3 "missing links" for getting more clients from your emails

👉 these tips helped me *a lot*

When I first started writing regularly I got pretty good at “giving value” in my emails.

Over time - as I added elements of storytelling and humour - my writing got more entertaining too. Especially when I got brave enough to share my own experiences - the bad as well as the good.

But the thing that took the longest to start working for me was turning valuable emails into valuable clients.

I’d send out newsletters with some of my very best tips and ideas in them, But frustratingly, great tips and ideas didn’t turn into clients. I’d get great feedback, but no sales.

Even when I followed all the email “best practices” with strong calls to action, time-limited offers, links to fancy video sales pages… nothing seemed to really move the needle.

If that experience rings a bell with you, these 3 tips may well work for you too. They’re an extract from the module on writing persuasive emails in my new Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters Course I’m just putting the finishing touches to right now.

Implementing these tips didn’t quite make me a gazillionaire overnight after discovering them. But they helped my sales a lot :) Maybe they’ll help you too.

The first thing I realised was that in my rush to “give value” by sharing my best tips I’d overlooked one of the absolute fundamentals of sales: if someone doesn’t think they have a burning problem to solve there’s no reason for them to buy anything.

What I found was that if - instead of just launching into my tips - I started by talking about the problems they solved and describing some of the symptoms first, I got much better results.

By touching on the problems and symptoms it allowed my readers to think about their own situation. And for some of them, it triggered a realisation that they had this same problem too.

Now my tips were more impactful because they weren’t just nice ideas. They were (partial) solutions to problems my readers actually had and were thinking about. And they could get the full solution by working with me.

The second thing I discovered was that I needed to clearly differentiate what I was advising from what others were saying.

I’d assumed that the differences were obvious. But the reality is that no one carries around an encyclopaedic knowledge of all the topics they get emails on, along with comparison chats saying which experts say what and how they’re different.

Unless you tell people how your advice is different in your emails, they’ll assume that while your tips might be good, they could get equally good advice from many others.

So you need to contrast your valuable advice with the ineffective tips they might get elsewhere. For example by telling them about your lack of success implementing “best practices” until you discovered what you now do.

And finally, you need to make a clear link between the valuable tips and advice you’re giving in your emails and your products and services which will help them even more.

Again, it seems obvious that if your emails have brilliant tips about something then your paid products and services will help even more in that same area.

But in the real world, people are busy. They don’t have the time to draw conclusions: you need to tell them directly.

Kind of like I did earlier when I said that these tips were an extract from my new Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters Course ;)

Of course, there are lots of other ways of doing it (which we cover in the course, ahem).

But the main thing is to be aware of the issues. In particular: it’s your own incorrect assumptions that are holding back your sales.

Don’t assume your readers know they have the problems you can help them with. You have to help them discover they have.

Don’t assume your readers know your advice is different and better to what they can get anywhere else. You have to demonstrate it is.

And don’t assume your readers will know you have specific products and services that can help them in the areas where you’re giving your valuable tips. You have to tell them what they are.

Make sense?