Checklist For Email Openings That Make Sales

A checklist for email openings that make sales

I want to give you a litmus test for which stories, which news items, which pop culture illustrations to open your emails with, or rather, not open your emails with.

You might think what I’m about to tell you is obvious. Far from it. It took me years to realize and internalize. It’s actually the most valuable and important thing I can tell you about daily emails, and it’s the core message I keep hammering home over and over with my students and clients. Here goes:

The way to decide if an idea is a good opening to your email is to ask yourself, “Will this help me make the sale?”

I’ve personally written tons of emails where the opening was interesting. Interesting, yes, but not relevant to making the sale. And then I had to figure out some way to work it into my offer. This made my job much harder, and most likely meant my results will suffer.

It’s much, much better to start your email with an opening that’s both interesting and relevant — that helps you make the sale in some way.

How can an email opening help you make the sale? Simple. Somewhere in your personal story, or current news item, or celebrity gossip, there’s an element that does one of the things on the bulleted list below.

Now about that list:

This list comes from my Simple Money Emails course. When I first created that course, I got feedback from several people that the list below was the most valuable thing in the entire course to them. The list below made things finally “click.” For example, career coach Tom Grundy wrote me to say:

I thought about how to follow Tom’s advice and give more details on these bullet points in a compact, useful way. Rather than simply pasting in more pages of copy, I’ve decided that the most useful way to illustrate the following bullet points is to:

1) point you to an email in the Simple Money Email Swipe file (which you can find here), which can serve as an illustration, and to

2) explain why exactly this email illustrates the point, which might not be obvious if I just paste in the copy like I’ve done above for the various ways of opening an email.

So here are 8 different, subtle ways in which your opening can help you make the sale, along with an example of each. The opening of your email can

1. Build up desire in your reader for the outcome you’re promising

Example: SME #18. “Open with news about you: Abdul’s WAGMI challenge.” This email was one I wrote for business coach Abdul Samad, in which I tastefully hinted at his enormous wealth, and said how he is planning to invest $1M of his money and turn it into $10M by the end of the year. For the market that Abdul was writing to — people looking to get rich — this was like catnip and made his offer of a business opportunity more exciting.

2. Stir up the reader’s anxiety about the status quo

Example: SME Swipe #31. “Reason why close: No-pull dog harness.” This email tells a scary story of what can happen if your dog wriggles out of a harness. For dog owners who use a harness and are already thinking their dog might wriggle out, this story creates a vision of how bad that can be.

3. Create more belief in your solution

Example: SME Swipe #3. “Famous person open: Gary Bencivenga.” This email tells the story of A-list copywriter Gary Bencivenga and a discovery that he made early in his career… which just happens to be the basic approach I use inside my Copy Riddles course. The implication being, if it’s good enough for Gary, it’s good enough for you.

4. Make the reader trust you more

Example: SME Swipe #14. “Industry news open: Justin Goff ‘sold out.'” This was an email in which I pointed out a pretty shady scarcity tactic by marketer Justin Goff. When you can act as a consumer advocate, people trust you more.

5. Dismiss alternatives

Example: SME Swipe #42. “High-level teaching close: Dryer sheets can cause acne.” Pretty straightforward. I was selling dryer balls. The status quo solution for the same problem is dryer sheets. So I told the reader something negative about dryer sheets he or she might not have known.

6. Create an “in” group and make your reader want to be in that group

Example: SME #16. “Open with news about you: Marina Santos pregnancy.” This email does the community thing in a few ways. First, it mentions the Radiant Me community, the results that the women inside the community are getting, and the support and love inside there. And then there’s Marina’s personal reveal, along with the fact that you as the reader are one of the first to hear about it.

7. Resolve objections your reader has

Example: SME #25. Third person story open: “Cutting dog nails with two slices of cheese.” The reader might silently think, “Oh I could never cut my dog’s nails at home, he is too much of a crybaby.” The opener of this email says, “Yes, you can, and here’s a story to prove it.”

8. Simply motivate or inspire your reader to actually make a change and take action right now rather than waiting.

Example: SME #1. “Famous person open: Frank Shamrock.” This is the email I already quoted above. To a large part of my audience, a guy like Frank Shamrock is motivating to begin with. To top it off, here’s Frank, a very tough guy, telling you that the secret to his toughness is having a notebook and taking lots of notes, starting now. Sign me up.

Again, the litmus test above is really a fundamental idea. I can’t overemphasize it. You might feel it’s obvious and any sane person would already do this. But I can tell you from personal experience, it’s something that didn’t click in my head until I was five years into copywriting.

For the longest time, I thought “infotainment” meant you entertain people, and then they buy from you. But that’s not at all what it is. “Infotainment” means selecting entertaining items that help you make the sale.

The guys who have lived rich off this kind of marketing for years or decades aren’t just sharing vulnerable personal stories, interesting news items, or fun celebrity gossip. They are sharing their various “fluff” very methodically, very deliberately.

Let me give you a quote by a master of this craft, Dan Kennedy. Dan is one of the most successful direct marketers of all time, and somebody who has mastered this kind of story- and news- and pop culture-based sales messaging.

In one of his newsletters, Dan was talking about riling up anxiety in his readers by talking about current events. And he had this to say:

You don’t always need to use anxiety, although anxiety is a powerful motivator. But all of the opening stuff that you do isn’t just entertainment. It has to serve a purpose. It has to be there deliberately, and the purpose is to ultimately help you further the sale.