are you still interested in a house in Cincinnati, Ohio"?”, or “Are you still planning a trip to Rome, Italy?”
And it's called the 9-word email because some of the examples that he shared just include a simple sentence that's nine words. It doesn't have to be literally nine words — you can do a 9-word email that's more or less.
But the gist is that you want to just send that one sentence. You don't want to have a lot of preamble. You just want to simply ask them, “Hey, are you still interested in this?”
This can be a one-on-one email. It can be an email that you are sending out to individual people that you have had some interaction with in the past. That's how Dean Jackson is using it. These are people that had maybe come in through a contact form or they were someone that you'd spoken to before and they're in your list of leads to follow up with.
Using the 9-word email with your email list
But it’s something that you can also do with your email list. This is something I've seen done a lot of different ways on various lists I’m on. They’ll send out a general email to their whole list to gauge interest or generate a response.
For example, you might say: “Are you still interested in help marketing your business?”
You could also be more specific with something like: “I'm going to be in San Diego next month doing a workshop on BLANK topic. Are you interested?”
The point of these emails is not to make it look like a marketing email that you would send to every other person on your list. It's meant to look very one-on-one. They're very plain emails. They're very simple text and it looks like something that you might get from an individual.
The only reason I know that they're not individual emails to me is because they still have the footer stuff of a mass email. They still have the unsubscribe link. They still have the address and stuff that you would get if you were sending it through your email service provider.
But in every other way, these emails look super plain and look like something that I could have gotten from that actual person.
Why send a 9-word email
The point of this email is to start a conversation. That's why you want it to feel really one-on-one because people reply to individual emails way more than they would to email blasts that go out to a whole list.
Even if you're sending it to your whole list, it can still feel really one-on-one with the formatting you choose. You can make it really plain text.
You can use it like Dean Jackson does for your list. Maybe you have a segment of your list and expressed interest in an offer. Maybe they clicked on a launch that you were doing and didn't end up buying and maybe you want to follow up a little bit down the line to see if they’re still interested. The email can start those sales conversations and you can talk to people who respond individually.
But another way you can use this is to gauge interest in a new offer. Maybe you are thinking about doing a course on something or a masterclass and you want to see hey are people on my list even interested in this before I put the time and effort into creating it.
You could send something like” “Hey, are you interested in this?” or “Would you be interested in a class on BLANK?” and just see what you get back from your list.
Testing the 9-word email
I’ve seen the 9-word email floating around in online marketing circles for a while now and I've seen other people do it and I've always been curious what actually happens when you send one of these emails. So I decided to try it out with my own business.
The reason I wanted to send a 9-word email was because I was considering putting together a new offer and I wanted to gauge the interest on my list before I actually started developing it.
I was thinking about offering Day of Voxer sessions. Voxer is a walkie-talkie app on your phone where you can talk back and forth with people. You can do text messages back and forth to people. It's something that I use with some of my business friends and we chat back and forth on Voxer, but I wasn't sure how widely used it was with people that are in my audience or if people that are in my audience would even be interested in working with me in that way.
So I sent the 9-word email, which technically was an 11-word email. Here’s what I sent:
“Would you be interested in copy coaching / strategy sessions via Voxer?”
I made it super plain. I normally send very plain emails, but I took out all the formatting that I have on this one for margin size and font size. It did still have the footer information that you have with any email that you send from your email service provider. I use ConvertKit (affiliate link), so it had the unsubscribe, update your information link, and then my address which is required for any email you send.
It really did look like an email that would have come straight for me and based on the reactions I got people did think it was straight from me.
I just used “quick q” as a subject line. Super simple, like super casual. I didn't even capitalize it. It was just like something that you would get from a friend, from a personal email. I sent that email and thought let's see what happens.
Results of the 9-word email experiment
First of all the open rate for this was super high. I got a 43.1% open rate, which is higher than average for my list. It's a great open rate, so a lot of people were looking at it. I think because it looked a little different. Even from the subject line that it was a little bit more simple and casual.
And I actually did get a ton of replies to this email. I had a lot of people just simply say yes or no. I had some people say — maybe depending on price.
I also got some questions about people asking what is Voxer, so I was able to start those conversations. I got a lot of people that were interested and wanted some more information, which was good. If I'd had an offer ready to go, I could have led them to that.
Note: Since sending this email, I have developed a Day of Voxer offer. You can check it out here!
I even had some marketing friends spotting it and be like, “Oh, is this your 9-word email? I'm so curious to know how it's going!”
Obviously, a lot of people didn't respond at all, which is normal. But for me, I got way more responses than I do to a typical email. People definitely thought that was something worth taking the time to reply to.
But I didn't have anyone that was rude. It was really just like yes, no, I'm not interested, or maybe, let me have some more information.
I also didn't have a crazy high amount of unsubscribes. My unsubscribe rate was 1.5% which is within a normal range. It's a little higher than a normal newsletter email I send out but it wasn't like 10% of my list unsubscribed because I did this.
For me, it was a successful experiment because it gave me what I wanted. I wanted to see if people would be interested in this offer. Based on the responses I got, I decided to develop and test out this offer.
Update: You can book Day of Voxer with me here: https://sarahmarieanderson.com/voxer
Do I recommend the 9-word email?
Would I use the 9-word email again and do I think you should try it out? I would totally do this again!
But I wouldn’t do this too often. I could see people getting burned out by this. It is a little gimmicky and probably the next time I do this, people aren't going to automatically assume it’s an email directly from me. (Especially if they see this post!)
But I definitely think it's something worth trying. It's a great way to engage people that have shown some interest before and you could do that either one-on-one or with some tagging in your email marketing system.
Or you can do like I did gauge interest in something new that you're thinking about developing before you put all the time and energy and effort into creating an offer that it turns out no one cares about.
Overall, I'd say give the 9-word email a try. Experiment on it with your own list and let me know what you think.
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