Sell Like Crazy

Anatomy of a High-Converting Email
Every element of your email has one primary goal: to get the reader to take
the next step. Every line of copy should keep their eyes glued to their
screen, sliding down the slippery slope.
Your reader starts at the top of the slope, reading the subject line, and then
immediately slipping down to the preheader text, and then they open your
email and slide into the opening line of your copy and then immediately slip
down to the next line, slipping to the next line and so on and so forth.
In this sequence:
Subject line/Preheader: Grabs your reader by the throat and forces
them to keep reading. After reading your subject line, their brain

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should be burning with intrigue to find out more.
Lead: Drag them into your copy by captivating them with an
interesting statement or ‘pattern interrupt’ that jolts them to
attention.
Body: Fascinate them with a gripping or unusual story or example.
Call To Action: Get them to click, share, buy or do whatever the
primary call to action of your email is.
Once you’ve gotten your email opened, how do you get your readers to
actually click to go and see your offer or whatever it is you want them to
do?
First up, if they’re ever going to click and do what you want them to do,
people must ‘consume’ and read your email. The very first element of this
is design.
1. Email design: how your email looks is as important as what it says!
While your email subject line is one of the primary ways to get email
opened, the design of your email is how you get it read.
As I mentioned previously, you might think that beautifully designed emails
with lots of images, animated-buttons and a HTML-enhanced responsive
theme would increase the amount of people that read your emails and then
click. But this couldn’t be further from the truth.
Don’t believe me? Let’s take a look. When you quickly scan this email,
what’s the first thing that comes to your mind?

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Ok, stop. Let me guess. Immediately you knew it was from a business. You
knew it had commercial intent. Therefore immediately it goes into the ‘C’
group of emails. Consequently, you knew it wasn’t important or didn’t
require an action from you, and then you deleted it.
What’s the very first thing that tipped you off? Let me guess – it was
probably the subject line with each and every word capitalised (when was
the last time a friend sent you an email with letter case in the subject line?)
Then, once we do open it, there’s a logo at the top in the header. Your
friends would never send you an email with the logo in the header, so don’t
do it. Instead, put your logo in the signature.
This is not just common sense. It’s backed up by research and data. Digital
marketing behemoth HubSpot researched the idea of HTML versus plain
text emails. To summarise their findings, they too found that HTML emails

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actually decreased both their open and clickthrough rates.
Aside from proper list segmentation, nothing boosts opens and clicks as
well as an old school, plain-text email.
Why? It’s simple. Plain text emails look more authentic and less
commercial than HTML-enhanced emails. In addition, email filters are
smart enough to weed out over-enhanced emails from plain text emails – so
it helps with your deliverability too.
People see email as a one-to-one communication tool, and when was the
last time you got a beautifully designed HTML-enhanced email from a
friend about something important? Simple plain text emails seem to reflect
the personal nature of email, while HTML-enhanced emails scream
‘commercial mass marketing’.
Check out this example from an email I received about business lending:

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This is the perfect example of what not to do. It’s completely over designed,
there’s no copy, and the images are completely unrelated. I’m sure the
creator would be saying to their manager, ‘How great does this email look?’
Unfortunately for them, the design and polish of your emails doesn’t make
people trip over themselves to buy, in fact, it does quite the opposite.
No one wants to feel like you’re marketing to them. They’d rather feel like
they’ve opted in to receive information that will help them reach their
desired outcome. Email is a way to get your list to know, like, and trust you,
which is the number one way you convert subscribers into paying
customers.