Today I meant to write an elaborate email about the sales page for my Simple Money Emails course.
But against my better judgment, I got roped into chauffeuring a friend of my father through stop-and-go traffic in the middle of the city.
While my blood pressure has largely returned to normal, the 45 minutes that that unnecessary drive ate up cannot be replaced. So the SME email will have to wait until tomorrow.
As for today, let me tell you something acute that one of my readers wrote in with a few days ago, after I wrote about my 10 jaw-dropping email deliverability tips. My reader wrote:
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#5 – Links at the end of almost every email
I noticed that most of the time it is either an offer or an affiliate offer. Very rarely do you link elsewhere, unless you invite engagement like right now.
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That’s very true. I almost always link to something I am selling at the end of my email. I never link to, say, the Red Cross website or to a cute ferret video.
On the one hand you might say that’s only natural — it’s what most daily sales emails look like, because their goal is to make sales.
But at the same time, I don’t have a huge list, and I don’t have surprising new offers every day. In other words, I am not necessarily sacrificing sales by not plugging the same well-trodden offer in each of my emails, day after day after day.
Plus, I remember a time when I first got onto Ben Settle’s list, circa 2012.
After a few weeks, I dismissed Ben because each of his emails at the time followed the same format: promise + tease + CTA to sign up to his print newsletter. I gradually got bored and I unsubscribed.
It took a conscious effort a few years later to get back on Ben’s list and start listening to him again, and I only did that because there still wasn’t anybody else talking about email regularly.
So when you put those two things together, you get the following heretical conclusion, heretical at least in the direct marketing world:
I can see good business sense in occasionally linking to stuff that won’t make you any money, but that can benefit, surprise, or delight your audience.
As Rich Schefren said once about the length of his own emails, you want to keep people guessing. You don’t ever want to give them a reason to dismiss you out of hand, before they’ve even had a chance to see your message.
I figure there must be some optimal rate of “public service emails” that keeps the interest of a large number of readers, while still allowing sales emails to predominate, and while maintaining or even increasing total sales. I don’t know what that rate might be, but I’m guessing somewhere around 10%-15%.
All that is really a long open to the following close:
When I decided to write this email today, I asked myself what was the most valuable resource that I don’t sell, but that I could share with readers on my list.
One thing popped up in my mind immediately.
It’s a book. I discovered it a few weeks ago. It talks about the psychology and neurology of misdirection.
Misdirection isn’t a great term, by the way — because what it really is is the control and focus of attention, along channels that serve the purpose of, say, a magician… or, say, a marketer or copywriter.
For the past couple weeks, I’ve been devouring this book and taking pages of notes on it.
I was planning on hoarding all this knowledge for myself, and profiting from it all by myself.
But you gotta keep people guessing.
At the same time, to make myself feel better, I tell myself not one person in a hundred on my list will actually get this book, and even fewer will actually read it and apply it. But in case you’re curious, here’s the naked, non-affiliate link of a valuable resources that I do not sell: