How to keep an email swipe file (and why one email isn't enough)
Sign up, forward, keep the order. How to build an email swipe file that saves whole onboarding and lifecycle sequences, not just nice-looking one-offs.
TLDR
- Most email swipe files are screenshots of pretty emails. That’s the least useful part of an email.
- What you want is the sequence: which email came when, what triggered it, and the gap before the next one.
- Sign up for things with an address that saves every email automatically, then forget about it.
- Save the email itself, not a screenshot, so you keep the subject line, the preheader and the links.
What people save, and what they should
Scroll through anyone’s “email inspo” folder and it’s the same thing: nice-looking newsletters and Black Friday promos, screenshotted. Great for a designer. Almost useless when you’re writing an onboarding flow, because the design is the part you’ll change anyway.
The useful stuff is invisible in a screenshot:
- The subject line and preheader. Half the job, and a screenshot of the body doesn’t have it.
- The timing. Did the day 2 email come 48 hours after signup, or the morning after?
- The trigger. Did it come because you did something (or didn’t)?
- The order. Welcome, then value, then social proof, then the ask? Or the ask on day 1?
A single email out of a sequence is like one frame of a film.
How to collect sequences without trying
- Use a separate address. Not your work inbox, not your personal one. A Gmail you only use for this is fine.
- Sign up for everything in your space. Every competitor’s free trial, every tool someone mentioned on a podcast, every DTC brand whose ads you keep seeing. Start the trial, then do nothing. The “you haven’t done X yet” emails are the best ones.
- Also buy something small. Transactional and post-purchase emails are a whole genre, and you only get them if you actually check out.
- Abandon a cart on purpose. You’ll get the abandonment sequence, often something like 1 hour, 24 hours and 3 days later. Now you know what everyone else is sending.
Where the emails should end up
A Gmail label works until you want to find “that welcome email with the checklist” and Gmail search gives you 400 receipts.
Better options:
- A forwarding rule from your spare address to wherever you keep your swipe file.
- Public libraries for browsing. Really Good Emails has thousands of emails by category, and Milled is a searchable archive of retail newsletters. Great for “what do other people send on Mother’s Day”. Less great for your specific competitors.
In Savepad, forwarded emails are saved as emails, rendered the way they arrived, with trackers blocked, and search reads the subject and the body. For sequences, each one gets its own forwarding address. Sign up for a competitor’s trial with it and every email they send gets appended to the sequence, in order, with the time between them. You come back two weeks later and the whole flow is sitting there.
How to sort it
Folders by type of email, because that’s how briefs come in:
- Welcome and onboarding
- Trial and upgrade
- Abandoned cart and browse
- Win-back (“we miss you”)
- Transactional (receipts, shipping, password resets)
- Newsletters
- Launches and announcements
Then tags for what’s interesting about it: #plain-text, #founder-voice, #one-cta, #gif, #dark-mode-broken.
What to write down
For every sequence, three lines: what the product wanted you to do, how many emails before they asked, and what they did when you didn’t. That’s the strategy, and after ten sequences you’ll see the patterns everyone copies from everyone else.
If you’re writing a welcome email this week, there’s a post on welcome email examples, and the subject line preview shows how yours gets cut off in Gmail, Apple Mail and Outlook.