Have you ever seen a nine word email?


Hello Reader,

I learned a great acronym from Col Fink recently, during a live workshop at Thought Leaders Business School. He calls these SPEAR emails:

  • Short
  • Personal
  • Expecting
  • A
  • Reply

Contrast this with LINEAR emails:

  • Long
  • Impersonal
  • Not
  • Expecting
  • A
  • Reply

When we are nervous about making sales outreach, we confuse our communications by complicating it with all sorts of reasons to respond that muddy the message. SPEAR emails get responses. LINEAR emails don't.

Have you ever heard of the 'nine word email' before?

You may have seen one of these short, concise messages in your own inbox.

Here are some examples that I have received recently:

These are SPEAR emails. Even though they could be automated, or longer than nine words, a message like this can be used on LinkedIn or Facebook Messenger or sent via SMS. These SPEAR messages are more likely to get a reply than a LINEAR message.

Deciding what to say, in advance, is the hard part.

As Mark Twain supposedly said, "If I had more time, I would have written you a shorter letter." Distilling your call-to-action down to just nine words takes a great deal of forethought and revision.

That's why I made a template Google Doc, to make the CTA writing process easy. This short 3-minute video illustrates the importance of separating the Buying Decision from the Call-To-Action:

If you want to duplicate my template and write clear and concise CTAs for your own SPEAR emails, get the workbook here:

GenAI Training Newsletter

Generative AI improves your Productivity, Creativity, and Strategy - but only if you build the GenAI Habit. Learning how to incorporate GenAI Training into your day will help knowledge workers prepare for the future of work.

Read more from GenAI Training Newsletter
GenAI panel

“AI adoption is not just about the short-term gains. Organizations need to invest in the efficiency of the design, deployment, and integration of AI solutions to their operations that enable tracking of the impact.” - Fan Ho, ED/GM of Solutions and Services Group, Lenovo Asia Pacific Hello Reader, As an immigrant, I have an outsider's perspective on New Zealand. (I recently received my citizenship, making me the Newest Zealander!) During the first workshop of the AI Training Programme I teach...

“This is the last frontier of media - billions of people making high-end content.” - Chris Valenzuela, Runway CEO Hello Reader, Prompt engineers are movie producers now. Producing video content used to require access to equipment, and talent, and funding. Not anymore. Now, you don't need a movie studio, or a graphics budget, or any skills. Just a good idea (and good taste!) can make a good movie, with a little prompting. Google's new Veo 3 model has generated some amazing new videos on the...

“AI is very good at content, but not context. Without context, it doesn’t know what to do, so it doesn’t have any purpose.” - Daniel Priestley Hello Reader, The quality of your AI outputs depends on the context you give it. What is Context with AI? Think of it like having a conversation. If your partner doesn’t know what you’ve been talking about, how can they respond well? Context is the information behind the content. Developing context is how I refine my prompts, shape my visuals, and...