You know you’re supposed to be emailing your email list at least once a week to keep them engaged.
It’s Monday. Time for a new email blast.
You open up a blank sheet of Google doc, ready to win your email list over.
…
What do you write?
Is this an issue you’ve had where nothing comes to you? Where you have absolutely no clue what to write to these people?
Speaking to John Vishnesky in one of our Expert Sessions on writing email newsletters, he introduced the SCARY writing structure which really breaks down the different types of emails you can continually send to your subscribers, in new and different ways.
This is one easy structure you can continually refer back to never run out of email ideas ever again.
Here we’re going to break it down:
S – Spin
C – Correlation
A – Ask
R – Resolution
Y – You
P.S. If you want to catch the replay of this Expert Session, head to the Skyrocket Blog Traffic Facebook group!
At A Glance
The Secret To Unlimited Email Ideas
S – Spin
What Spin means is you don’t have to start every single email idea from scratch. Is that a huge weight off your back hearing that?
There’s a lot of other great writers and thinkers that have come before you, so you’re not reinventing the wheel when it comes to sending value-driven emails. Here are some ways to start sourcing email ideas from:
1. Blogs
Look at blogs that are in the field that you’re in.
2. Google Trends
Go to Google trends to see what people are typing and what they’re searching for that surrounds what your topic is.
3. Twitter
Go on Twitter, type in the keywords for what your niche is in, and check out the conversation trend.
If you’re teaching about blogging, you can go in and see what people are talking about blogging right now. What are the big questions, what are hot topics, what are people discussing about blogging. Maybe it’s the latest SEO update, maybe it’s that Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp are shut down.
4. Reddit
You can go onto Reddit. It’s a great, great place to see what people are asking questions about.
5. Message boards/ Forums
One of the ones that you might not have thought about, even if you’ve checked some of these out before, is going on message boards or forums.
This might sound old school, but message boards were all the rage when it was just getting started online. Message boards seem a little outdated, but they’re a really great place to do some of that research about your target audience and the topics they want to learn about.
On message boards, you can see people who’ll tell you exactly the issues they’ve been having with whatever it is that you help them with.
You can then use that same exact content to write emails about. It’s a good way of having people tell you exactly what they need help with and also so you can use their language.
It’s important to use their language in your emails, as they’re going to know that you know EXACTLY what issues they’re having, and so it’s going to sound like you’re talking directly in their head. That’s the way to connect with them.
If you want to also figure out how you should be writing these emails, get on other people’s email lists who’re doing similar things as you, or even people you simply enjoy reading from.
For instance, you have a blog about gardening and you want to write emails about that, so you can go on to other gardening blogs and subscribe to their newsletter.
Apart from that, you can go on other blogs that blog about anything in general that interests you. A lot of the times, they aren’t just gonna be talking specifically about what they blog about. They might be talking about things that happened in their day, and that might inspire you to write an email about what happened to your day, which you can then use to bring it back into gardening in some way.
This brings us to the next theme, Correlation.
C- Correlation
Correlation emails are a way of tying all the great information you’ve found in your Spin section into a call to action to buy your product.
Correlation means you can write about any topic that comes to your mind at all. It can be gardening, it can be going for a walk, it could be going to the store or something that happened to you, as long as it’s an interesting story and it’s going to get people’s attention.
Then, bring it back to your main topic and turn that into an email that’s going to lead to a sale for you.
Sticking to gardening as an example, I can use a previous experience I’ve had.
“Two days ago, I went on a backpacking trip with my dog here in Colorado. We went overnight we got rained on, I almost ran out of water because my water filter wasn’t working, but I stuck with it. And had a blast!”
You can thus relate that back to your gardening story.
“Going on this backpacking trip is kind of similar to me starting this garden – I didn’t know what I was getting myself into. I started this garden and my plants were starting to die and I stuck with it and I watered them and I gave them food after learning what to do. I now want to help you do the same thing. That’s why I’ve got this gardening product I want to sell you right now.”
This is the correlation that goes from your story about the hiking trip into your story of starting gardening and how I want to show you how to garden today.
A- Ask
Ask, as the name suggests, is all regarding asking your audience.
If you don’t know what your audience’s biggest challenges are or what they are having issues with, you’re going to have a lot of trouble connecting with them.
Make sure to include the biggest challenge email in at least one of the emails you’re sending out. This is where you ask your audience what their biggest challenge is, what topics they’d like to hear more and get help with.
They’re most likely really going to want to answer this because it’s something they’re very passionate if they’re on your email list. Whenever they answer this, they’re going to give you the exact copy and words to add into your sales messaging that’s going to connect with them.
Then the second ask is the FAQ email, which is best used as part of your sales sequence. It’s where you answer questions whenever you’re doing a launch for your product that incorporates some of these questions that they’re saying they’re having challenges with.
Going back to the gardening example, say the biggest challenge I’ve had with gardening right now is “I don’t know how often to water my plants.”
In your FAQ email whenever you’re doing your sales email to launch a product on gardening, you’re going to say,
“Here’s the frequently asked questions. One question I get is, I don’t know how many times I need to water these plants or how much. Great! inside this course I’m launching right now, I’m going to show you exactly the right amount of times to water, the best times of day to water and how often you should be doing this.”
R – Resolution
This is a reminder to always assure your readers you have the resolution to their most pressing issues.
What I like to do is with the welcome series, whenever someone just first enters your list, you want to make sure that they know that you can help them with this issue.
One of the ways to do this is to include your hero story in your welcome series. Use a hero story that shows them you’ve gone through the same issues that they are dealing with, and this is how you are able to get through that.
Y – You
This type of email is where you break down all of these objections and show them how your product or service would actually work perfectly for them, if it’s an ideal fit for them.
This would be an email that you write to them where you break down all the objections that people might have about why this might not work for them, and you show them why your product is exactly what they’re looking for.
Going back to the gardening idea, imagine I’ve had a lot of questions come in about people who aren’t sure if this product I have is perfect for them. So I’m going to break it down.
A simplified example is this:
Objection: “I only have a certain amount of space on my back patio to grow something. Would this still work for me?”
My response: “Oh yes. Perfectly. I’ve I’ve got a section inside this course that shows you exactly how to use a small garden on your back patio and it works perfectly.”
Keep breaking down those objections and keep each email capped at 3 objections. You could break this into two emails and that would go out over time.
By using the SCARY writing structure, you’ll never out of email ideas ever again. Especially when starting out with the Spin section, you’re going to have a lot of different things to write about!
