What You MUST Do if You Want Subscribers to Buy From You
Before we get into some of the elements that belong to an email, we need to understand psychologically how and why this works. How do people gain trust in you online? People will begin to trust you online the same way that they’ll begin to trust you off-line. The same elements that go into building a trusting relationship off-line will be those exact elements that are required to build it online.
It’s not difficult to begin to feel as though the people that are on your email list are just a name and email address. 10 subscribers a day, 20 subscribers a month, 100,000 total subscribers and so on. It’s really easy to think of a subscriber list as a list of emails that sometimes buy.
The reason it‚Äôs so easy to think like this is because we see so much information online such as “optimize this,” “force your subscribers to buy three times as much by using these words,” “get the keywords that make people buy from you.” And on and on. Whether or not this stuff works is not the issue here. Again, the issue here is not if optimization works or not, the underlining message is the fact that we are being told that all we have to do is optimize a few words in order to get more people to buy from us. This dehumanizes our subscribers, whether it works or not. This leads us to believe that our subscribers are just numbers.
It’s almost like they‚Äôre a computer, and that they‚Äôll automatically respond to some scientific thing that we do on our sales letter and all we have to do is tweak it a little bit to get more sales.
It’s easy subconsciously, subliminally and psychologically to forget that your list is human when you listen to that type of training.
As we have discussed, optimization does work on your sales page and it does work on your email campaign. Getting rid of emails that don’t perform very well and replacing them with better emails works. But, this is limited to things you have already created and it’s limited within the confines of your trust and the relationship you have with your subscribers.
We must recognize that it‚Äôs a human doing the purchasing. It‚Äôs not your optimizing software… it’s a human that’s reading your sales pages. You have to write your emails as if they‚Äôre going to a human.
Remember: You’re Writing to a Real Human Being
Let’s look at an example:
We begin to think when we‚Äôre building email campaign, “Okay I need to put X number of this email in, and X number of that email in, etc.” When you meet somebody and you are building a new relationship, do you think about how many content pieces you are going to put into your conversations and how many sales angles you use when you talk to them?
If we did this, we would be considered weird and unsociable. If everything was scientifically calculated it would be extremely cumbersome to communicate and get it out. It’s the same thing online.
If we are just sending content out, or if we’re just sending sales emails out, or if we’re sending both out, we’re not building a relationship. In effect, we are saying, “read my emails and some of you by chance might buy.”
This method brings us to the place where we just hope that they’ll buy. We hope and pray that they’ll buy. It’s not that your hope and prayers did not work it’’s a fact that you’re not building a relationship. You’re going to send an email out that’s a billboard every day. Think about how many times you actually call the phone number that’s on a billboard. Most people ignore 99% of them. This is what people are doing with emails like this.
The question is: How do we build an online campaign that mimics an off-line relationship being built? Before I give you the steps and the background, the terminology I’m going to use is from a book that I believe should be mandatory reading for anyone who is writing an email campaign. If you have not read this book, you‚Äôre probably missing something in your email campaign. This book is not about writing emails.
It’s about these psychological elements that humans use in trust relationships. Having said that, you can use the psychological elements to build trust relationships, both online and off-line. When you use these as foundation of your email campaign, instead of using content and sales emails as a foundation, you’ll generally build trust and relationship.
Remember what we say about the trust relationships. People buy based on trust, not on sales copy. People buy based on trust relationship, not based on your sales copy. Saying this, once there‚Äôs trust and a relationship, can improving your sales copy improve your sales? Yes. But if someone does not trust you, unless you’re selling something with a really good price with no risk, no matter how good your sales letter is, more than likely no one is going to buy. If people trust you then you can optimize your sales copy and get more sales from people who trust and respect you. If people don‚Äôt trust and respect you, no matter how good your sales letter is, you’re probably not to make any sales.
Before we get to the terminology let me give you name of this book – The 7 Triggers to Yes. I believe this is mandatory reading for everything a person that writes an email campaign. If you read this book, and use it when you write your email campaigns, then your emails are going to improve.
I believe my email campaigns have improved incredibly because I use what I have learned in this book. Prior to reading this book, I knew a lot of these concepts and I used them in my day-to-day life, but for some reason I never really applied them to my email campaigns. Was I making money my email campaigns? Yes, because I was building trust and relationship in email campaigns. But I was using only two or three of these elements and my email campaigns.
When I write emails, even if I decide to use a particular formula for certain type of email, I still allow my genuine personality to flow through, which tends to build trust and relationship on its own. When I began to apply all the psychological elements, and apply them to what I was already doing naturally, responsiveness in my campaigns went up dramatically.