How ‘Bite-Sized’ Emails Can Trigger a Customer Feeding Frenzy

This summer I finally got to take my two oldest sons fishing for the first time.

There’s this 5-acre pond nestled in the woods behind our church, with a fountain that shoots a bloom of water 20 feet in the air.

Very peaceful and picturesque.

I decided to take them both individually for some “daddy time.”

Fishing was just about my favorite thing in the whole world when I was a kid, but after I went away to college it kinda fell off the radar (heh).

So it’s been almost 20 years, and on my first trip out with my oldest son I forgot many of the tricks I used to know.

I wasn’t sure what kind of fish were in the lake, so for “bait” I brought along my old standby which was:

Purple rubber worms.

Bass love these things—doesn’t make a lick of sense, because they don’t really look like anything a fish would have seen before.

Anyway, we get to the lake, and I within a few minutes I realize I’d made a serious tactical error.

Because it turns out the fish that were biting that day weren’t bass—they were small sunfish, and my huge honkin’ rubber worm was way too big for them to see it as food.

Aside from some momentary excitement when the worm must’ve snagged on the bottom of the pond, we didn’t catch a thing.

Not even a nibble.

Poor kid.

For the second trip with #2 son, I got smart—I remembered a trick I used when I was a kid.

This time, we brought along a loaf of bread with us.

And before we started fishing, we spent 10-15 minutes tossing scraps of bread into the water.

Every little “splash” would attract attention from a few more fish, and pretty soon there were dozens of them circling just beneath the surface of the water.

They got so competitive they were going out of their minds and attacking the bread like a school of piranhas, jumping halfway out of the water to grab a mouthful.

NOW we’re ready to catch some fish.

My 4-year-old was loving it.

We’d bait up the hook with a little piece of bait, and just drop it in the water and—SLAM—a fat little sunfish would grab it half a second later.

At this point we could have sat there and hauled in fish after fish for hours on end.

There are so many good analogies between marketing and fishing.

Like the importance of finding out where the fish are—we walked all around the pond that day, and they had all congregated in this one spot.

Or the way scarcity and competition can spur IMMEDIATE action.

But the main takeaway here for your email marketing is:

Before you can catch a “fish,” you gotta start by giving them what they’re hungry for—that’s why email courses work so well.

And the emails have to be bite-sized too, so they just whet the appetite and leave ’em hungry for more.

But once you have their attention, and they know that every “splash” in their inbox means something good just landed…

Well, how hard will it be to get them to bite?