Are you too timid in your emails?

👉 I certainly was

Timid Salesmen Have Skinny Kids - Zig Ziglar

The same applies to emailers and newsletter writers too. And it’s one of the biggest and most common hangups people have.

I guess it’s only natural. As a marketing medium, newsletters are a phenomenal way of giving first: of adding value to potential clients before asking anything of them.

So as an approach it tends to be used by people who like that idea of giving first and adding value through their marketing.

And because those people are all about giving, they often don’t feel comfortable asking for a sale. They don’t want to be seen as pushy or perhaps even needy.

And I’ll admit, I fall into that category.

Very few of my early emails had calls to action that would lead to someone paying me money. And it was a big mistake.

Eventually I realised that although at any given time 90% or more of readers just weren’t ready to buy - that left quite a lot who were.

And if I didn’t offer them something they wanted, very few were going to message me to ask or go hunting on my website.

So over time I discovered that if your calls to action are relevant and a natural continuation from the useful information you’ve given in your emails, no one is going to throw their toys out of the pram if you offer them a way of getting better results. Or getting them faster, cheaper or with less effort.

And it doesn’t take a lot to word your calls to action so they flow naturally from the main body of your email and don’t feel jarring.

These days the main reason I have calls to action in most emails is that it’s become habit. I’ve done it time and time again. It’s got me sales. And I’ve seen directly that people don’t end up seeing me as a pushy salesperson.

Do you have a call to action that could lead to sales in most of your emails? Is fear of what people might think holding you back?

My suggestion is that you do what I did and think about the people who do want to buy from you. Don’t make life difficult for them.

Try a sales-focused call to action in each of your newsletters over the next month and see what happens. I bet you’ll be pleasantly surprised - even if it’s only by the fact that you don’t get chased by readers carrying pitchforks.

And if you want to learn how to write those sales-focused calls to action so that they flow smoothly from your content and get more people to click, there’s a dedicated module in the Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters course that shows you exactly how.

You’ll learn the key success factors for a must-click call to action. And you’ll get detailed guides to my 5 favourite call to action templates: “Personal Support”, “More of This”, “Tools and Templates”, “The In-Depth Guide” and “Struggling for Time”.

Click here for details (and avoid having skinny kids)

- Ian