We’re switching gears. Shifting to the sale.

In Email 5 you set the scene so your audience knows the sale is coming. Now we start in Email 6 with the big reveal.

Let’s get started:

Bolt the doors

Before you get into your sale again reiterate that you want people to leave.

Huh?

I start my main sales email with a reminder I’m going to sell to the reader. And a request that anyone who isn’t happy with that leaves.

The reason for this is that:

i) anyone annoyed isn’t going to buy from you anyway (no upside) and

ii) they might report as spam (downside)

We’ll remove the downside whilst losing no upside.

The third (really interesting) reason is that as soon as we tell them “this isn’t for you” they are more likely to stay and read the sale!

Because of all this I start my big sale with a request that those who aren’t interested please leave. I then give them a big “unsubscribe” button right there.

Believe me - you aren’t losing anything if they go. They were never going to be customers.

Get the click

The purpose of your sales emails is not to sell.

It’s to get people to click to go to your sales page.

The sales page’s job is to make the sale. The sales emails’ job is just to get people to the sales page. Read that again - it’s important!

For now we just want to get a click. We have (in the current sequence) 5 emails to get people to click to the sales page. Most people won’t do it on the first email. They’ll miss it. Or don’t have time to go to the page right now. Or the email just doesn’t grab them.

That’s fine. It’s why we have a handful of sales emails to get the click.

First sales email

With this first email we are making an introduction.

We aren’t going deep. We aren’t pushing a sale. We are just showing them the valuable product or service we have to offer them.

Email 6 (our first sales email) therefore is a broad introduction - a survey of what our offer is.

In tomorrow’s Part we’ll get into the remaining emails - right now we are just making a first sales impression.

The best way to do this is to connect this first email directly to your sales email.

Use this prompt alongside your sales page:

Act as a marketing copywriter 

Analyse this sales page and draft a sales email.

The objective of the email is purely to get someone to click to the sales page

Provide a survey of the offer, focusing on features and associated benefit.

Do not mention pricing. Do not go into too much detail. 

Sales page copy begins:
[copy/paste sales page copy]

Copy and paste in the copy from the sales page below the prompt to generate a draft of a sales email:

Make sure to rewrite in your personal style. Borrow language from your sales page as much as possible. We want to create congruency between your email and page so that there isn’t a huge tonal shift when people arrive on the page.

Some smaller pointers

First up don’t mention pricing.

We want to get people to the page and walk them through the offer before hitting them with the pricing. This is the job of the sales page - to walk them up to the pricing. So we don’t want to jump the gun at the email with the pricing.

Also, if you change the pricing on your sales page you’ll need to go back through all your sales emails and make changes. Believe me - this gets very annoying very quickly!

Second, make sure not to hide the link to the sales page. The name of the game here is to reduce friction. Don’t make people hunt for the sales link! Easy buttons and visible links are useful here. And include it more than once if it’s a longer email.

Third, don’t apologise for the sale. This includes explicitly apologising (don’t do that!) but also feeling apologetic and allowing that to seep into your tone.

You need to be confident of the value of what you are selling. If you are not they won’t be confident to buy.

And if you aren’t confident in what you are selling? Then…why are you selling it? Serious question.

You life will be a lot simpler if what you sell is truly valuable. If it isn’t - make it so. Go and develop the product until you are confident it is valuable.

If you are selling someone else’s product and you can’t make it more valuable? Stop selling it! Go make something truly valuable and sell that instead.

In the next Part I’m going to move onto the remaining sales emails and how we knock down objections.