Selling by email rule #5

👉 sales calls to action that actually work

In this email, I’m going to do my best to explain how to add effective sales calls to action to your content emails.

These can be your most important sales weapon because they allow you to get sales from your emails regularly while still adding value and building goodwill in those emails.

Every now and then you may want to do a pure sales email - for example at the end of a sequence of emails about a new product. A pure sales email will get more sales - but it’s a withdrawal from your goodwill bank rather than a deposit and you can only do so many before you lose your audience.

A sales call to action in a content email gives you a bit of the best of both worlds. Depositing in the goodwill bank while still getting some sales.

The key is to make your call to action a logical next step to your content that enhances it rather than undercuts it.

The logical next step is the easy bit.

It means that if your tip was on how to improve your Linkedin profile, the product you offer should help them with the sort of thing you’d want to do on Linkedin after fixing your profile. Maybe getting the right connections, creating content to attract potential clients, or using messaging to build relationships.

It shouldn’t be about Facebook Ads or face-to-face networking or anything unrelated to Linkedin. Save those for a relevant email.

Enhancing rather than undercutting your tip perhaps needs a bit more explanation.

What I mean is that you’ll often see someone give a tip in an email and then undermine that value by immediately suggesting that in order to get any results you actually need to buy their product or service.

The idea, of course, is to motivate you to want the product.

But the end result is often that you just annoy your readers and leave them thinking “oh right, so that tip you gave me was a waste of time. I can’t actually get anything from it unless I buy your product. Gee thanks”.

Instead you want the tip you give in your email to be valuable in its own right - with or without any further purchase. But then to offer something that takes them further.

For example, if your tip is a presentation technique on how to open a talk, your offer could be templates with another dozen approaches for openers. Or it could be a course to teach them how to nail the remaining phases of the talk. Or it could be the offer of coaching to help them perfect their opener. Or it could be a guide to using presentations to win clients.

In each of those cases what you’re offering builds on what you gave them for free. It could be more of what you gave them. It could be the next steps. It could be personal support. It could be templates or tools to help them implement faster.

All adding to what you gave them, not undercutting it.

I’d also advise you to focus on only one benefit of your product or service at a time in each email.

On a sales page you’re going to list all the features and benefits and cover off all the key objections. That’s needed because the reason people read a sales page is that they’re interested in buying and will have questions you need to answer before they’re able to commit.

But in an email your goal is just to build enough curiosity, interest and desire to get them to click through to the sales page. You’re not selling the product, you’re selling the click.

In fact if you try to sell too much in the email itself it’ll unbalance it. It’ll make the valuable content email feel more like a sales email. You’ll end up withdrawing from your goodwill bank, not depositing.

In particular, if someone is one of the vast majority who isn’t ready to buy yet - but there’s a lot of selling in the email - it’ll feel to them like the whole email was a sales pitch. It’ll get them that one step closer to unsubscribing.

If instead there’s a valuable tip and a link to the sales page if they want to get more (more methods, more support, more templates, etc) then the email will feel like valuable content. They won’t even see the pitch on the sales page.

And it’ll get them one step closer to buying.

They’ll tune in for the next email and maybe by then they’ll be close enough to being ready to buy that they’ll click to the sales page. Or maybe the next email or the next.

And in each email you can focus on a different benefit they’ll get from your product which might be the one that lands with them.

Over time - and in combination with the other methods I’ve mentioned for getting your offers in front of the right people who are ready - it’ll get you a lot more sales than the brute force approach of just hitting them with sales pitch after sales pitch.

But perhaps more importantly: the reality is that most of us just wouldn’t be able to bring ourselves to send out sales pitch after sales pitch.

But we absolutely can send valuable tips followed by a good reason for people to click to find out more about something that will help them get better results.

That’s it for now on selling in emails - I hope you found this mini-series useful.

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