Have you ever frozen up in front of a blank page, afraid to write that e-mail to your subscribers? It’s hard. When you have thousands of people reading your stuff, every e-mail can be intimidating to write.
That’s why we’ve made a list of 9 e-mails that you can add to your conversion funnel today. They are:
- Case Study
- FAQ E-mail
- Proven Content
- Article
- Video & Audio Content
- Quick Tip
- Parable
- Q&A
- Live Training
Let’s dive right in!
1) Case Study
People love case studies. These e-mails are storytelling and education combined. Use them to remove specific objections.
Source: Single Grain case studies
For example, maybe you hear the objection, “I can’t do this because I have no time.”
No problem. You could write a case study e-mail all about how Janice, a single working mom with 3 kids, had success with your product by investing time on weekends and late nights to achieve XYZ result. All of a sudden, people have a lot more confidence that your product or service can work for them, too.
Live example: Copywriter: Andrew Warner at Mixergy. Click here to see a perfectly executed case study e-mail.
2) The FAQ E-mail
Source: Stock Unlimited
Include one Q&A email in your autoresponder. This gives you a place to answer common questions about your offer.
We’ve put together a PDF cheat sheet of this post, to help you execute these e-mails and make more money in your business.
In your FAQ e-mail, write out your prospect’s most common objections, phrased as questions.
Like this:
Q: “What if this product doesn’t work for me?”
A: Don’t worry, you’re always covered by our money-back guarantee!
Q: [Common objection]
A: Answer that removes objection.
And so on.
You can search through your helpdesk and support e-mails for FAQ ideas.
If you’re still not sure about your customers’ objections, you can always survey your past customers. Create a Survey Monkey and ask customers why they chose you. Ask what (if anything) made them hesitate before buying.
Source: Survey Monkey
This intel is a gold mine for copywriting.
Just copy people’s questions word for word, answer them in an FAQ e-mail, and watch your conversions jump!
Live example: Copywriter: Derek Halpern at Social Triggers. Click here to see a perfectly executed FAQ e-mail.
3) Proven Content
Source: Buzzsumo
You don’t need to reinvent the wheel with your autoresponder.
Keep in mind that, no matter how big your list is, when each prospect opens your e-mail, it’s still just a one-to-one communication. In other words, how do you e-mail your best friend or your mom?
Odds are, you e-mail people to share remarkable stuff that they’d enjoy. You send links to funny or useful videos. You send an idea or a tip to something cool you know they’d like. Do the same with your autoresponder.
This is called proven content.
With proven content, you literally just find an interesting link on the Internet that’s already proven to resonate with your audience and put it in your e-mail.
Here’s how to find proven content for your audience:
- Go to your favorite (i.e. addictive!) site. Good ones include Reddit, YouTube, Digg and Imgur.
- Search for a phrase that your audience cares about. It’s important that you think broader than the product you sell. For example, if you sell golf gloves, your audience cares about golf. So you might search Imgur for the most shared photos of breathtaking golf courses, not just gloves.
- Pick a viral photo or video about your topic. The more remarkable, the better. And guess what: the headline you clicked has also already been “validated” by virtue of this proven content getting a ton of shares. That means you can just copy the headline as your e-mail subject line.
Source: TIME’s Viral YouTube Videos of 2016
Pro Tip:
Use proven content if your market attracts a rabid fanbase. Do your customers have an insatiable desire or hobby like golf, CROssfit, fashion, video games or music?
Case in point: any CROssfit athlete on the planet would watch this video to the end:
See what I mean?
If you sell a product even somewhat related to a rabid fanbase (think very hard about this), then you, too, can use proven content to feed people’s desire for MORE.
The other opportunity for proven content is if you sell a physical product that people only buy occasionally. Like a leather office chair.
The next time your prospect needs to buy an office chair, they’ll be more likely to skip Google and search their inbox for that e-mail you sent last month. You’re “top of mind” – and your drip sequence has done its job.
4) How-To Article
Source: Stock Unlimited
Obviously, your blog is a good place to look for e-mail content.
Chances are, your prospects haven’t read your older articles, and a drip sequence ensures that new readers see the best stuff from your archives.
Learn More: The Ultimate Guide to Drip Campaigns
For the e-mail itself, just write a quick intro followed by a link to the article. Add some “teaser bullets” to boost your click-through rate.
Live example: Copywriter: Bryan Harris at VideoFruit. Click here to see a perfectly executed how-to article e-mail.
5) Video & Audio Content
There’s arguably no faster way to escalate your relationship with e-mail subscribers than to put your actual face (or voice) out there.
If you have videos or interviews, use the best ones in your autoresponder.
As for the e-mail itself, write a quick intro, then add a link to the video. Same goes for audio training and podcast episodes.
Live example: Copywriter: Clay Collins at LeadPages. Click here to see a perfectly executed video content e-mail.
6) Quick Tip E-mail
When you send out tips, you should avoid writing long, encyclopedic lists.
Why?
In his book The Paradox of Choice, researcher Barry Schwartz explains:
“If you offer people 26 flavors of jam, they’re more likely to get overwhelmed and buy none than if you’d just had them pick between strawberry and grape. The fear of “buyer’s remorse” is too great—so people freeze up and choose nothing.”
Don’t write long, exhaustive content in the body of an e-mail.
Instead, pick just ONE juicy tip (even if you can rattle off 20). Write 300 words about why this one tip works and how to get started.
Now your readers have a single course of action and are more likely to implement your content–and open your e-mails in the future.
Live example: Copywriter: Neville Medhora at NevBlog and KopywritingKourse. Click here to see a perfectly executed quick tip e-mail.
7) Parable
Source: Ryan Clements
Storytelling is essential in your conversion funnel.
The truth is, you can only write so much how-to information. But you’ll never run out of stories.
An added benefit is that stories let you sell without being “pushy.” Your prospects have objections to buying. You need to remove those objections to get the sale. That’s where storytelling comes in.
To illustrate, think about the #1 reason your prospect would NOT do business with you. Really, think about one objection right now. This will save you time writing later.
Maybe it’s one of these?
- “Too expensive.”
- “I’d prefer competitor XYZ.”
- “I don’t understand it.”
- “It won’t work for me because I’m not ____.”
How do you remove an objection?
Keep reading.
Rather than arguing with an objection, you overcome it indirectly – with a story.
Like this:
Imagine you’re taking a walk and you see a seven-year-old kid on his bike about to ride past you. He’s not wearing a helmet.
What would you do?
Obviously, this kid should wear a helmet. He knows it. But like everyone, he wants to look cool. Maybe the helmet is uncomfortable. How would you persuade the boy to turn back and grab his helmet? Do you lecture him?
(Hint: that won’t work with your e-mail list.)
There’s a better option: Tell the kid a story.
You could tell the kid how his red bike looks just like the bike you got for your 9th birthday. Tell him about the terrifying time you were riding down the street and hit a pothole.
Describe how you lost control… in suspenseful detail. Talk about how you got tossed over the handlebars. Illustrate how your head whipped against the sidewalk curb and how your helmet cracked into pieces, scattering chips of blue plastic across the sidewalk.
Talk about how lucky you felt to walk away okay. Show him the scar on your elbow.
At this point, your “pitch” for the boy to grab his helmet isn’t really a pitch at all. It’s just the moral of the story.
Same goes for your e-mails.
After you’ve addressed objections with logic, use storytelling and case studies to remove objections without spamming people to death.
Stories aren’t just for objections, either. You can use storytelling to showcase your cause, build trust and establish authority. Michael Margolis from Story University calls this your Origin Story.
Live example: Copywriter: Ramit Sethi at I Will Teach You To Be Rich. Click here to see a perfectly executed parable e-mail.
8) Q&A
Source: TrustWave
One of the biggest factors that helps boost conversions in your marketing funnel is being able to address objections well.
Learn More: Step by Step Guide: How to Build a High Quality Marketing Funnel
The best way to uncover these objections is by asking your customers as many questions as you can about the things they’re struggling with, and then try to give them advice on how they can solve that problem. This way, you can observe in real time how potential customers respond to your sales messages.
If a customer tells you their problems over e-mail and you give them a potential solution, watch what they do next. Do they respond and say “thanks”? Do they just never respond? Do they respond with “yeah, but…”?
The way your customers respond to these e-mails are likely how they respond to your sales pitches. This is why Q&A e-mails can be so valuable in your conversion funnel.
For example, check out how Wesley Parker from Clicteq does this:
Wesley runs a services business that helps people with PPC campaigns, so he asked his list: “What’s your biggest challenge when it comes to Adwords marketing?” You could alter this question based on the specific problem you’re solving. For example, if you’re helping people improve their sales processes, you could say “What’s your biggest challenge around improving your company’s sales?”
To uncover objections quickly, you could even send out a survey asking questions like “What sort of things have you tried in the past to solve X?” That way, you’ll know how your proposed solution needs to sound different.
9) Live Training
Source: Single Grain
There’s a reason why so many companies use webinars to convert prospects and leads into paying customers.
SaaS companies use these frequently. For example, KISSmetrics maintains an entire library of webinars that they use to push potential customers further down their conversion funnel.
At Single Grain, we also use live trainings to educate our potential customers. For example, we host trainings on how to build a paid content promotion funnel to teach people how to promote their content using paid traffic.
Learn More: Paid Content Promotion: A Comparison Of The Different Platforms
To maximize click-through rates on these e-mails, be sure that you:
- Limit registration to a certain number of seats. By limiting the total number of people who can attend your live training, you’re doing a couple of things: 1) inducing scarcity, which increases conversions, and 2) giving yourself the ability to give more personalized attention to your attendees. The lower the number of total signups, the more questions you’ll be able to answer on the live training, and the more likely it is that those prospects will buy your product.
- Outline exactly what attendees can expect to learn. No one likes webinars that are 80% fluff and 20% sales pitch. That’s why it’s important to outline specifically what attendees can expect to learn if they attend your webinar. In our e-mail above, notice how we included bullets like “How to amplify your content marketing efforts using Facebook,” “Content automation tips,” etc.
Conclusion
And there you have it!
Use these 9 e-mails to help you build engagement, convert prospects to customers and grow your sales with e-mail marketing:
- Case Study
- FAQ
- Proven Content
- How-To Article
- Video & Audio Content
- Quick Tip E-mail
- Parable
- Q&A
- Live Training
Ready to get writing?
To help you execute these e-mails and make more money in your business, we’ve put together a PDF cheat sheet of this post. Save the PDF to your desktop for quick reference:
Now you’ve got some ammo for the next time you’re staring at a blank page to e-mail your list.
