Going For The Click Not The Sale

One of the biggest mistakes that you can make in your email copywriting is to go for the sale. This is something you should not be doing!

As email marketers our main goal is for the click. We want to achieve two things:

1. Have as many people open the email as possible (i.e. a kick ass subject line}
2. Have as many people click on our link as possible

If you’re trying to sell the product in your email then you’re trying to do the work of the sales page… DON’T!

So how do we go after the clicks?

To go for the click we want to have a compelling story. The story is what entices our readers to click the link to find out more. All emails, and auto-responders, should be based around story telling. This is WAY more important than anything else. By using a story we allow our readers to engage more thoroughly with what we’re saying.

It’s a human condition that we are draw into storytelling and the more that we’re drawn in then the more we remember. Draw in your readers about whatever your subject topic is using a story and they will retain more of the information and therefore it will be more effective for them.

Not only that, but we will also be enticing them to click. The more clicks we get then the more traffic we send and the more sales we make.

Before you start any email or auto-responder you should begin by planning it out. Write down:

1. What are you teaching in this email?
2. What is the landing page selling?
3. What are your readers struggles with using this information?
4. What is the most common journey to this point for your readers?
5. What will this knowledge solve for your readers?

With these questions answered you can now build the structure of your emails. What you’re teaching and what the landing page is selling must be congruent. They must follow on from each other.

The answers to questions three, four and five are going to form the basis of your content. Start by listing each of the struggle points, arrange them until they are in a sensible order i.e. the struggle that most likely comes first at the top of the list, followed by the one that comes after this is solved etc…

Doing this will allow you to talk to all of your readers rather than just a minority because you are covering every stage of possible difficulty and you will be relating to all of them.

This sets you up for the answer to question four. Check your list point and make sure that this journey of struggles is the most common journey for your readers. If not then you may want to re-adjust.

Now write at the bottom of this list how the knowledge is going to solve all of these struggles for your readers. You now have your roadmap for your email.

All that is left is to fill in the gaps with the story. Look at the story outline that you have created and start to fill in the spaces with your own story. If you don’t have a similar story then you can fill in with the details of a fictional journey.

This journey must differ from the sales page journey as it is not about the product, but it is about how you found the product and it helped you. Or how it took you a long time to find a solution and now there is something that can do it for you.

You get the idea 🙂