The Original Conversion Copywriter, Joanna Wiebe
Teaches You About Writing Emails That Sell

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TRANSCRIPT

Hey again, Joanna here from Copyhackers. Today we’re going to be talking about how to write sales emails. I hesitate to say that because I know that most people dread the idea of selling at all, never mind selling an email. But I really hope that you can put aside any thoughts you have about that, any negative thoughts you have about it, focus on the positive. As we talk today about trying to take what you’re doing with growing your list and getting people engaged, we want to get you to a point where you feel good about making money with email by sending emails that are intended to get your visitor to do something big, such as giving you money in exchange for something of super high value.

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So I’ve said it before and I will say it again: email marketing is the growth engine for Copyhackers. Everything else feeds it, and everything else gets that by it thankfully. I wish I’d known years ago, when I was doing email marketing for other people, just how much you could do with emails – where you don’t have to feel a scuzzbucket, or you can try different tactics, different ways of expressing your message and things like that, that get people to want to buy from you.

I wish I had known that it doesn’t have to be all scammy or all very passive and soft. But, there is a happy medium. There’s a space in there where you can have a promotion or have something that you’re trying to launch, to re-launch, or to discount potentially, and to offer some sort of incentive to, say, your software users, to upgrade things like that. So let’s talk about that today, and we’re going to get into a couple of things. Let’s dive right in.

By now you’ve set up a couple of lists, and the goal is to cultivate relationships with the people on those lists, absolutely, and to do that in order to eventually sell to them. And we’re looking right now at my swipe file. When we’re talking about sales emails there’s so many different things you can do in your email to sell for the various different scenarios in which people want to promote something, and the different types of products you’ll be promoting to different audiences and so forth. There’s a lot email marketing, and it’s nowhere near it seems as cut and dry as writing your homepage, or your plans and pricing page.

Because I can’t teach you everything there is to know about email marketing, and I’m sure you already know a lot, I want to give you a tip, a very, very important tip, very useful tip that will help you as you move forward with considering writing emails that are intended to sell. And that is it. You should have swipe files set up.

Now, we’re looking right now here at all of these, this entire, everything you’re seeing under here is part of my swipe file. This is a general swipe file category. Email Marketing Swipes is what’s it’s fully called. And then you can see I’ve got quite a bit in there, over 3,000 emails in a general uncategorized area. Probably not the best thing to have, just a general down for a swipe file. Rather, I recommend that you have a couple of interesting useful swipe files set up.

When time comes for you to write let’s say your first launch, you’re launching a new product, you’re ready to start communicating that to people, you may want to have a swipe file that’s called “Great Launch Campaigns.” Then, within that, all you have to do is go into that swipe file “Great Launch Campagins” and see the three or four emails that someone might have sent out to launch their new product. Then, you can repeat what they did rather than sitting and staring at your screen and wanting to freak out because you don’t know where to start. So put together a swipe file.

Now I have 13 tips for writing sales emails. Half of these are mindset oriented and the other half are tactical, like how you’ll actually go ahead and write the sales email. They’re not going to cover everything. Again, we can’t. But I find that these help me get through my challenges when it comes time to write the first sales email or write the seventh one to a smaller segment, and you are like, “Ah, these people hate me now,” right when you’re freaking about writing sales emails. This can help you.

Number one is you do not need a massive list. You don’t need a huge list. What you need is an engaged list. A fresher list is usually better for people who have shown that they really care about stuff, that maybe have been with you since the beginning, that keep opening your emails that you can find by segmenting them. So you don’t need a massive list. You need an engaged list.

Within that you may want to try to sell to your new subscribers within the first two or three weeks of their signing up. Now, that might sound crazy, like, why would I do it then? Again, people who have signed up to hear from you, and are opening your emails early on, are really good leads. Just to get them comfortable with buying from you, if you have something really high value that was inexpensive it can be a good idea to get them to buy on something small early on. Nothing huge. I wouldn’t promote a mastermind class to somebody who’s in the first two to three weeks necessarily. Something that gets them cool with buying from you and where they can actually see that the stuff that they buy from you is really high value.

Further, it’s a really good idea to cleanse old lists or to segment out people who show that they’ve been around a while and are no longer really opening emails from you. Again, our goal is not to build a huge list. You could send out an email to people who have low engagement with you, who maybe have been around for two years or something and are not actually really engaged with you. Two years is a long time. It could be six months that they haven’t been opening emails from you. You can either suppress emails that go to them, segment them out, or you can create a new email segment just for them and send them an email that says, “Hey, are you still interested?” because you don’t want uninterested people or disinterested people on your list.

Number two, when people unsubscribe, that is a good thing. You probably think it’s a bad thing. It feels gross, especially if someone wrote to you and said, “I don’t like that email,” or “This doesn’t seem valuable at anymore,” or whatever and you feel like, “Oh, why do I even do this?” Obviously I’ve had that feeling before. But really, it comes down to not worrying about those people. Unsubscribers are good. If they don’t want to hear from you anymore, they shouldn’t be on your list anymore. That’s okay.

Number three remember that if you lose someone, someone unsubscribes, they can always re-subscribe to you. They may not dig you right now, but a year from now, when they read another guest post or they see something really cool happening with your company, they can come back. An unsubscriber unsubcribes today, they may come back tomorrow. Don’t let your heart get broken by seeing them go.

When you’re selling in your email you should never be passive with your attempt to sell. And I say that I don’t mean you should always be aggressive, I’m thinking at all. A passive or soft sale can be good early on in your drip campaign that you do for your micro course. But actually, if your goal is to get someone to buy because you’re doing a sales email campaign, and that’s really what you’re trying to do with it otherwise why are you doing a sale email campaign if don’t want them to buy.

If you want them to buy and you have something valuable for them, don’t be passive about it. You don’t have to go on and on and on and on. Of course you don’t have to push at them. But, we want to sell. Be okay with selling. You’re allowed to sell. In fact, if you don’t sell, your business dies. That’s it. That’s it. That’s it. I know I’m getting dramatic now, but it really comes down to choosing your business over these misconceptions you may have about what it is to sell and selling ugly.

I often opt for long form narrative style of writing when I’m doing sales emails. You don’t have to. But a story can go a long way toward getting people to click and move to your landing page. When we’re going to do the selling we’re going to talk about those long form landing pages tomorrow.

But that email that gets them to click through, it doesn’t have to be this big. People may say, “I don’t like your long emails.” But, it’s not about what people like. You only worry about what their clicks are showing you. So if they’re clicking through and you’re making sales, that’s the thing to pay attention to. If you’re not, if they’re not clicking through, and you’re not making sales, then of course obviously you have to pay attention to that and change things up.

Okay, now let’s talk tactical. I recommend a three-to-one rule for free content to sales content. I often get this question, “How often am I allowed to reach out to people and try to?” You should send them three great high-value free things before you send them one offer.

The next one, you already know from the other day’s lesson, create different lists for your different products. That way you can sell your different products to the right list and get higher conversion rates.

Next up, make sure those lists are specific, and within the more general let’s be sure to segment again as we talked about the other day. In most cases you’ll want to have an email campaign for your selling, so a sales campaign, where you send the first email potentially to the full list, full-targeted list, and then from there you’ll send emails based largely on their behaviors, did they open, did they not open. Two different emails for those two groups. Those who did open, there’s more you can do within there. Right, those who open and clicked.

There’s also other ways you can segment and get your message really nice and narrow. And it’s only going to require that you write a couple more emails, which is completely worth it if you’re selling something that’s actually going to make you money.

Another tactical one, you should split test your emails all the time well. And for sales emails, because you’re trying to move people from the email to the sales page, you’re not converting in the email itself, your microconverting there, you’re trying to get them to move from the colds actions in your email over to this landing page where you’ll actually close them, so it’s good to split test that email with the goal or metric of a click-through. So the email that has the higher click-through rate is the one that gets distributed or sent to the remainder of your list.

Give people notice that a product launch, a re-launch, or a promotion is on the horizon. So you have a list and you know you’re going be reaching out to them, going forward in two weeks or something, give them heads up. Get them a little bit excited about it. You don’t have to start selling from the first moment that you’re selling in email.

I recommend that you vary your long and short emails as you get further into the sales campaign, and closer to the end date. You might want to start having shorter emails as you go.

Different segments may require different length of email because you might want to say more to someone who opened and clicked twice for two different campaigns but has still not converted. You might want to talk to them a little differently that you talk to someone who hasn’t clicked at all on any of the sales emails you’ve sent.

Send an email on your last day, just hours before your promotion, and trust me, this works every time. Everybody I know who sells something online does this and it works, it works, it works. Try it. If it doesn’t work for you then write to me. When it does work for you, write to me too and tell me about it.

So you want to end your promotion at an hour at which you can physically cancel it and around a time where if you send an email a few hours before it closes, people are still in the spaces they need to be in order to convert. So if you’re in B2B they probably need to still be at work or in front of their computer doing work stuff in order to get that final email. What I like to do is end my promotions at 5 pm Pacific Time. Most people are cool with that, even Australia and other places deal with it, because you warned them in advance and it’s about them.

Okay, that is it for today. Your assignment, create these two folders at least, at least these two in your email and start storing email swipes starting today. The first one is “Email Swipes – Sales Emails I Opened,” and “Email Swipes – Sales Campaigns That Made Me Buy,” and the rest of the details follow.