First of all, thank you so much for tuning in, whether you’re tuning in now, whether you’re tuning in a day from now, I mean, we’ve been promoting these things like crazy.
Today, we’re going to talk about how to write email copy for your email list, whether it’s an email auto-respond or whether it’s writing a broadcast email, whatever.
The whole goal of building an email list is building distribution so you’re able to email your list whenever you want to promote something. If you want to create a new product, then you email your list. Furthermore, if you want to offer a new service, you email your list. If you want to recession-proof your business, you email your list. That’s probably one of the biggest things in looking back over my career, the email list is something I struggled to create, I struggled to wrap my mind around it at first because I was like, “Well, I’m writing these blog posts and I’m getting traffic from the search engine.”
That traffic is just always going to be there. I’m always going to be able to leverage the search engine traffic and whatever, but the thing about it is, Google updates their algorithms and you might not be getting search traffic in the future. You might have a down month and you have to stop advertising. A pandemic might strike and all of a sudden, you don’t know where your next deals are going to come from. The doors might shut and you don’t know how to get in front of your customers and your clients and your prospects anymore because you never took the time to put together an email list in the first place.
This is some of the reliability and the stability that you get from having an email list because when you have an email list, you can write an email copy about anything you want to them and press Send and they receive it. Well, 96%-ish of them receive, will it? That’s why email is important for your business. You need to grow your email list and use email marketing software to house your list, to market it to them, and all of that stuff. That’s why email marketing is important.
Now, on Monday, we talked about some email marketing maintenance and how often to mail, how frequently you need to mail them, what you should be emailing them, all of that kind of stuff. Yesterday, we talked about lead generation and how to generate leads and seven different ways that you can generate leads, usually through a lead magnet or survey, and then we talked about some other ways.
Today, what we’re going to do is talk about email copy and writing an email copy for your list. Now, luckily, not but I wrote an article probably three years ago, so I’m going to drop that in the list here or drop that in the comments. This article, the title of it is Writing Email Copy: How to Write Email Copy That Converts.
We’re going to go through this article because there are some good solid points in here. Number one and number two, I’m going to take this video once I’m done and I’m going to put it right at the top here and put it right at the top of this blog post, update the blog post, and then it’s going to rank about four or five pages higher in Google because that is how content optimization works.
Writing Email Copy: How to Write Email Copy That Converts Without Being a Copywriter, that’s the biggest thing. On some of my early, early copywriting days, I had a website called Marketing Hacks. On this website, I started talking a lot about marketing because I loved marketing and then we started doing product reviews and I started making a bunch of money on product reviews.
There was this one blog post that got better search traffic than anything else that we had. It was this blog post about creating slogans, how to make a slogan, how to create a slogan for your business. We were getting to like 2,500 visitors a day to this blog post. I was like, “Well, if people are coming to the website to learn more about slogans, then it must be that I need to create a product for slogans.”
Wouldn’t you know, people were coming to the blog post, they didn’t want to buy a product about a slogan. This is one of those things like yesterday in the accelerated training, I talked about problems and solutions. People didn’t have a problem creating solutions, they just wanted inspiration. Same thing, same reason why you go to Pinterest. You don’t necessarily want to buy plans to put together a coffee table, but you want to be inspired by having plans or seeing coffee table designs so that you know how to put one together yourself. That’s the purpose of… It’s not the purpose of Pinterest, but you get it.
What happened was I ended up rewriting the same copy over and over and over again trying to get this thing to work. There were marginal incremental improvements from click-throughs and stuff, but in that particular product, never did transfer into something that was a barn-burner product. We sold some, not a lot, but we still generate some revenue with it.
Now, what happened was is the discipline in rewriting the copy over and over and over again helped me be a better copywriter. Now, having written thousands of video sales letters and hundreds of webinars, maybe thousands of webinars, and tens of thousands of emails, I still don’t necessarily even call myself a copywriter, but when I write email copy, I always intend for it to convert.
The biggest point of being a copywriter, especially when writing email marketing and writing email copy is you want it to convert.
The process, very simply, is you have anywhere between one email and four emails that link to a sales page or link to some sort of a page. That sales page, that advertorial is the conduit to the order form. The email’s only job is to get somebody to open the email, click the email, and then go to the sales page. Then you let the sales page do what it does, which is sold. At the end of the day, that’s what a sales page does: It sells things. That’s how the process ends up unfolding: email into a sales page, ultimately into an order form.
Now, every person who receives your email, they have to do three things before they hit your sales page. They have to open your email, they have to start to read your body copy, and then they have to click a link in the email somewhere. What the email needs to do is it needs to do something called “pre-framing,” which is an NLP thing, neuro-linguistic programming. Successfully pre-framing someone is all about setting them up to take action on the next page after they click the link in your email.
For instance, if an email copy reads, imagine using some technique to sharpen your client’s photos. This strategy has served as inspiration for a lot of the landscape photos that I’ve been talking about. The conditions are like this X and Y, this X technique or this Y strategy. Pre-framing is the biggest difference between marketers who make huge money and marketers who don’t. The email pre-frames them into the sales copy. It alludes to, it gives clues to what they’re going to be able to do on the sales copy without necessarily pitching them. It increases their interest and their desire before they hit the sales page and then end up taking action.
Copywriting is really about starting with the end in mind. No matter what how you write email copy or sales copy, whether it’s even a blog post, it’s about knowing where you want your prospects to go and then helping them get there. An email is one of the biggest proponents, one of the biggest things about it.
Let’s say you have a webinar that you want them to sign up for. The goal of the email is you have this live webinar. A live webinar is going to be is, it’s Wednesday, so next Tuesday at 3:00 PM Eastern. Next Tuesday at 3:00 in the afternoon. The goal is to get them to sign up for the webinar. Now, you need to take yourself back and say, “All right, how many emails do I need to send an order to get them to sign up for the webinar?” Okay, I need to send, let’s say, three or four. I can send one a day, maybe one Friday, one Sunday, one Monday, and then two on Tuesday. That would be five emails.
The goal, in the end, the goal that we’re looking to hit is for people to sign up for the webinar. All right, to get somebody to sign up for the webinar, meaning the webinar link, we need the webinar landing page, we need the webinar copy. We need to be able to talk through three or four or five emails about what we’re going to talk about on the webinar. We need to already have the webinar done.
One of my things with webinars is usually I just start. I come up with a webinar title and then what I’m going to teach on the webinar and then I’m going to email the webinar and then I come up with the webinar content about 30 minutes before the actual webinar. It’s just always been that way, I don’t know why, for a webinar.
Now, if it’s a sale, if you’re trying to get somebody to take action on an offer or book a strategy session, then you’re going to start in the end in mind there. Throughout three or four emails, you’re going to tell them, increase their interest in their desire through the email copy to get them to take action on the sales page itself. Just having that end in mind informs a lot of the rest of these decisions.
Your email open rate is 100% based on the subject line and even the pre-headline, that headline that now in a lot of CRMs you can have an intro paragraph. It opens up in Gmail, basically, because Gmail, you have your subject line and then you have that first paragraph. With typical email, the first line in the email is usually what the pre-heading is. In CRM, you can define it.
Some great ways of writing a strong subject line: You can ask a question, how-to subject lines are great, subject lines with numbers or percentages are fantastic. Numbers, percentages, dollar signs, any kind of thing that jars them out of whatever they’re seeing in their inbox. If you could be different, then it works. You see a lot of this with emojis now. When I wrote this, emojis weren’t a thing, but now, there are so many big retailers are putting emojis in the subject line just to jar you out of whatever’s in there. I like using pluses, minuses, parentheses, brackets, percentages, any of them. I should probably redo this 100 Most-Opened Subject Lines PDF, now that I’m thinking about it.
Some elements of a great subject line are curiosity, contradiction, specificity, personal touch, and instant usability. I tend to go right to instant usability. I’m more a how-to guy. The how-to stuff resonates with me a lot better, that’s how I end up writing, but nothing beats good AB testing, split-testing email subject lines. In Ontraport, you can do it and set up ABCD tests. In a lot of CRMs, you can set up email testing in there.
Then once the subject line is written, the rest falls to the text that is in the rest of the body. Now, HTML emails are really popular. Having image-heavy emails work better than they did in the past, but for a lot of our clients and even for a lot of our stuff, we still have just straight-up, text-based email. It’s not image, it’s not newsletter-pretty. A lot of the direct-response copywriters are still just text-based and it works out well.
The goal of the email body is to get them to read down to the point where we make a call to action and they click that link or they click the button or the image or whatever. Once they click the email, the email’s job is done. That’s all that that email was supposed to do: It was supposed to get opened and it was supposed to get red and it was supposed to get clicked. That’s it. Once that happens, email’s done.
The only thing at that point is the email sits there from a legacy standpoint so that if they click and then they go off to your sales page, then the email is still sitting in their inbox, which means they can go back and look at it in the future or they can come back to it a couple of days later if there’s something that they liked that you said or that you said that they liked, so they can come back and take action on it then.
Getting the click is really, it’s the biggest thing. For a long time, the actual CTA link should have been the subject link. The subject got them to open up the email. Now, the reasoning was that if the link inside the email was the same as the subject, they would click that much more easily, which is still true, but now we always just use an anchor link and it’s “Click here to watch the video, click here for blah, blah, blah.” Every once in awhile, we’ll do a two-lined link, so it’s like “Click here to watch the video,” and then “Return.” That reveals the five-step process and then that whole two-line link is hyperlinked to the sales page.
There are lots of different ways and every list is a little bit different, but make sure to make your calls to action overt, like they’re ready to be clicked. Make it apparent this is what they need to do. Don’t send emails that don’t have a link to go somewhere because you want to train your email list to click the links in your email. Don’t send more than two emails that don’t have any sort of action. We always want them to go somewhere.
Another thing you can do is include a clickable image. This can be a button, it can be a… I do it all the time for these live streams, like the actual live stream image, the cover photo is clickable. Some people will click it. A lot of people will click it. You can use the double-line link trick, which is what I just described. Rather than “Click here,” you use something like, “Here, click here to download the Hundred Most-Opened Subject Lines Report.”
This one is pretty sweet, this list-style link trick. I’ve done this on quite a few things. Basically, you ask a question. You say “Click the answer below that you resonate with,” or, “Click the best answer below,” or, “Click whatever.”. Each of these goes through the same page, but what you’re doing is you can either even fire off a little automation action on the backside. We’ve done this to put people into buckets.
This link, you end up… Let’s say, what is the most important area of a sales funnel? Okay, you have a landing page, sales page, confirmation page, upscale copy. Well, what you can do is the person who clicks these things, you then put them into a bucket. In that bucket, you serve up marketing material about that one thing that they wanted. It’s pretty sweet stuff. You also want to make sure to spell it out. “Click here,” “Download this PDF,” those are all super powerful things from a copy standpoint.
You want to write email copy in a narrow format… This used to be a thing. The narrow email copy used to be important because you wanted them to read it like a newspaper, something that was nice and pretty slim, but now, with a mobile device, most of your email is read on a mobile device. A lot of it, I should say. That’s one of the reasons why HTML newsletters have worked out so well because they give you that slim frame and then it’s responsive. It works on devices, it works on desktops, which is nice just for the simple fact that you don’t have to worry about the carriage returns. It’s one of the nice parts of the HTML newsletter is it is responsive like that.
I always batch by writing. If I know that I’m going to be promoting a webinar, then I sit down and write email copy in chunks of four or five emails at the same time, without a doubt. I don’t write one and then go somewhere else and then write another and then the next day read another. I always batch them so that I can maintain a good, strong story throughout and have continuity between the emails.
The other nice thing is when you’re in that headspace, it’s easy to knock out three or four more emails as opposed to just the one. We built our AXIS email copy software just for this, so basically, you can go and populate all of two minutes. You can populate a week’s worth of email in like two or three minutes and then that’s that. Batching writing, I mean, I’ve just always done it that way.
The same with lead magnets and sales videos and webinars. It’s easier just to knock everything from a client out in four hours than it is to try to revisit it over and over and over again because you have that whole mental switching. It takes like 14 minutes or 16 minutes to move from one task to another mentally.
You always want to make sure to do include bonding emails, too. Not every email should be a pitch. You want to include content emails, blog posts, live streams, videos. Also, you want to include things that people are going to resonate with. Things that people are going to get value from that aren’t a pitch. You can always have a pitch in your stuff. We can say, “If you want to schedule an action plan call, go to doneforyou.com/start.”. Nice, easy, simple, but it’s not the point of it. The point of it is to just give content and help educate. Help give some a has and go from there, you know what I mean?
That’s the point of all of it. That should be the point of your email. You always want to include something clickable and actionable. Even if you don’t have content, like you’re not creating content daily on demand like this, you can always link to an old blog post.
I mean, this email, the one that we’re talking about, I think I wrote three years ago. It ranks great, it gets great search traffic, but it needs an update. I was like, “Well, I might as well just do a Livestream, knock off two birds with one stone, get this video transcribed, drop the transcription at the end, and then put the video up top.” Then instantly, this turns into a six or 7,000-word blog post with a video and it will crush the search engine in like a week. Yeah, I might as well just do that, right? That’s the idea behind the bonding and behind the bonding we do the bonding, writing email copy that gets clicks, gets links, all that other stuff.
Do you have any questions? In the comment box, just let me know, any questions at all. All right, cool. Now, I think that’s all I wanted to cover today was the copy piece of it. I think while we’re here, I am going to kick through AXIS and show you can get this stuff created quickly. If you go to triggers.the app, Triggers is where our AXIS CRM lives. Underneath Email Copy, it’s going to walk through the email copy app that we have. I call it the “autoresponder engine” because that’s basically what it does. Email copy app.
It was funny, I was telling a friend that I was doing this presentation today. He was like, “Why the hell are you teaching people how to write email copy? Just have them go to your software.”. I’m like, “Yeah, but still, you got to know how to write email copy even just a tiny, tiny bit to get value from it.”. All right, that is where you are going to learn about the email copy app.
Now, I’m going to just go to log in and show you. I’m going to go to Log In. All right. We are logged into a test account on AXIS. Now, over here in the left-hand ribbon, just to walk you through a little bit. Some of you may know, some you may not, but basically, we have our dashboard. There’s a dashboard, there is a marketplace where it has different apps. There’s email copy analytics, there’s a page builder, it has the Zapier integration and Twilio integration, so it’ll send SMS messages, then we have our CRM over here. We got Dashboard, Contacts, Forms, Message Center, Campaigns, which are pretty sweet because it’s all drag-and-drop. Anybody, just send me a message on Facebook here if you want to go through a little demo of this. It’s pretty sweet software.
The point of today is the email copy piece. Let me just make this a little bit bigger so you can take a look. All right, now, if we go into… This envelope here is our email copy app. Basically, what it is is because everything we do is starting with the end in mind. Here, we’re just going to hit Add New and we’re going to say I want to create a free-plus-shipping offer. Yeah, free-plus-shipping email copy for the book, let’s say. Okay.
There are all kinds of email sequences in here: post-webinar, pre-webinar, re-engagement, ascension, all that stuff. We have a free-plus-shipping sequence in here. There it is, free plus shipping. Then there are 20 different affiliated sequences here, which are going through an update right now. We select the free-plus-shipping offer and then we go down to Next.
Now, here it’s going to ask us questions about what it is we’re trying to create. What we’re trying to create is an email copy. We can have a persona in here and we can select an offer. We’re just going to fill this all in manually. We’re going to have “My name is Jason.” The product is going to be a converted book. The product topic is going to be “How to be a badass marketer.” An archetype is a book. Link is going to be “doneforyou.com.” Product inventory is unlimited. The buyer main goal is “To buy shit.” The high-ticket product type is going to be coaching. Nah, Done For You funnels. Then product benefits we have, so we’re just going to say benefit one, benefit… We’re just going to fill these in. You get the point. You can add benefits if you want.
Now, when we hit Next, it’s going to write email copy for us, so we’re going to hit Next. Remember, this is a free-plus-shipping offer. We start with the end in mind. All of our email sequences here end up outputting into… There we go. All of the email copy, or all of the email sequences, ended up outputting into the dashboard here. Let me just go… I’m going to need to refresh here.
There it is. The free-plus-shipping email copy for the book, we’re going to preview this guy. Don’t you know, it’s probably not going to come up. There we go. Hmm, a little weird, but anyway. What ends up happening is it’ll write an email copy. Then you get to output it as a text file. You get to end up putting it inside your CRM in the message center.
You end up getting emails that look like this. We have the email. The email is going to be the subject line closing. Then here, we just have a very, very, very short email body. It ends up working out. It just automatically gets pushed up into the message center. Here, we have “Are you in?” Then we have “Today’s the last day to join us here,” “Are you in?” Blah, blah, blah, features and benefits. Then we have “Every module has been painstakingly put together,” and so on. All of your email copy’s already created and then you end up just editing and firing it out.
That’s the idea for all of the sequences in place. Then in terms of sequences, there’s a lot of different ones. So we have the flash sales and single physical products and blog sequences, lead magnet sequences. A lot of different stuff you can end up playing with.
Check the AXIS app if you want or you can write an email copy on your own, either way. It takes a lot longer to write an email copy your own. Where I discovered this was, I was probably writing 50 to 70 emails a day. It was about four years ago when Sebastian was little. I discovered that the email copy between offers is very much the same. I was like, “Well, if we build a piece of software for it, then I can just edit stuff that’s already working as opposed to not.”. That’s where the inspiration for it and then the CRM was built around it and everything else.
If you have any questions at all, send me a message inside the group or on the Facebook page. Go to doneforyou.com/start and book a call with my team and we can look at marketing automation, email copy, sales funnels, the whole deal.
