Your goal is to make a sale. Maybe a BUNCH of sales. So you begin to craft your sales letter.
But you may be getting ahead of yourself.
Before you can ever make the sale, you have to first answer three important questions for the recipient:
*Why should the recipient open this email?
*Why should the recipient read this email?
*Why should the recipient visit the link in the email?
If you can give enough answers to each one of these questions, you will have a good return on your email solicitations.
Let’s think about how you can answer these questions…
1. Why Should I Open This Email?
According to a recent study by DoubleClick.com, the most important feature in determining whether or not an email will be opened is the FROM line. Is this from someone I know and want to hear from? Use a FROM line that will increase the number of people who will open the email.
According to that same DoubleClick study, the second highest ranked feature the average email recipient uses to determine whether or not he will open an email is the subject line. Canned or “spam like” subject lines caused a lower open rate, while personalized and interesting subject lines work much better.
My guess is you can spot “spam-like” subject lines in your inbox immediatley. Couple that with a sender unknown to the recipient, and your email is going to the trash bucket!
Another issue to consider is filters set up to catch spam or other unimportant email. To maximize your chances of passing through the filters, first test your email and make any changes necessary to reduce its “spam” score. Here is a spam filter Ken Evoy has set up for you to use free:
Send your email to: spamchecka-i-o-b@sitesell.net
Make sure the subject line begins with the word “TEST”.
It will send you back a report on the spam score plus ways to reduce your score.
2. Why should I read this email?
Once you overcome the first hurdle, you have a second. You have to give the recipient a reason to actually READ the email you sent them.
Start out giving the recipient a benefit just for reading the email: “In this email you will discover…”, “You are just five minutes away from $50…” or one I did recently “Derek blew it…”
These each appeal to different reasons why a recipient would take the two minutes to read the email.
If your email is long, you need to keep providing reasons to read throughout the email. The first line or two needs to contain a solid reason why they should read, and every 7-8 lines should contain another.
Now, for the third question…
3. Why should they visit the link?
In order to get someone to visit the link, you need to give them a reason. Consider all of the negative thoughts going through your recipient’s mind and attempt to overcome those in the email.
The more of these thoughts you can overcome, the more people you will get to the site. Remember–your goal is to get the reader to the site with an open mind. You are not trying to sell him before he gets there–your job is to get him to the site and let the site do the selling.
Once you have crafted your email, use this special trick to get even more visitors to the site–summarize the best benefit for visiting into one or two sentences, and place it as a PS in the email, listing the URL as the LAST thing in the email.
Even if someone doesn’t read the whole email, they will often scan the PS and catch the benefit and the link.
If you consistently answer these three questions in every email you send out, you will see a good return from your sales letter efforts.
Kevin Bidwell is owner of
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293
Kevin just finished a complete report on building a passive
income. Grab your copy here:
http://www.All-In-One-Business.com/cg-bin/at.cgi?a=274293&e=/pi
