The easiest way to be more persuasive

--> (and get more sales)

Probably the most common question I get from people who are a bit more experienced with emailing is “How can I make my emails more persuasive?” or more bluntly “How can I get people to actually buy from my emails?”

After all, we’re not emailing for the good of our health or just to entertain our readers.

We’re emailing to get them to take action.

Maybe not immediately. Maybe we’re aiming for a lightbulb moment or mindset change. But eventually we want that to lead somewhere.

And more often than not, that somewhere is buying from us.

In a second I’m going to tell you what I believe is by far the easiest way to be more persuasive in email and get more people to buy. It works outside of email too.

But I’m going to ask you to suspend your judgement for a bit, Because initially it’s going to sound too trivial. Too simplistic.

It’s not.

But in recent years we’ve been conditioned to believe that persuasion is something complicated. Something only professors of behavioural psychology or gurus of persuasion can teach you.

Complex techniques involving priming and reciprocation and secret subliminal influence words.

(Don’t get me started on just how many of those “groundbreaking” psychology experiments so much of the literature on persuasion relies on have turned out to be impossible to reproduce in the real world or just plain faked).

The truth is though that we’re born persuaders. Children are masters at getting what they want.

And the number one technique children use to get what they want?

Repetition.

Asking again and again.

The same exact thing works for selling and persuading by email.

See, I told you it would sound trivial.

Sure, you can learn copywriting or persuasion techniques that will add a single or double digit uplift to your conversions.

But you can also get a much bigger impact simply by emailing twice as often and making sure you actually offer something for sale or an action people can take more often too.

Ask yourself realistically: what’s going to be easier for you? Learning advanced techniques that will make the words you write on a page have double the impact and get people to click twice as often, or simply sending an extra email?

I know for me, it’s the latter.

I’ve studied psychology and persuasion and copywriting a lot.

But the biggest impact I got on results came from learning how to come up with ideas and write emails fast and simply sending more. And then from being brave enough to add more calls to action.

My guess is the same will be true for you.

Of course, it’s not quite as simple as just emailing more and making more calls to action.

Kids can get away with asking again and again because, well, they’re our kids. We can’t click unsubscribe on them when they become annoying.

We emailers have to learn to write interesting, useful emails so that people stay subscribed and keep reading our calls to action. And writing calls to action that persuade without annoying helps too.

But all that is very doable.

And it would be rather ironic if this email didn’t have a sales call to action to suggest how you might actually be able to do this yourself :)

So if you do want to take the easier path of learning how to come up with ideas for interesting, valuable emails at will and to write them fast, this is your best bet.

- Ian