Emails are used as a means of contact for a variety of purposes, including but not limited to: interacting with educators and lecturers, maintaining social relationships, making inquiries to companies, and applying for internships and employment.

 

Despite email’s many benefits, its expansion in professional and educational organizations has given rise to additional problems.

 

The Real Purpose Of An Email

The purpose of email is to sell. That’s a given, of course, but to sell with email consistently, you must engage, entertain and build solid relationships with your subscribers.

 

 

Remember: people are not reading every email that finds its way into their inbox. They are deleting most of them without much consideration.

 

So even though the purpose is to sell, engagement is your number one overall goal. Without engagement, you’re just pissing in the wind. Besides, You don’t build lists of subscribers. You build lists of fans. Just having that distinction in mind will set your intention up perfectly from the start.

 

Don’t think for one second that just because you’re building relationships somehow means you treat everyone the same.

 

 

What Matters Success in Email?

If you want to be successful with email, you must ooze confidence, and more importantly, you must polarise your message.

 

Without polarisation, you risk being another sad statistic that blends into the background and eventually falls through the cracks. That’s EXACTLY what’s happening to most people right now.

 

In short: you need to repel the people who are not like you, to attract the people who are. After all, you can’t build a raving fan base by appealing to the masses.

 

Email is a personal thing, so in order to get people to follow you, it’s important to get others away from you. This will all make sense as we move forward too.

 

 

Why Email Subject Lines?

What’s the big hoopla about subject lines these days? There are products (you actually can buy) that will teach you how to write cracking subject lines. we’ve never heard of anything quite so absurd.

 

 

Now don’t get it twisted. When your subscribers don’t know who you are, it’s important for your subject lines to get their attention.

 

However, when they do get to know you, writing subject lines that get attention can be replicated and implemented by a monkey with typing abilities.

 

It really is that easy.

 

Anyway, the email’s sender becomes infinitely more important than the subject lines they use. The reason, I assume, that we have so many people banging on about subject lines, is because they’re not building strong enough connections with their lists.

 

They have to somehow trick people into opening their emails. The day you have to fool a friend into opening your emails, is the day you need to get new friends.

 

 

Long Emails vs Short Emails

You can bet your bottom dollar that if someone is telling you to do what everyone else is doing, they clearly are not thinking as an individual. This should be blindly obvious.

 

 

So, another myth is that people haven’t got the time to read long emails, so short emails work best.

 

But wait. Surely the shorter your email is, the less qualified your clicks are going to be, right? Right.

 

Truth is, many lemmings out there will tell you to write shorter emails , so you can get people to a sales page as quickly as possible.

 

Poppycock. It’s the email that builds the trust. It’s the email that builds the relationship. So it should be the email that does most of the heavy lifting when it comes to shifting products.

 

Don’t forget, people are less intimidated inside their own inbox. It’s where they feel most comfortable. Why take them away from their safe haven inbox and out into the wilderness, prematurely?

 

It makes little sense unless your goal is to blast your list with promotion after promotion until they buy, die, or unsubscribe.

 

Not saying that business model doesn’t work; it does, but it doesn’t work as well as the relationship-building model, simply because we want our customers to buy off us, repeatedly.

 

If you don’t build that relationship, chances are they’ll just buy willy-nilly from someone else anyway.

 

 

Emails are for engagement, not for hard selling.

It’s the sales page’s job to do the hard selling. But it’s the job of the email to do the trust-building. And there ain’t no engagement or anything remotely like a relationship being built, if you’re writing short emails.

 

Thing is, the more qualified clickers are the ones who have already been partially sold in the email, either because they have bought into you, or have been preframed about the product before they waddle on over to the sales page.

 

Anyway… So what if some people don’t want to read long emails. Why on earth would you be trying to appease these people?

 

You should be doing whatever you can to get rid of them. Besides, if you haven’t the time to read a long email, you certainly haven’t the time to read a longer sales page.

 

Again, this is just common sense. Keep in mind, though. Long boring emails are just as pointless as short emails. People will not be bored in print, or on glass.

 

Worry about Email Unsubscribes?

It’s another myth that people unsubscribe because of you. They don’t. They unsubscribe because of THEM.

 

 

And since “statistically” the largest portion of your list are never gonna buy from you anyway, worrying about unsubscribes is pointless.

 

You should welcome them. Whenever you send an email, you should be getting unsubscribes. If not; you’re not really doing much of anything, are you? And yet, we see people working really hard to keep people on their list.

 

Why do people don’t want to be on your List?

Surely those are the very people you don’t want on your list in the first place. You should grab-a-granny and do the bloody tango every time dead weight drops off your list.

 

Saves you having to delete those users yourself later on down the line.

 

The biggest problem with worrying about unsubscribes, is that your message is going to be weak, and bland.

 

Because if you truly are writing emails that engage and interest people, it’s because you have a personality. And if that’s the case, a lot of people will not like you.

 

Your priority, first and foremost, is to build a list of people who know, like, and trust you. You’ve no doubt heard that you should write emails as if you were writing to a friend, yes? I can’t speak for you, but rarely do I read emails from friends that are watered down, diluted drivel.

 

And that’s where your competition is dropping the ball. They write boring, mundane trite that is as interesting to read as a terms & conditions agreement.

 

It’s pathetic, weak, and naive. Your writing must jump off the page.

 

It must encapsulate your true personality without resistance. After all, these are real people you’re talking to. When you do that, you will get unsubscribed.

 

But that’s the point. In order to attract the right people for your business, you must also replace others. It’s inevitable. It’s unavoidable.

 

Building relationships for subscription

You just can’t build solid relationships with people unless you repel others in the process. We’re not dealing with people face-to-face here. They can’t see your expressions. They can’t see your body language. If your message is weak, so will you be perceived.

 

Does this mean that you have to be all up their face? Absolutely not.

 

But you do have to express who you truly are, without resistance. When you do, I guarantee you will have some hard-brass knobends telling you they don’t like your emails, your personality, or YOU.

 

That’s just how it goes. And that’s fine. You’re not in the people pleasing business. Unfortunately,(or fortunately depending how you look at it) most believe they are. And that’s to your advantage.

 

People who feel the need to contact you with their opinions are like my confused “selfie-taking” cousin. They reek with insecurities, have no back-bone and deep down inside they’re just a little scared child.

 

Don’t pay any attention to what they say to you. And don’t reply to them either. If you do, you’re just as insecure as they are. So… welcome unsubscribes. They certainly are a blessing in disguise.

 

 

 

Free vs Paid Content:

Give away more free content than you do selling content. That’s what we’re told. But it helps no one, especially the people on your list.

 

You’re much more likely to take action with your investment. The bigger the investment, the bigger the action you’ll take. And yet, this industry has more free content available than ever.

 

No wonder people are overwhelmed. No wonder they are taking little action.

 

Unless you have skin in the game, it becomes increasingly easy to get distracted by another shiny free object.

 

Look at all the free reports you’ve downloaded on squeeze pages over the years. How many of them did you follow through with until you got a positive result?  Not many, right?

 

Free has become next to worthless in most cases. Easily ignored.

 

Truth is, if you have a great product that you know will help the people on your list, you should be doing everything possible to get into their hands.

 

Every free bit of content you give away is most likely taking them further down the path of confusion and overwhelm, because they will NOT be taking action with it.

 

Does Free Content help in Sales?

it’s your job to help people on your list get a specific outcome. And since they value what they invest in more than what they’ve gotten for free, it’s your moral duty to get them to buy from you as quickly as possible.

 

Providing you’re ONLY selling premium information that helps them, that is.

 

Sure, giving away a few tips here and there is fine, but don’t think for one second that you have to give away the farm to build trust and credibility. It doesn’t work like that.

 

Bare Naked Fact: The more you hold back, the more sales you’ll make. Forget about this crap that you MUST give away your best stuff for free, in order to build trust. It’s complete bollox – and it doesn’t work the way many would have you believe.

 

Truth about Free content on Email

People DO NOT value free content as much as they do paid content… period! And it’s well known that, people love to buy, they just don’t like to be sold.

 

This why we want our emails to be engaging and entertaining – and NOT free content driven. Now don’t get it twisted. I’m not suggesting that you never give away free tips inside your emails. You should.

 

But it should be done sparingly if you want the best results. Once you start giving away free content in most of your emails, you’re essentially playing the “me too” game just like your competition.

 

When you entertain and engage, you end up building relationships far quicker – and you have the added advantage of making your “held back” content seem much more valuable.

 

Listen, there are many people who will love you for giving them free content, but when it comes to taking out their credit card, they’ll be hot snotting it out the backdoor.

 

It’s actually much more likely that they’ll pay for someone else’s products, and freeload off you. After all, why should they pay you for your content when all along you’ve been giving them it for free?

 

 

Check more Articles: 

How To Get Better At Writing Emails

Why Sending Emails Daily ? Hard Truth You Need To Know

10 Best Email Marketing Course Online

 

 

Conclusion

The Purpose of writing emails is to entertain and engage your audience. However, never forget that we build emails to make money. You should ALWAYS be selling in EVERY email ( indirect way )

 

 

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