MindValley Labs Internet Marketing Blog

I’ve com­bined some of the things I learnt from Matt Furey with my own approach to writ­ing, and the result is a win­ning com­bi­na­tion that I use to write emails that actu­ally make money.

For me, writ­ing an email is a 4-step process – it’s a sys­tem that you can use and build on.

4 Step Process to Email Copywriting

1. Cur­rent or Evergreen?

First, you have to strate­gi­cally decide whether it’s an ever­green email or a cur­rent email.

An ever­green email is the type of email that you can put in your autore­spon­der and you can keep it run­ning repeat­edly year after year or once every 4–5 months, depend­ing on the sub­ject and on your sequence.

In other words, you can keep it there forever.

A cur­rent email means that you write emails as a reac­tion to what is hap­pen­ing in the world right now. It usu­ally a news-related item, for exam­ple oil prices going up, sum­mer, the Dark Knight Returns, or back-to-school.

If you decide to write a cur­rent email, use the USA Today secret and put in lit­tle facts to get your reader’s attention.

How­ever, to put it another way – it’s long-term profit vs. short term gain, because some­thing ever­green isn’t affected by cir­cum­stance and is an eter­nal issue that won’t go away. How­ever, it’s with cur­rent emails that you’re able to make more money in the short run because that’s directly rel­e­vant to the per­son read­ing your email.

I don’t know what the magic ratio should be — 50% ever­green and 50% cur­rent so that your work as an email copy­writer is reduced because there’s more ever­green con­tent? Or, should you focus on bring­ing in short term gain because email is so flex­i­ble that you can write one in 2 hours? That ratio is up to you to determine.

Either way, always decide whether your email is ever­green or current.

The peo­ple who are really good with ever­green emails are the seduc­tion gurus who do it for top­ics they believe are ever­green in their niche mar­ket– peo­ple like John Ala­nis or Ross Jef­fries. David DeAn­gelo (Dou­ble your Dat­ing), for exam­ple, has a 100email autore­spon­der sequence, every day except week­ends for about 3 months, and then it repeats – and he has a 20M dol­lar business!

If you want to do the same, you can send the same emails – but prefer­ably after a long time. Chances are, peo­ple won’t remem­ber after 6 months.

2. Deter­mine the Strategy

It sounds very big, but there are actu­ally just 3 com­po­nents: List, Story, Offer.

1. Which list am I email­ing? Because this deter­mines your cus­tomer avatar, and what res­onates with the peo­ple on each list is different.

2. What’s the story I want to share? Did my friend share with me an amaz­ing tech­nique that I want to intro­duce? Or how I used a par­tic­u­lar tech­nique to do over­come something?

3. What’s the offer, and what prod­uct am I sell­ing to this list?

You just need one sen­tence for each of the above: you don’t need to be very elab­o­rate because emails aren’t meant to be elab­o­rate – they’re meant to be sim­ple and to the heart.

Matt Furey says the “3 C”s of email mar­ket­ing are to be Clear, to be Con­cise, and to be Col­lo­quial.

By con­cise, I don’t nec­es­sar­ily mean short –just don’t repeat your­self. With email length, it works 2 ways – David DeAngelo’s emails go on and on, and at the same time Matt Furey says the rec­om­mended length is about 500 words. It doesn’t have to be short because 500 words does give you a bit of room.

Here’s the thing – to be suc­cess­ful in email mar­ket­ing, you must write the way your grand­mother would write email, in a way sim­i­lar to how she’d ram­ble to you. The more you repli­cate that for­mula and the more you write like a friend, the more sales you’ll make because you’ve devel­oped that connection.

This is because when peo­ple go into their email, their mind­set is to open an email from a friend. If you write some­thing ‘salesy’, they’ll most likely find it a turn off and they’ll imme­di­ately switch off.

3. Write down the Bones

At this point, I start writ­ing the emails. ‘Writ­ing down the Bones’ is a strat­egy employed by one of the top cre­ative writ­ing teach­ers of all time, Natalie Gold­berg. She said that there are 2 per­sons resid­ing in you – the writer and the edi­tor – and they’re always at odds.

That means when the writer writes some­thing, the edi­tor imme­di­ately says, ‘Hey, that sen­tence looks funny…why don’t you improve this struc­ture?’ So, ini­tially, you have to cast the edi­tor aside, and write.

To do this, I give my self a time-line –usu­ally exactly half an hour. I don’t care how long it is; there’s some sort of struc­ture, but I just con­tinue to write whether the sen­tence seems weird or it’s not flowing.

Why? Because that is most prob­a­bly the most authen­tic thing you can get because it’s heart to heart.

As Matt Furey says, Talk-Write Write-Talk. It’s heart to heart com­mu­ni­ca­tion, so it can only work when you write out of your stream of con­scious­ness. You write from your sub­con­scious to touch the other person’s subconscious.

Usu­ally, in the first draft, you’ll have the story. You may not have all the psy­cho­log­i­cal trig­gers and you may only have a bit of the offer, but it is really all about the story (because grand­moth­ers like telling sto­ries). The more sto­ries you tell, the more things you sell.

Even if ini­tially your story is ill formed, just make sure to spend that half-hour writ­ing. No sec­ond thoughts, no going back – just keep mov­ing forward.

4. Edit

I usu­ally spend one hour edit­ing the foun­da­tion of my email and clean­ing it up here and there.

I use psy­cho­log­i­cal trig­gers – things like scarcity, antic­i­pa­tion, curios­ity, etc. I’ve also assem­bled my copywriter’s tool­box which con­tains tran­si­tion words and phrases, power words, elec­tri­fy­ing your ads, col­lo­qui­alisms, idioms etc.

I reg­u­larly use Magic Tran­si­tions (from Ted Nicholas) and the new Clay­ton Make­peace free report, ‘The #1 Way to Elec­trify Your Ads’, which you can use to make your email more ‘warm’ by using clichés, col­lo­qui­alisms, and fig­ures of speech.

And voilà — that’s how you write an email using my sim­ple 4 step process.

Addi­tional tips:

• Col­lect sub­ject lines – when you see a good sub­ject lines, copy and paste it into your col­lec­tion. I’ve seen really cool sub­ject lines, like “Head­less man found in Top­less Bar”, or Dr Dave drinks his own urine to lose weight – I mean, that would make you open that email! Even things like real life, like people’s Skype mes­sages can make for eye-catching lines – one of our pro­gram­mers wrote “hack­ers have CSS design­ers too”. You can so eas­ily use this as a tem­plate and adapt it to your needs e.g., ‘ser­ial killers have friends too’, etc.
• When it comes to try­ing to under­stand your mar­ket and fig­ure out the psy­cho­log­i­cal trig­gers in rela­tion to the sub­ject you’re writ­ing about, it’s use­ful to go to Ama­zon and find a book related to what you’re writ­ing about. If you look at the chap­ter break downs / head­lines, it’s pretty much all the psy­cho­log­i­cal trig­gers there because they’ll cover topic by topic what the reader is look­ing for.
• The top bul­let swipe files are not in copy­writ­ing books, but 2 gen­eral books that you most likely have heard of before: the first is ‘How to Win Friends and Influ­ence Peo­ple’ by Dale Carnegie. The sec­ond is ‘How I Raised Myself From Fail­ure to Suc­cess in Sell­ing’ by Frank Bettger, with the table of con­tents by direct mail mas­ter copy­writer Vic­tor O. Schwab. The con­tents are all essen­tially bul­let point tem­plates for you to swipe.

Last 5 posts by

• Are You a Direct Response Gazillionaire-In-Waiting? — Octo­ber 28th, 2008
• 3 For­bid­den Twit­ter Mind Con­trol Tricks to Explode Your Mar­ket­ing — Octo­ber 1st, 2008
• An Intro­duc­tion to Tro­jan Horse Mar­ket­ing — July 2nd, 2008
• The Paprika Effect: The Brain-dead Sim­ple For­mula to Instant Cus­tomer Delight — June 25th, 2008
• 3 Ways to Use the Let­ter ‘S’ to Sex up Head­lines, Body Copy and Bul­lets — May 22nd, 2008

About the Author

Kenneth Yu is a tormented artist, but he was determined not to be a starving one. This is the primary reason why this D&AD award-winning advertising creative has plunged into the world of Internet entrepreneurship, and the rest -- as they say -- is history. Straddling both the creative and business realm, Kenneth combines bullet-fast ideation and his vast experience working with the big brands to alchemize marketing gold as the Head Copywriter and Marketing Strategist in MindValley. He shares more out-of-the-box marketing and copywriting tips (plus cool irreverent stuff) on his Twitter

Check out other posts by Kenneth

If you want to see what's in the private lab...

Ask yourself... which part of your business would you most like to improve?

I can send you 7 tactics related to your specific needs, if you like.

You don't have to buy anything, just take it as a backstage pass into our private course.

Will it give you the solution you've been waiting for?

There's only one way to find out.

Your first-name

Your email

Get Free Tactics

Our strict privacy policy keeps your email 100% safe and secure.