Now we move into the bulk of the value delivery with emails 2-5.

That doesn’t mean we are only providing pure value. We’re a business so we are preparing to sell - we’re using these four emails to lay down the groundwork.

Let’s get started:

After Email 1 we’re going to continue our charm crusade.

We’ll use the next 4 emails to keep dropping value bombs and then transition into the second phase (the sale) in emails 6-10.

Why 4 emails? Well. It actually doesn’t need to be. It really depends on how big your first sale is.

If someone has just signed up for your email list and your first sale is $10 I’d say use 1 email to welcome them and give them a gift and then the second email moves immediately to the sale.

$10 is small enough to be an impulse purchase. It still needs to be super valuable (don’t shortchange yourself by selling crap!) but it doesn’t need 10 emails to get someone to a $10 sale.

If, conversely, your first sale is $1000 then you’ll probably need more than 10 emails. Scale your sequence up accordingly.

Not sure how many emails you’ll need? Find others in your niche who have similar priced product and see how many emails they send for that - generally they’ll have dialled in on that length of sequence over time.

We’re using 10 emails (5 value, 5 sale) as a happy medium. This will let you sell a product or service from $50-500 which will cover most eventualities.

False Beliefs

We are going to continue to deliver value over the next 4 emails. Overdeliver if possible.

This means very valuable, helpful emails. And more free gifts. Our aim is to overwhelm with goodwill.

One option here is simply to find your top 4 blog articles, videos, newsletters, lead magnets or any other known popular asset. Then deliver these one at a time as a “best-of” sequence.

This is a decent start but let’s get a bit more sophisticated.

We want to use each email to bust a false belief. Which each false belief we knock down we get closer to a sale.

For example in my world of AI entrepreneurship false beliefs might include:

• I can’t use AI because I’m not technically savvy

• I can’t start a business now because the economy is in the toilet

• starting a business using AI is expensive and I can’t afford it

These are all false beliefs that I’ve run into in my time writing, teaching and consulting. And they are all false beliefs I know I can disprove.

Once I’ve done so I can help people move out of the way of themselves. We really are our own worst enemy at times!

Start by thinking about what your customers’ false beliefs are. Use your experience here but here’s a ChatGPT prompt to get you thinking:

Act as a market researcher
My niche is [niche details]
My ideal customer is [avatar details]

First, give me 10 questions I can ask to subtly elicit their false beliefs about the topic. 

Second, give me 10 examples of what their false beliefs could be.

As an example I’ve plugged in:

My niche is AI entrepreneurship
My ideal customer is people who have always wanted to start their first business but have not taken the plunge

This gives me two main outputs. First the questions I can use to poll my audience to gauge false beliefs:

and second some examples of false beliefs:

Ideally use the questions to start asking your audience. See what they respond to. If in doubt though use the list ChatGPT generated for you. As always though data from actual customers (rather than ChatGPT!) will give you better answers.

Busting makes me feel good

We want to hone in on the 4 most prevalent and dangerous false beliefs.

And then use our 4 emails to knock these down.

Identify them manually (keep talking to your audience and customers and this will become clearer) or use a prompt like this:

Bust these false beliefs:
[list out false beliefs]

and for each suggest a tool/resource I can give audience members to help them shake their false belief.

Here’s one example from above - “AI is too complex”:

This would lead me to write an email where I specifically talk about how using AI tools like ChatGPT is actually very simple. I bust the belief.

If you can use Whatsapp you can use ChatGPT - that would be my hook. I’d then expand and show how modern AIs are basically chat tools. I’d give a handful of examples and grab some screenshots of the tools to show the simplicity of use.

I’d then back that all up with a quick 1 page PDF “ChatGPT Quickstart Guide” to cement the value.

I’d do this for each of the beliefs I want to bust. One email. One belief. One belief bust. One free gift.

Nudging towards sale

Whilst these first emails are very heavy on the value we do not want to hide the fact we’re going to sell.

In fact we want to make this clear upfront to set expectations.

I do this in two ways.

First up, in each of the value emails I’ll have a line or two that mention the sale and gives a link. Something like “if you find this valuable you’ll love my [product name] that I’ll be introducing later. If you want to know more here’s a page with info: [link]”

Second, in the last value email (email 5) I’ll explicitly say I’m going to transition to telling them about a product or service in the next email.

I don’t apologise. In fact I say “now that you’ve learned more about me and what I do I’m pretty sure you’ll love to hear about [product]. With your permission in the next few emails I’m going to tell you more.”

I will also (this is optional) tell subscribers that if they aren’t interested it’s time for them to unsubscribe. I then put a large Unsubscribe button in to make it easy for them.

It looks exactly like this:

As I say this is optional. And depends on whether it fits with your brand!

This is basically me saying to people in my free list that if they aren’t happy for me to talk about this stuff I’d rather they leave. They don’t want to be there. So I don’t want them to be there. So I politely show them the door.

Funny thing about this is …as soon as someone on the fence is shown the door they are much more likely to want to stay.

The emails with explicit “please unsubscribe” buttons have, you guessed it, the lowest unsubscribe rates.

We humans are weird huh? 😝

However you decide to do it make sure that your readers are ready for the sale. Which we’ll be cracking into in the next Part.