It was the best of times, it was the worst of times. And the clocks were striking thirteen. Call me Ishmael. Is Your Answer Yes.

All of these are famous opening lines that hooked people immediately … and the subject line of an email I received last week. Yes, really.

So how do you make sure you write the former and not the latter? Well, that’s a lofty aim— those are all-time classics. But you can consistently write great openers by following some basic guidelines.

The exact approach you should take will depend on what you’re writing, and in what context. We’re going to run through the most important things to consider when you’re opening a blog post, an email, or an ebook, and then cover some general tips.

Let’s get started.

Opening a Blog Post

Since people consistently scan content in a broad F-shape, the opening consistently gets the most attention of everything on the page, and messing it up is likely to be disastrous. This is a blog post of sorts, and here’s how I tried to hook you:

I initially went with a question (“how do you write the perfect opener?”) because that’s a very strong approach. It gets the reader thinking and establishes a strange feeling of obligation that feeds off one of the many quirks in human psychology: when we’re asked a question, we can’t really help but consider the answer.

This is extremely common, and you can see it in the below post from Mark Manson:

Following that, I worked back and gave it a lead-in built from very recognizable parts. I don’t imagine there are many people who won’t get the references, and they work perfectly for the juxtaposition with the horrendous email I received.

Bringing in the email was an element of storytelling— I gave you a little insight into my life, which made it clear to you that this piece wouldn’t be a dry statement of tactics.

Another way to achieve that is to make a bold claim that you think may be controversial, or repeat it if you already did so in your title, as in this post from Sebastian Marshall:

I find the post itself a little inconsistent, but the opening is killer. It cuts straight to the point, no equivocating, no hedging. Try doing something similar. If the median time spent reading a blog post is just 37 seconds, you don’t have a huge amount of time to play with.

Opening an Email

An email is a particularly slippery creature because you have to hit the mark on not one but two openers: the opening line of the content, and the subject line. This is because we’re so inundated with garbage emails and spam on a daily basis that we’ve become accustomed to simply ignoring most of our inbox influxes. Even the industry with the highest opening rates, ‘Hobbies’, only hits an average of 28.46%.

The subject line doesn’t give you much space to work with, either, though on the bright side that means there’s little benefit from spending too much time on it. It can only really get so effective, and past that point, you’re just wasting effort. Consider that between 1-20 characters are demonstrably the optimal length for just about any kind of marketing email.

Use personalization, but only if you can do it tastefully (remember that bad example from the intro), and use humor, but keep it appropriate for the context. Questions work well if they’re actually interesting and the answers are plausibly inside the emails. Draft something, run it through an email subject line tester to check that you’ve covered your bases, then move on.

The opening of the email proper must agree with the subject line, either by confirming the topic before moving on or by immediately following it up. If there seems to be no connection between the subject line and the opening, the reader may well feel misled and back out of the email entirely. This Virgin email confirmation does the job nicely:

Remember that marketing emails are action-focused. They may look to inform as well, but they are all about driving conversions. If you want to go straight into a CTA, and you feel it works in the context, then do it. If you’re doing mass email, you’ll have the advantage of being able to A/B testing with it anyway, so if it doesn’t work, you can change it. This Loupe design conference email keeps it simple:

You should also send email on a Tuesday, apparently— though your mileage may vary.

Opening an Ebook

What is an ebook but a version of a book that the reader is slightly less invested in? If you’ve gone to the trouble of buying a book, or even just borrowing it from a library, you’ve put some time into acquiring it. It would be a waste not to read it. But an ebook, well, you can get a trial, or a preview, and disregard it on a whim…

I’m really just saying that the opening actually means a little more for an ebook, so while you’ll be using the same tactics as authors since time immemorial, you’ll be under more pressure to show that yours is worth reading. There are plenty of terrible ebooks out there.

You should start by considering what type of text you’re offering. An absurdist fiction can have a confusing opening, but a step-by-step beginner’s guide to marketing needs something very clear. The opening sets the tone for the rest and reassures the reader that they do indeed have the right ebook— it has to match their expectation to some extent.

If it’s a guide, tell them what they can expect, leading to a breakdown of the contents. If it’s in the form of a narrative, tell them what you intend them to learn from it.

There is only really one rigid rule of opening an ebook, and that is to know your audience well enough that you can cater it to their tastes. As long as you get that part right (and get some dispassionate feedback before you push anything into broad distribution), you’ll know what you can and can’t get away with, leaving you to get creative within those parameters.

General Tips

No matter what your type of opening, you should aim to hook people, and keep it concise. Don’t forget to mention something of value, as a hook with no bait won’t catch much fish. And if you want to throw in some stylistic flair, why not? Provided you don’t go overboard with it, people will appreciate the change.

One more thing: even though your opening is what opens the copy, you shouldn’t write it first. Great copy is often assembled piecemeal, slowly, chunk by chunk. Writing the first line before you’ve written anything else generally guarantees two things: it won’t end up matching the rest of the content, and it won’t be any good.

About the Author: Kayleigh Toyra: Content Strategist Half-Finnish, half-British marketer based in England. I love to write and explore themes like storytelling and customer experience. I manage a small team of marketers at a boutique agency.