First off – Thanks to Billy Mueller’s recent post of inspiration.

Top take aways:

Ask yourself: Are your emails easy to read?
“Less is more” scarcity is valuable
Extremely shareable content has more organic / viral engagement than most $ marketing spends
Be fearless in taking – strategic – swings at deeply connecting with your audience. Remember Hall of Famer Ty Cobb has the top-batting average EVER, with only a .366…

So don’t worry if you can’t bat a 1.000 with every marketing message or campaign you put out there!

Why is Wordle so popular? And can it help you write better emails?

Because everyone and their Aunt Gladys now texts me their daily scores, I decided to address this.

(To be fair, I text them all back. More on that shortly.)

Anyway, in case you’ve been in an underground bunker without internet access for the last several months, Wordle is a word guessing game that’s taken social media by storm.

It’s surprisingly simple: You have six guesses to figure out a new five-letter word each day. That’s pretty much it.

After every guess, you get shown feedback about which of the five letters you guessed correctly.

Letters in green mean they are exactly correct. Letters in yellow mean they’re in the word, but placed in the wrong spot. Gray letters are not in the word at all.

When you’re done, it looks something like this:

^^ (No spoiler alert necessary. The image below is from a few days ago. Don’t be so shocked that I started with the word EMAIL!)

It all started with me and my wife playing together over morning coffee. Molly is the self-proclaimed world’s worst speller. She was told by a teacher in grade school that she is a “creative speller.”

Yet despite that, she ends up guessing the winning word more than I do.

I’ve never finished a crossword puzzle in my entire life. And yet, I got hooked on Wordle immediately.

How could that happen? What turned this game into such a phenomenon?

I think it’s worth exploring why some things become so popular…

So let’s take a look at a few of the reasons and see if we can extract some email marketing or business lessons…

1. It’s generally not that tough.

It’s easy to get a win streak going with Wordle. I would guess that the average person solves the daily word 9 days out of 10.

So ask yourself: Are your emails easy to read? Because if they’re not, people aren’t going to keep opening them.

2. It has legitimate scarcity.

Wordle only releases one word per day to everyone. Once you’ve solved it, you have to wait until the next day to play again. It’s a great example of “less is more.”

(Of course, I’m an advocate of applying scarcity to your offers, not to the volume of email that you send out.

3. It’s extremely shareable. You can’t help but tell others about it.

Wordle did not go viral until the inventor came up with a easy way to share your results with friends in a spoiler-free fashion.

This is what it looks like when you text your results to someone:

Now, there are two ways to look at this…

The first is to frame this charitably and say that Wordle brings us all together to share in some intellectual fun.

In that case, the takeaway would be: Write emails that people would want to share.

Fair enough, that’s good enough for me.

But let’s consider something a little deeper:

We also want to feel superior to others.

I mean, we all think we’re better than average at pretty much everything, don’t we?

Polls, for instance, show that 89% of drivers think they are “better than average.” That means 39% of us are delusional!

So the other way to look at this is that sharing your Wordle result is an easy, point-and-click way to humble-brag.

And hey, if you failed to guess the winning word, well, tomorrow’s another day.

Point being: Understand the deeper motivations and desires of your market. And then speak to them.

What else?

Well, sending frequent emails gives you clues to your audience the way Wordle gives you clues to the winning five-letter word of the day.

The closer you can get to your emails being helpful and FUN, the more green you’re likely to see (if you get my drift, lol, and I know you do 🙂