This should be the #1 goal of your emails

👉 nothing fancy: just something incredibly powerful

Folks like me who teach emails and newsletters often talk about how your emails should “build credibility and trust” or “build a relationship” with your readers.

But what do those phrases really mean?

How much credibility can you really build in an email? What do I mean by “trust” in this context? Or “relationship”?

It’s all a bit fuzzy.

What we’re trying to get across is a sense that after reading your emails regularly, your subscribers will feel that you have the expertise to help them and that you’d be a good person to work with. Obviously that’s a service business perspective but it works similarly for products.

But there’s a more fundamental and simpler goal than that.

It’s mental availability.

In marketing, mental availability measures the likelihood that a potential customer will remember you (or your product) in a buying situation.

It’s the absolute foundation for the majority of products and services that aren’t bought instantly on seeing your marketing.

If you’re selling breakfast cereal, mental availability means that a shopper will think of your brand when they’re at the cereal aisle in the supermarket and that they recognise your box on the shelf.

If you sell sales training it means that a training manager will remember you and put your name in the hat when their organisation starts looking for new suppliers for an upcoming sales training program they want to run.

Mental availability doesn’t necessarily mean they rate you as the best in your field or have such warm feelings about you that they’d prefer to work with you.

It simply means they think of you when they’re buying the kind of thing you sell. You get considered.

In other words, you’re not necessarily in pole position, but at least you’re on the starting grid. You have a chance.

If they don’t remember you at buying time it doesn’t matter how great you are or how brilliant you’d be to work with, they never get to see that.

How do you build mental availability by email?

In my experience it comes from two things:

• Firstly, it comes from your audience regularly and frequently reading your emails. You know this from exam revision: you’re more likely to remember something if you get exposed to it repeatedly.
  
  Note: I said regularly and frequently reading your emails - not just being sent them regularly and frequently. Your emails need to be interesting and valuable enough that your audience actually opens and reads them, so they remember you.

• Secondly, your emails need to be relevant. You need to build little neural pathways connecting you and your products to the things your audience are going to be thinking about when they’re considering buying. These buying triggers are usually their problems or goals: so your emails need to talk about your audience’s problems and goals and link what you do to them.
  
  That way when a problem gets big enough that they’re considering a solution, those pathways fire up and they remember you. And the stronger the pathways (the more times they’ve read relevant emails from you that reinforce those pathways) the more likely they are to fire.

Of course, you can go much further. You can push your way up the starting grid by building real credibility in your emails or creating the impression you’d be great to work with.

But the most important step is the first one: getting remembered when they want to buy something.

And you do that with frequent, relevant, valuable, interesting emails.

The kind I teach you in the Effective and Engaging Email Newsletters course.

The kind I hope you see from me.

And the kind you can write too.

- Ian