This powerful hook solves one of your biggest problems

👉 and it does it quickly too

The core of a value-based approach to email marketing and newsletters is to build credibility and trust and edge your readers closer to being ready to buy by sharing useful tips and ideas.

Those useful tips and ideas demonstrate to your potential clients that you know how to solve their problems. And so they position you as the #1 person they’d like to work with.

But there’s a challenge with this sort of approach.

What if your clients don’t know they have the problems you solve?

It’s much more common than you might think. After all, if they were fully aware of their problems and how important they were, they’d already be working to solve them.

And even if you do manage to make them aware that they have the problems you focus on, they probably already have a different set of priorities they’re working on instead that won’t be easy to shift.

So how do you get them at least thinking about the areas you can help with?

The answer is to use a barrier hook in your email.

Instead of telling them they’re focusing on the wrong things (never a winning strategy in my experience), show them that the problem you want to talk about is a barrier preventing them from achieving a bigger goal they’re already focused on.

For example. in my email on The real secret of using stories in your newsletter I wanted to give a solution to the problem of how difficult it is to write stories for emails.

The problem for me is that unless you’ve tried to write stories in emails a few times, you probably don’t realise just how hard it is.

So instead, I opened the email by talking about a bigger goal: getting and keeping your readers engaged in your emails and about how stories are a proven way to boost that engagement.

Those are things my readers most likely already know about and would acknowledge are good things.

After I’ve got them nodding in agreement with the bigger goal of getting engagement in your emails I introduce the problem.

Quite blatantly in this case:

But there was a problem.

One that caused me no end of late nights and pulling out of hair.

Perhaps you’ve run into it yourself?

The problem is that writing stories is hard.

Really hard.

In particular, it’s incredibly hard to maintain a story over a full email or article

(Using a personal story or anecdote is a great way to introduce a problem by the way. It shows you have real-world experience with it. And it’s not something that can be argued with - it’s your experience).

Now I’ve introduced the idea that the problem I can help with (using stories in emails) is a barrier to the bigger goal they already know they want to achieve (getting readers to engage with their emails).

It means I can now go on to talk about the problem in more detail and offer my ideas on solutions, safe in the knowledge that they’ll realise these solutions are valuable because they help them overcome a barrier to a bigger goal they have.

And it’s much, much easier to get someone interested in fixing a problem by showing them how it stands in the way of them achieving a goal they already have than it is to convince them that this problem should be a big goal for them in its own right.

For example, maybe your clients don’t realise their slow time to market is holding them back. So instead focus on a big goal they already buy into - like revenue growth. Open your email by mentioning how important revenue growth is to a new business but then highlight how time to market is a huge barrier to revenue growth because it slows down your flow of new products and stops you using profitable new marketing channels while they’re still fresh.

You can do this in any field, as long as the problems you highlight genuinely are barriers to bigger goals.

That’s why I use this hook a lot in my emails.

Including this one :)

- Ian