5-Minute Crash Course On Writing Daily Emails
Over the past couple of years, I’ve consulted, taught, and coached dozens of business owners, marketers, and professional copywriters on writing daily emails for their businesses or their clients’ businesses.
For a while, I was naively teaching them advanced email copywriting tricks and tactics. But I noticed that many people don’t do the basics right. Yes, even professional copywriters, even those who are getting paid good money for their emails by clients.
For people who couldn’t do the basics right, none of the advanced techniques I was sharing would matter at all. The fundamentals have to come first.
So here the fundamentals of email copywriting, the way I see them, in 7 brief points:
1. A sales or influence-building email consists of two parts.
The first part is what I call the meat. The second part I call the bone.
2. The meat of an email is the enjoyable, fun, sexy part.
The meat is the entertainment. It’s what sucks the reader in, plays with his emotions, and gets him curious and reading willingly.
There are many types of meat that can go into an email. Here are a few:
- A personal story
- A joke (“How do sheep get clean? They take a baaaath.”)
- Current events
- A person — people love to read about other people, particularly if those people are successful or good-looking
- A pop culture reference
- Industry gossip or drama
- A question from a reader
- A comment from a troll
As an example of this in practice, I want to show you an email I wrote a long time ago to promote an essential oils course I was selling at the time.
This email is not perfect — I would write it differently today. But just by adding a bit of meat, it did its job. It got people reading. It got them buying. And maybe most importantly, it got them interested in reading and buying more of what I had to share down the line.
Here is the meat part, a pop culture reference to Disney’s Pinocchio:
SUBJECT: Essential Oil Pleasure Island
In Disney’s fantastic 1940 film Pinocchio, there’s a place called Pleasure Island.
Pinocchio winds up there on the advice of a sly fox called Honest John.
At first, Pleasure Island appears to be every boy’s dream.
You can do whatever you choose: play pool, smoke cigarettes, even get drunk.
However, the place hides a horrible curse.
The stray boys who end up there eventually turn into donkeys and are sold into slave labor.
That’s exactly what happens to Pinocchio’s friend Lampwick, while Pinocchio manages to get away with only some donkey ears and a tail.
3. The other part of the email, besides the meat, is the bone.
The bone is the part that is important, the dry, hard material that people need but don’t necessarily want. It’s the lesson, the valuable idea, the mindset shift. Here’s an example of a bone from that same essential oils email:
Now I’m sure this Pleasure Island can be a metaphor for many things in life.
But if you’re curious about essential oils, then I just want to warn you about the many “Honest John” characters out there on the Internet.
They’ll tell you to do whatever you want with essential oils: drink them, massage them onto your skin undiluted, even cook with them.
Beware.
There’s a price to pay for listening to that misleading advice, usually in the form of a rash or a burn or an allergic reaction. [This is really the bone, the important lesson I want people to get into their heads.]
4. In general, effective emails need both the meat and the bone.
Yes, there are exceptions to this. But for this crash course, let’s just say that each of your emails should have both.
Why both?
Because while the bone is important, it’s not something that people enjoy consuming on its own. If all you give people is important, valuable, abstract, dry information, day after day, they will get bored and frustrated. After a few important but dry days, they will leave you and go in search of somebody who will treat them better, by serving up something more enjoyable to consume.
On the other hand, while the meat of an email is tasty, it’s also not something that you as the marketer want to serve up on its own.
In part, that’s because including a bone underneath all that meat allows your readers to justify to themselves why they are reading your emails, so they can feel good about continuing to read. But there’s a more subtle reason also.
In part, it’s because the bone can actually do much of your selling — if you choose a valuable lesson or idea that ties into your offer.
5. Did I say there are two parts to an effective email? There are actually three.
The third is the call to action, the CTA. That’s where you tie up everything you’ve talked about so far, and get the reader to take the next step you want him to take.
The reason I put the CTA behind the meat and the bone in importance is that, if you get those two first parts right, the CTA can be an afterthought. It can be as simple as saying, “Oh and if you want some help with that,” and then including a link to your offer.
Of course, you can also do a bit of work to pre-sell your offer, and to explain to the reader how it ties into the email that he has just read. For example, here is how I tied up that Pleasure Island email:
The fact is, safe and reasonable use of essential oils might not seem as exciting at first, but it’s a lot more sustainable and useful in the long run.
My new EO Pioneers course tells you how to avoid Essential Oil Pleasure Island, or if you’ve already landed there, how to get away without donkey ears or a tail.
If you don’t want sly foxes leading you by the nose, here’s more information on this new course:
[link goes here]
6. As a rule of thumb, an effective email will have exactly one of each, meat + bone + CTA.
Yes, there are cases in which you can break this “Rule of One.” But if you haven’t written a few hundred emails using this basic M+B+C formula, then don’t break it.
The fact is, you won’t ever go wrong with the simple formula. But you can go very wrong by throwing in too many different ideas, illustrations, or offers, and creating a confusing and mixed salad of cacophonous sounds. So get started with just one of each.
7. What about the subject line?
If you do a good job writing emails consistently, and making them interesting and valuable to your readers, then your subject line becomes less and less important. People read because they like your emails, and because they’ve made it a habit to do so.
Does that mean that subject lines don’t matter at all?
I wouldn’t say that. But rather than obsessing over tricks and tactics to increase open rates, my best advice, after thousands of tracked sales results that came from emails, is to use your subject line to give people more of what they are looking for.
There are two options.
First, if you are writing to a list of people who feel they have a relationship with you, who feel they know you, who trust you, who look forward from hearing from you specifically, then give them more of that. Give them a relationship.
Feature the words “I, me, mine” somewhere in your subject line. Hint at a personal reveal or a conflict that involves you. Inject yourself into the subject line, even if you don’t really belong there.
Second, you might be writing to a list where the relationship really isn’t strong or doesn’t exist at all. Where people don’t really know you, trust you, like you. Where they are mainly reading out of self-interest — either because of what you’re promising, or because you’re entertaining them.
In that case, give them more of that. Promise them benefits or warn them of dangers or give them entertainment, like I did with me “Essential Oil Pleasure Island” subject line above.
And that’s it.
If you have never written any marketing emails, congratulations. You now know all it takes to write daily emails. The seven points above are the fundamentals. Just apply them consistently, and you will be miles ahead of most other people who consider themselves effective copywriters, but who write boring or pointless or ineffective emails.
And if you’ve somehow made it to this page without being signed up to my own daily email list… and if you want to see how I put the above points into practice every day… then click the big red button below. Fill out the form with your name and email address, and you will get a spot on my email list — and hear from me later today.