In the new course I just released, Simple Money Emails, I gave the example of an effective “George Costanza school” email I wrote five years ago.
That email used “The Opposite” storyline from Seinfeld. George realizes every decision he has ever made in life has been a mistake, and decides to start doing the opposite from now on. Good things follow.
I used this story to open an email for my old aromatherapy list (I used to be a low-grade aromatherapy influencer once). Sure enough, I sold some copies of my aromatherapy book via that George Constanza trope. And I’m not the only one…
… and not in the aromatherapy niche only.
Yesterday, I got an email from a long-time customer and reader (not sure he wants me to share his name), who wrote me after getting SME to say:
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Hey John! Loving the course so far, and very interested in the “9 sins” offer.
One thing that made me laugh while reading it is that I used this same episode and story about George Constanza twice in different emails for different lists to sell some courses, successfully.
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I don’t know which lists and which courses he made sales to with this story. But the smaller point is clear. If you ever need a formulaic but effective way to open your email:
Use “The Opposite” storyline from Seinfeld. It can fly in pretty much any market.
Bigger point:
It might seem obvious that you want to open your emails with stories that help you make the sale. But it’s not obvious at all, at least based on the 100+ emails I’ve been paid to critique and review over the past year.
All the time, I see people who open their sales emails with cute or interesting stories that go nowhere, or at least nowhere near the offer they are promoting.
And then these same people wonder why they’re not making any sales — the email marketing equivalent of being unemployed and living with your parents.
And on that note, I’m putting on a live training next Monday, 9 Deadly Email Sins.
The above is one of the 9 sins. The others are equally as simple, equally as widespread, and equally as deadly.
If you’d like find out what these sins are, so you can take a 180-degree turn away from them and towards a new, more successful episode in your life: