Email Marketing Demystified

I’ve combined some of the things I learnt from Matt Furey with my own approach to writing, and the result is a winning combination that I use to write emails that actually make money.

For me, writing an email is a 4-step process – it’s a system that you can use and build on.

4 Step Process to Email Copywriting

1. Current or Evergreen?

First, you have to strategically decide whether it’s an evergreen email or a current email.

An evergreen email is the type of email that you can put in your autoresponder and you can keep it running repeatedly year after year or once every 4-5 months, depending on the subject and on your sequence.

In other words, you can keep it there forever.

A current email means that you write emails as a reaction to what is happening in the world right now. It usually a news-related item, for example oil prices going up, summer, the Dark Knight Returns, or back-to-school.

If you decide to write a current email, use the USA Today secret and put in little facts to get your reader’s attention.

However, to put it another way – it’s long-term profit vs. short term gain, because something evergreen isn’t affected by circumstance and is an eternal issue that won’t go away. However, it’s with current emails that you’re able to make more money in the short run because that’s directly relevant to the person reading your email.

I don’t know what the magic ratio should be - 50% evergreen and 50% current so that your work as an email copywriter is reduced because there’s more evergreen content? Or, should you focus on bringing in short term gain because email is so flexible that you can write one in 2 hours? That ratio is up to you to determine.

Either way, always decide whether your email is evergreen or current.

The people who are really good with evergreen emails are the seduction gurus who do it for topics they believe are evergreen in their niche market– people like John Alanis or Ross Jeffries. David DeAngelo (Double your Dating), for example, has a 100email autoresponder sequence, every day except weekends for about 3 months, and then it repeats – and he has a 20M dollar business!

If you want to do the same, you can send the same emails – but preferably after a long time. Chances are, people won’t remember after 6 months.

2. Determine the Strategy

It sounds very big, but there are actually just 3 components: List, Story, Offer.

i) Which list am I emailing? Because this determines your customer avatar, and what resonates with the people on each list is different.

ii) What’s the story I want to share? Did my friend share with me an amazing technique that I want to introduce? Or how I used a particular technique to do overcome something?

iii) What’s the offer, and what product am I selling to this list?

You just need one sentence for each of the above: you don’t need to be very elaborate because emails aren’t meant to be elaborate – they’re meant to be simple and to the heart.

Matt Furey says the “3 C”s of email marketing are to be Clear, to be Concise, and to be Colloquial.

By concise, I don’t necessarily mean short –just don’t repeat yourself. With email length, it works 2 ways – David DeAngelo’s emails go on and on, and at the same time Matt Furey says the recommended length is about 500 words. It doesn’t have to be short because 500 words does give you a bit of room.

Here’s the thing – to be successful in email marketing, you must write the way your grandmother would write email, in a way similar to how she’d ramble to you. The more you replicate that formula and the more you write like a friend, the more sales you’ll make because you’ve developed that connection.

This is because when people go into their email, their mindset is to open an email from a friend. If you write something ‘salesy’, they’ll most likely find it a turn off and they’ll immediately switch off.

3. Write down the Bones

At this point, I start writing the emails. ‘Writing down the Bones’ is a strategy employed by one of the top creative writing teachers of all time, Natalie Goldberg. She said that there are 2 persons residing in you – the writer and the editor – and they’re always at odds.

That means when the writer writes something, the editor immediately says, ‘Hey, that sentence looks funny…why don’t you improve this structure?’ So, initially, you have to cast the editor aside, and write.

To do this, I give my self a time-line –usually exactly half an hour. I don’t care how long it is; there’s some sort of structure, but I just continue to write whether the sentence seems weird or it’s not flowing.

Why? Because that is most probably the most authentic thing you can get because it’s heart to heart.

As Matt Furey says, Talk-Write Write-Talk. It’s heart to heart communication, so it can only work when you write out of your stream of consciousness. You write from your subconscious to touch the other person’s subconscious.

Usually, in the first draft, you’ll have the story. You may not have all the psychological triggers and you may only have a bit of the offer, but it is really all about the story (because grandmothers like telling stories). The more stories you tell, the more things you sell.

Even if initially your story is ill formed, just make sure to spend that half-hour writing. No second thoughts, no going back – just keep moving forward.

4. Edit

I usually spend one hour editing the foundation of my email and cleaning it up here and there.

I use psychological triggers – things like scarcity, anticipation, curiosity, etc. I’ve also assembled my copywriter’s toolbox which contains transition words and phrases, power words, electrifying your ads, colloquialisms, idioms etc.

I regularly use Magic Transitions (from Ted Nicholas) and the new Clayton Makepeace free report, ‘The #1 Way to Electrify Your Ads’, which you can use to make your email more ‘warm’ by using clichés, colloquialisms, and figures of speech.

And voilà - that’s how you write an email using my simple 4 step process.

Additional tips:

* Collect subject lines – when you see a good subject lines, copy and paste it into your collection. I’ve seen really cool subject lines, like “Headless man found in Topless Bar”, or Dr Dave drinks his own urine to lose weight – I mean, that would make you open that email! Even things like real life, like people’s Skype messages can make for eye-catching lines – one of our programmers wrote “hackers have CSS designers too”. You can so easily use this as a template and adapt it to your needs e.g., ‘serial killers have friends too’, etc.

* When it comes to trying to understand your market and figure out the psychological triggers in relation to the subject you’re writing about, it’s useful to go to Amazon and find a book related to what you’re writing about. If you look at the chapter break downs / headlines, it’s pretty much all the psychological triggers there because they’ll cover topic by topic what the reader is looking for.

* The top bullet swipe files are not in copywriting books, but 2 general books that you most likely have heard of before: the first is ‘How to Win Friends and Influence People’ by Dale Carnegie. The second is ‘How I Raised Myself From Failure to Success in Selling’ by Frank Bettger, with the table of contents by direct mail master copywriter Victor O. Schwab. The contents are all essentially bullet point templates for you to swipe.


Email Marketing Demystified - To learn more about this author, visit Michael Reining's Website.

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