The Anatomy Of A High-Converting Email

If you are a regular listener to this podcast, then you know I am a massive fan of using a mailing list as a central part of your business development strategy. And in today's podcast, I want to talk about the anatomy of a great email. Because a lot of people buy into the concept of building a list and regularly emailing that list, but then they get stuck because they don't know what to send or the engagement levels they're getting with the emails that they are sending are not as high as they hoped. So in this episode, I want to talk to you about what is the anatomy of a great email? Now, this episode is brought to you by my brand new program, the Build, Nurture and Convert blueprint, which is the A to Z of building a complete email marketing machine to attract new subscribers, nurture them, and then convert them into loyal customers. Now, right now I'm providing a special offer for podcast listeners. So if you type in podcast 20, that's podcast 20 at checkout, you will receive a 20% discount off the price of the program. All the details are in today's show notes and I really hope that I will see you inside the program. But meanwhile, let's get on with today's show and let's break down what the anatomy of a great email is. Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta. Hey everybody. Welcome to today's episode of the podcast. Today we're talking about email marketing again, but specifically what makes a great email and how do you structure an email to maximize your engagement. Now, I know a lot of you guys listening will buy into the concept of building an email list. I've talked about it many times before and I've talked about why building a list is one of the most valuable assets you can have in your business and how it's one of the most cost effective and consistent ways of getting more people into your world, nurturing them so that when they are ready to buy, that is, they're in enough pain and they're clear that your product or service can solve that pain. They reach out to you to start engaging. So I hope you buy into that. But I know a lot of people struggle to consistently create emails and consistently create emails that convert. So that's what I want to focus on today. Fundamentally, there's three crucial parts of an email, and they are crucial in this order. The first thing you need to get right is the subject line. The second thing you need to think about always is the PS at the end of an email. And then the third thing you need to think about is the body of the email. Why are they important in that order? Well, because often people will obviously read the subject line. That's the thing that gets them to open up the email in the first place. But they might well then skim right to the bottom of the email. And if you don't have a really good call to action in your ps, then they may just leave because they don't read the whole body of it. So that's what we're going to focus on. I'm going to start off by talking about getting the subject right. So the subject line is the first piece of your email that a reader interacts with. And it's really your only chance to grab your reader's attention and then entice them to open the email. Now, a great subject line creates curiosity. It might highlight the benefits of opening the email. It might touch upon a pain point that you know your reader will be suffering from. And it needs to be short enough to convey your message without revealing too much. But not so long or so complex that the reader really has to think about things, because by then they've moved on to the next email in their inbox. So you want to invest a bit of time and thought in creating a really enticing subject. Because no matter how powerful the content of your email is, as I said, the subject line determines whether your email is going to be opened or ignored or just thrown straight in the trash. Therefore, it's essential that your email subject line stands out from the zillion other emails that are sitting in your reader's inbox. So you really want to spend as much time and effort creating an engaging subject line as you do writing the email itself. So there's a whole range of different types of subject line that you can use, including questions, including kind of a concept of missing out, creating curiosity. As I said, touching upon a pain point, or even making it a personal subject. So let me just give you a few examples. So if you were creating one that was a fear of missing out, it might say something like, urgent, you've got one day to watch this, or your plan goes away by midnight. Get it now before it's gone. And so on. The next type of subject line would be a curiosity one, and this can often be where you ask a question. So, for example, is this the best career move you could ever make? 10 bizarre money habits, making millennials richer? Or what's the one common trait that you and Every agency owner suffers from. So those examples of curiosity subject lines. And then the other type of subject line I mentioned is touching upon pain points. So get more kitchen space with these easy fixes. Stop wasting time on things that don't matter. Learn new language in only 15 minutes a day. How to delegate in nine easy steps. So those are examples of pain point subject lines. And then the last category I mentioned was using something personal. So this could be something like a piece of advice I wish I could give my younger self or how I doubled my revenue in 12 months. Now, you obviously have to make the subject pertinent to your reader. And to that point, you need to make sure that you really know who you're talking to. And a good tip here is that when I write my emails, I'm always picturing the person I'm talking to sitting opposite me and thinking about how having a conversation with them. So it's super important. You have a clear niche and you understand exactly who your ideal target customer is. Now, there's lots of other examples of subject lines you can find on the Internet. And you might think some of what I gave you is too salesy for your audience. So you've got to get that balance right between being interesting and enticing versus being overtly salesy. And that turns people off as well. So that's some examples of your subject line. Now, the second most important thing I mentioned was the PS at the end of your emails. So you always want to be thinking about what PS can I add in? And you know that I talk about the focus or the balance of 80% adding value, 20% selling. Well, I'll often use my PS as my 20% selling. So you'll see emails from me that say PS, here's three other ways I can support you, or here's four ways we can work together. And then I'll list out what they could be. So, for example, I could offer them to book a strategy call with me. I could promote this podcast in an email. I could tell them about one of my programs in my ps. So think really carefully about your ps, because people will often go straight from the subject straight down to the ps. And like I say, I often use my PS as a way to talk about how I can further support the reader. But you could also be offering, for example, a free PDF that's connected to the subject of your email. So it's kind of like the call to action. It's like, what do you want the reader to do next? Now, of course, you can put them in the body of your email. But let's just think for a moment that a lot of people will look at the subject line and they'll skirt straight down to the ps. So if they never read the body, are you clear what they want, what you want them to do next? And I'll always highlight my pss and they'll always be bold so that they stand out. So that is the second really important point, which is the ps. And now let's move on to the body of the email. And of course a lot of you will be thinking, well, Rob, actually the body is the most important part, because that's where I get my key message across. And of course it is. But the point I'm making is that if you don't get the subject right, you'll never get people to read the body of your email. And even when people open your email, they may still go straight down to the ps, which is why those two points are super important. So your readers opened your email because of your enticing subject line. Now you need to have an opening introduction, which is like the first couple of sentences and they're the thing that are going to trigger someone's interest to keep them reading. So my advice here is get to the point quickly, but keep the first two sentences or that first paragraph short to the point and maybe create more curiosity or ask a question or make a statement that they will be able to relate to so they carry on reading. Now, whilst in the body of your email, you might want someone to take action. Remember that we are trying to add value to our audience. So we are trying to build know, like and trust through these series of weekly or however frequent your emails are. You're trying to build that know, like and trust. So what we want to be doing is adding value, demonstrating our reader that we really understand them and the pain that they suffer from, so they look forward to receiving your email. And remember, it's only when we've built know, like and trust that we can then start really selling to them. So you really want to focus the body of your email on adding value, rather than making it too salesy, because that will just switch people off, especially if they don't really know you yet. So use your body to build value, to offer some solutions and some ideas without giving everything away, of course. My next piece of advice is make sure that your email and the body of your email is about one topic. I'm not a big fan of newsletters. I don't think people have got time to read them and I also think that people feel like if they're subscribing to a newsletter, then it's just an opportunity for you to sell. Where if you're sending one topic emails that is going to hit home and hit that pain point with your customer, then they're much more likely to read it. I think the ideal email is going to be somewhere between 300 and 600 words. And I think text based emails are better than designed emails because they get through the spam filters much more easily and people tend to see a text based email as something that isn't salesy, whereas a really well designed newsletter is obviously sort of salesy. Unless people are really signed up to that newsletter, it's hard to get traction with them. Now, a good structure for your emails is following the PAS approach and that stands for pain agitate solve. So the first part of your email you are identifying a pain. The second part of your email you're kind of sticking the knife in and making it even more painful. And then the third part of your email, you're giving them some solution to that pain. So if I was writing an email about delegation, for example, the pain part of it would be talking about how perhaps you're not good at delegating and you like to be in control and you're not good at letting go and giving other people opportunities. And then the agitate part of it would be the consequence of that. Like if you don't delegate, you're going to work really long hours, your team are going to get get really demotivated and people are going to leave and you're going to get stressed and have mental health issues and so on. So that's the agitate part. And then the solve part would be here's my nine step plan to help you become a better delegator. And in fact, if I was doing something like that, I might only share the first three steps in the email and then say, if you want to read the rest of this, download my free ebook on the nine steps to Great delegation. So taking this pain agitate solve approach to emails is a really good structure and one that you know will hit home, provided you understand who your ideal target customer is, of course. So I mentioned that you might put your call to action in your PS which is something I often do. But of course you might also want to put the call to action at the end of your email. So if we're following that delegation email and following the pain agitate solve approach, then the call to action would be, hey, if you want to learn about the full details of these nine steps to great delegation, then download my free guide. So that would be the call to action. Okay, so hopefully if you stuck with me to this point, you've got some ideas around creating really curious, interesting subject lines. You've got this great body of your email following that pain agitate solve approach and you've got a really good call to action in your PS and next steps. So let's just talk about a couple of other things while we're here and talking about emails. First of all, frequency, which is a question I get all the time. Just bear in mind that if you are sending value added emails to your audience, why wouldn't you send them frequently? I send an email at least once a week and I know sometimes when I tell some of my clients or my audience about that, they kind of feel, no, I can't send an email every week, guys. Yes you can. If you send value added emails. And at the end of the day, if a subscriber is getting really fed up with it, they can always unsubscribe. So that's the first thing. I think you should send emails at least once a week or twice a month, but certainly no less frequently than that because people will forget you. And your goal with your emails is to move people along the buyer's journey and get them to know like and trust you so they'll then buy from you when you're ready to sell and when they're in enough pain. And the second thing is, well, what is a good open rate? So if I've got my email list, I've created these good emails following your structure. Rob, what's a good open rate? Well, somewhere between 20 and 35% is pretty good and if you're heading towards 35 and higher, then you're doing really, really well. And the second question is, well, what should the click through rate is? So where I've got links in my email, what expectations should I have about click throughs? And this is obviously going to change massively depending on what the click through thing is. But if we were following like the ebook on delegation, for example, I would expect somewhere between 3 and 6%. So that's 3 to 6% of the people that opened my email would click through. So if I've got a thousand people in my list and I've got a 30% open rate, that means 300 people have opened my email. And then if 6% of those click on a link in the email, that means I'm going to get 18 people clicking through and then hopefully downloading my free guide. So those are just some kind of rough benchmarks and kind of approximately what I get with my emails. And of course it depends massively. It depends on the mood that the person's in, how busy they are, whether their desk when your email pops in, and also what's going on for them in terms of their current pain points. And the other thing that you want to do is experiment with both the time of day and the day of week that you send your emails to find out what is the time that's going to get the most engagement. And again, that is different for different industries. And also if you can, you can try some a B testing on your subject line. So some email automation systems allow you to try two different subject lines and it will send the email say to 15% to one subject, 15% to another. It will wait for four hours, see which one gets the most engagement, and then Send the other 70% of the list to that winning subject line. So that's a B testing. So that's something you can do if you want to get a bit more advanced. But anyway, I just wanted to talk about the anatomy of a great email today and I hope this has inspired you both to keep writing emails, but also to keep improving your emails. Try and get 1% better every time you write an email. And remember, doing something imperfectly is much better than waiting till you can do it perfectly. And of course, if you want more help with this, please do check out my brand new email marketing and list building program, the Build, Nurture and Convert blueprint. I will put a link to that in the show notes and I'll also put a link to the voucher code that you can use at checkout to get 20% off. But other than that, have a great rest of your week. As ever, if you found this useful, please make sure you hit the subscribe button. I would love you to leave a review about the podcast because that really helps the algorithm. Show the podcast to more people, which means I can help more people. But other than that, have a great weekend and get emailing.