Let’s discuss email marketing. There's actually a strategy to it. And, what I'm gonna talk to you about are some important things about creating your emails that are gonna give you a high clickthrough rate. And the clickthrough rate is important for you to understand because there's not just one click that has to take place there. 


There's actually quite a few clicks that have to take place in order for your email campaign to be successful. Okay? So, I'm gonna go through all those steps and I'm gonna show you things that have worked for me, and I hope that you implement them in your campaigns. So, let's get started. 


First and foremost, like anything else, you're gonna be as successful as the amount of time and effort you put into your preparation, okay? You should always prepare, be well prepared for your email campaigns.


Every single email that you send needs to be well thought out, okay? If you plan on having a long-term relationship with your subscribers, then you must plan out your messages. Sometimes, when you're promoting a product, you're given a swipe email, a pre-written email. 


I'm gonna recommend that you not send out pre-written emails, as is, you should always review the email and change it, make it sound like it's coming from you. That's important, because if you don't do that, it's gonna be tough to kinda, find a central point with your subscribers. 


You're gonna have to build a relationship with your subscribers. And if you're keeping, if you're sending them wording from different people at different times, what's gonna happen is that's gonna get confusing. They're not gonna really know when they're talking to you or when they're hearing from you, rather, it's really important to keep that in mind.


When you're communicating with them, you should also be very familiar with your autoresponder features, okay? So, different autoresponders have different features. I use AWeber, religiously. It's the only one that I use. I've had several accounts. I also have used different services in the past, but I like using AWeber. 




As long as you follow the rules and you email properly, and you build a relationship with your list, and you're collecting your list properly, you're not gonna have a problem with AWeber. So don't be afraid of losing your list. That doesn't happen. That only happens to people that are spamming and they're not using it properly. 


And that if you pay attention to what you're doing, if you prepare, if you send properly written emails, if you're promoting the appropriate products and you're not spamming people and you're collecting your leads properly and you're following the rules, you're not gonna have a problem.


But it is important that you're familiar with all the different features of the software, okay? And that's because it's gonna affect the deliverability of your messages. You're gonna be growing different lists from different products and from different squeeze pages and things like that. 


You're able to segment emails and you're able to separate the people that you're sending to. And it's important that you're familiar with how to do that. If you have, let's say, a golf product, you don't wanna be sending a different type of product offer or information to that particular list, you're gonna wanna make sure that you're sending the right information to the right list, or else you're just gonna people off and they end up getting a whole bunch of unsubscribes. 


While I mention unsubscribes, don't worry about the unsubscribes, worry about the subscribers. Focus on getting people to opt into your list and to grow your list. There's always gonna be people that unsubscribe. Now, if you feel that your unsubscribe rate is too high, then you need to go back and look at your metrics, look at your stats, find out where you're losing them, how you're losing them. 


What email did you send with, with every email that you send to your list, you can see the stats. You can see how many of your people received it, how many people opened it, how many people clicked on it. And that should be able to help you gauge exactly what you should and shouldn't be saying what works, what doesn't work. 


And it's important that you always track and review your stats. You know, you're not gonna get better at building your list and building your relationship with your people and getting high click-through rates because who cares, if you have this humongous list, if nobody clicks your emails.
The purpose of having a list is to get people to take action by communicating with them, by engaging them. I talked to you a little bit throughout this video on how to engage them and how to communicate with them, but you should always, always track and review your stats so that you can improve. So, become familiar with your particular autoresponder. 


Watch some tutorial videos. I'm sure that they have some tutorial videos on their main website, and learn how to use it and test things. It doesn't matter if you have a hundred people on your list, or you have a hundred thousand on your list, you should be testing, you should be seeing what works and seeing what doesn't work. That way, you can focus on the things that work moving forward.


Let's talk about email breakpoints. Now, I've mentioned this a few times in other videos that I've done, and I wanna be very clear about what an email breakpoint is. The main purpose of every step in the process is to persuade the reader to take the next step. When you think about it, the purpose of every meeting is to have another meeting. 


There is no other purpose. You have to try to convey in each step to the user that they should take the next step. And email breakpoints are every step. The reason I call them break points is because each one of those steps is a possibility for the entire process to break. 


If you don't do it right, the user, the reader will never get to the next step, and you failed. So the further you could get through this list of points here, the more successful, well, let me word that properly. The further you can get through this list of things with the most amount of people, the better and more successful you're gonna be with your email campaigns, and the more money you're gonna make using your marketing, your email marketing, your affiliate marketing.


The first step in the process naturally is getting people to opt in. That's how you collect your leads. That's how you get people on your list. So that's the first break point. If you have a crappy looking opt-in page, and you're not getting traffic to it, and you don't have it set up properly, then you're not even gonna get people on your list, and you won't even be able to get to the next step. 




If you're not doing well on that first step, every other step is gonna be affected. So it doesn't matter how good the body of your email is or the links you're sending or anything like that, if the actual opt-in doesn't actually get people to sign up for confirmation and white list.


Now, after they sign up, that very first message that they get when they click that submit message is very important. Are they confirming to be on your list? Are you using a double opt-in method? Are you familiar with the CAN Spam Act? You know, the fact that there's a can can Spam act does not mean that you can't have single opt-ins.


That people just simply type in their name and email and automatically get put on your list. It's perfectly legal to mail those people and to collect data that way. Don't think that it's not. The Canned Spam Act is about not mailing out spam and unsolicited information to people that did not want to be on your list. 


That's a completely different thing. But you might wanna test this. Test the different confirmation processes. Make sure you're telling people in that welcome message, or make sure you're telling people on that very first page that they go to when they click the submit button. 


Make sure that you're giving them specific instructions on what they need to do next. Let them know, Hey, you've just gotten an email from me. Make sure that you go and you click the confirmation button so that you can be on my list. Make sure that you also take my email address, which is xyz@xyz.com, and add it to your contacts. 


Make sure you whitelist me. So if you're using some sort of a spam arrest filter, make sure that my email address is in it so that my emails can get through to you. You need to make sure that in this step you are educating the reader. You gotta assume that every single person doesn't know what they need to do Once they subscribe.


If you assume that every single person doesn't know what they need to do, you're gonna have a much better explanation, and you're gonna have a much better subscription rate and confirmation rate. Because if you're getting 10,000 options and opt-ins a day, but only one person is actually ending up on your list and only one of those email addresses mailable, then you don't really have a list, do you? 


You might have a bunch of names, or you don't have very you know, useful email addresses because the confirmation and the white listing feature, the white listing process has not taken place. And even if they do confirm if you leave out the white listing information, what's gonna end up happening is a percentage of these people that have confirmed won't see your email address. It's gonna end up in their spam filter anyway.


It's important that you take this opportunity to educate them right at that confirmation page after they click that submit button. So if that doesn't happen properly then the next step isn't gonna happen at all. And that is from your address. It's important that you're actually creating your email list inside of your autoresponder.


One of the things that you're able to do is set the front field. So that's what's gonna display on the reader's email address as the sender name. The sender name needs to be something that they will remember. So let's say you launched the product called xyz product.com, and nowhere on your product page have you mentioned your name. Nowhere. 


You're just using that company name. The name of your company is X, Y, Z Incorporated. And then all of a sudden in your email list, you are sending emails. And on the front field, it's your personal name. That person doesn't know who the hell you are because all they know about you is your product. 


They know xyz.com. If you have multiple products, you gotta consider, are they gonna remember that they bought X, Y, Z from you two years ago? They might not. So it's important that you're using that, that you're populating the form field in that list with something that the user's gonna remember. 


Because if not, they're gonna be like, who the hell's this guy? And they're gonna delete it before they even get to the next break point, which is the subject line. So what is important about the subject line? Well, remember, the purpose of each step in the process is to get them to the next step.


So the purpose of the subject line is to get them to open the email, okay? So the thing with the subject line that a lot of people don't understand is it's not just the subject line that's displayed, it's also the first line of your email, okay? So in many email clients, they'll display the subject, but they'll also be in a little grade out font.
They'll also start displaying a little bit of what's written in the email. So that's what they're gonna see before they even open it. It's important that you do something that's compelling with the subject line. It's gonna engage them and get them to open the email. 


With that being said, be very careful here to not be deceptive. You may think that you're gonna get a whole bunch of opens and a whole bunch because it's called the open rate. The amount of people that actually get the email and then actually click to open it determines what your open rate is.


The open rate and the click-through rate are two completely different things. Because remember, we're not done with the process. We're only halfway through. We've made it to the inbox now, but we now need to get the email read. So now what's important is that your subject line gets them to open, but if it's deceptive.


Now they're inside, and what they're reading has absolutely nothing to do with your subject line, or they finally open up your email and they feel like come on, that's bullshit. You know, they're gonna leave. Not only are they gonna leave, they're gonna close your email with a bad taste in your mouth and in their mouth. 


The next time that they see an email from you, guess what's gonna happen? They're not gonna open it. So you may think, well, I'm gonna do something like I'm gonna just create a clever email address. Like, here's your password, or I'm gonna use a clever email address, like, your account is suspended. 


And then when they get inside, I'm gonna say, ha ha, just kidding. Hey, by the way, have you seen my new product? That's just stupid. You're gonna end up taking people off. You're gonna end up losing subscribers and it's not gonna work. What you will see for that one email is a huge open rate. 


And you know what you're also gonna see with that email, a huge unsubscribe rate. And that sucks. So you wanna use emails, subject lines that actually attract people that leave them in suspense and that make them read the next line. Now, keep in mind what I said. They're also gonna see the subject, before they open the email, they're also gonna see the first few words or the first sentence of your sub, of your email.


You can't expect this to work. You can't say you're not gonna believe this dot, dot, dot as your subject. And then in the very first sentence, tell them, I just got this. They were able to see it. They didn't cause them to open the email. They're seeing the first line. Here's another thing, pushing down the text with just white space doesn't work either. 


As a matter of fact, the email filters are very, very sophisticated, and they recognize things like inappropriate space and inappropriate words, and they will throw your email into the spam folder if you trigger these filters. What's the next thing? The body of the email is what they're gonna be reading once they actually opened it up.


So the subject line worked, you got them to the next break point. Now it's the body. There's so many things that we could talk about here in the body. There's the greeting, there's the actual meat and potatoes in the message. Then there's the sign off. And I could go in so many different directions here and I can turn this into just an hour discussion about the actual body. 


There's, should we do long emails? Should we do short emails? Should we do, I'm gonna talk a little bit more specifics about the body a little bit further on in the video in another slide. But what I am gonna tell you here is that you need to do three things in the body of your email.


If you expect your readers to actually take action and go to the next step, the body of your email needs to engage them. And that is done by educating and entertaining. I've proven that when you educate and entertain, at the same time, your engagement level skyrockets, people love to learn stuff. 


And that's probably the reason that they're on your list, because they feel that you have some sort of information that they should, that they wanna learn about. Okay? So that's why they're on your list. So it's important that you become an educator with your emails, but what's even more important is that you entertain them. 


People love to be entertained. People love to have fun. People love to be people they are attracted to, to positive energy and to entertainment and to having fun. So when you compose your emails, the body should do those two things. It should educate and entertain. 


And if it does, you're gonna see that you're gonna have a high engagement level. If you only educate, your engagement level isn't gonna be as high, because you're gonna bore some people. If you only entertain eventually people are gonna realize, oh, come on, I didn't get on this guy's list to just be funny all the time. 


Like, I wanted to learn stuff. So it's the right mixture of those two things. That's what's important with your body. I will say a few things, a few technical things about the body. The body should be easy to read, okay? So you shouldn't have these long, huge lines of text that are going from the left side all the way to the right side of the screen. It should not be tough to read.


I shouldn't have to be squinting and straining my eyes. It should not be a bad experience to read your email. Let's talk about the next step. So if they're engaged by the body, they're gonna see the link. And depending on the way that the link looks, they may or may not click it. 


I always suggest that you use cool anchor text. So action text is what I like to call it. I don't just use anchor text that says, click here. I use engaging anchor text. Something like, grab this now before it's too late depending on what I want them to do.


Maybe I want them to buy this or maybe I'm telling them, Hey, I want you to watch this video. I say, Hey, make sure you watch this video before you click off or something like that. I'll use that text and then I'll link the text. I don't ever, ever, ever, ever display well, I don't wanna say ever, but I rarely display a raw link, and I never display an affiliate link with my affiliate ID at the end. 


If you ever see me do that, I did it by mistake. It wasn't meant to be done, because those links are just ugly. And that's like, just telling somebody, Hey, I'm selling to you. I'm selling to you. It kind of makes people feel a little weird. And I suggest that you don't do it, just use anchor text. 


Another thing you can do with your link is you can make it stand out. We're gonna talk a little bit more about that later. But finally, if you got them all the way to the point of clicking, now, they've clicked through the email.




Now your system has pretty much worked. And the final step in the final breakpoint or the final process, is the destination. So, the final decision on whether or not this person will take action, and this email actually worked, and that person actually made a purchase from you will be determined by the quality of the destination. 


Now, clicked your link, they went through the whole thing, they opted in, they confirmed they went to recognize your address, they liked your subject line, they clicked it, they were engaged by the body of your email, they clicked on your link, and now they get to the destination page, and the page takes too long to load. 


The video on the page is buffering too much, and it's just annoying, or it just looks ugly because it's neon green and flashing in my face, and it makes me go the moment that I see it. So the destination is going to be a big, big factor in deciding whether or not this person actually makes a purchase. 


It's important that when you're creating an email, you always test your links, make sure that your links are working. Don't just write the email and just send it out. You gotta send a test copy to your own email address . A lot of different providers, email autoresponders, a lot of them actually provide this feature where you're actually allowed to test your emails. 


At least every autoresponder I've ever used is allowed to test your broadcast emails. When you get that email, take a look at it, take a look at how the subject line looks in Gmail. Take a look at how the subject line looks in Yahoo, or whatever other accounts you're in.


Take a look at the body. How is it laid out? How do the paragraphs look? Do they look hard to read? Does it look like too much text? What's your first impression of it? How does it look on a phone? That's another thing that you have to consider. Does the link work? When I click the link in the email itself, is it working? 


Did I properly hyperlink this text? Is it taking me to the page? Does it take too long to load that page when it gets there? What does that page look like? I hope naturally, if you're endorsing a product or promoting something that you'll already have looked at the sales page and made sure that you know this.


The offer is gonna convert and that it's set up properly. But these are the breakpoints that you need to consider as far as the email marketing process. These are the ones that I have found made a big difference in my business. I make a lot of money doing affiliate marketing through emails, and I build a relationship with my list. 


We're gonna talk a little bit more about that in a minute, but that's a very important part of this breakpoint because building a relationship and people learning about you, you'll find that the longer that somebody stays on the list, the more that they're willing to click on your links because they've built that trust with you. 


So they're not afraid to click on something because you know that you're not gonna send them to some scam or something like that. They know that you're providing value. So that's important as well.


Let's talk about the actual elements. So, the actual components inside of the email, the subject line, like I said earlier, you don't wanna be deceptive or you'll break the next point. You wanna use brow raising statements, like, exactly. Okay, so here's something that I've found works like a charm. 


When you're doing email marketing, make the subject line, use the word exactly. I do things like, Hey, this is exactly how I learned how to do this. Or I say, this is the exact way you should be doing that. When you use the word exactly, people are like, oh, wait a second, does that mean I've been doing it wrong? Or does that mean it kind of raises your eyebrow? It kinda makes you think, wait a second. 


You gotta create headlines that make people eyebrow raise, like Spock and they just put that one eyebrow on, Hmm, what's going on there? It's gotta make them want to read the rest of the email. But keep in mind that they're also gonna be seeing that first line of text. 


Don't make it some kinda like, suspenseful question and then answer it right in the first sentence of your email, because people will see the question and the answer in the subject line. And if they're in a hurry, they're just gonna move right onto the next email. How about the body? Well, like I said, there's tons and tons of stuff that you can do with the body. 


The body should be narrow. And what I mean by narrow is it really shouldn't extend from one end of the person's screen all the way to the other end of the person's screen. It shouldn't look like a textbook, okay? When they open your email, it shouldn't look like it's gonna take them an hour to read.


It shouldn't look like this is gonna take a while because what's happening is you're talking to people in the inbox. Chances are this person didn't sit down with a cup of coffee and is dedicating the rest of their evening to just reading emails. Chances are, I'm not saying that that's always the case, but chances are that that's not what they're doing. 


They're trying to get through their emails so that they can get to something else, something else that they wanna be doing. This is like checking the mail. You don't go to the post office or, you know, to the mailbox and grab your mail and then plan to read mail for the whole day. 


So somebody says, oh, well, what are you doing tomorrow? Oh, I think I'm just gonna read mail. No, that's not what you do. So don't think that that's what people are doing when they're receiving your emails. They're not sitting down to spend the rest of the day reading the email. 


You gotta be concise. Now, that doesn't necessarily mean that you have to keep it to one paragraph or two sentences, but you shouldn't deliver the entire message in the email. Leave the message for the sales page. The purpose of the email is to get them to the message. 


So you wanna educate, and you wanna teach them a little bit here in the email. You wanna entertain, you wanna educate, but the purpose, remember, of the body is to get them to the page where the main message is. I don't create paragraphs that are more than four lines long. I make sure that I separate my paragraphs. And when I'm doing it, I separate my thoughts into paragraphs as well.


So this one paragraph, which is gonna be no more than four lines long, and those lines are really not gonna be more than a hundred characters. I mean, probably a hundred is exaggerating. But I'm never gonna go further than half of the email swipe page. 


I'm not gonna go if the wissy wig editor that I'm pasting my email copy in as I'm typing it, I'm not gonna go more than half of the width of that editor. And when I look at the email back in my browser, when I do that test email to myself, I'm gonna look to see if it just looks too big. 


If the email just looks big, I'm not gonna read it. We tend to sit a little bit further from our runners than we do from a book when we're holding a book, right? And I don't wanna have to be squinting, I don't wanna have to follow a line of text all the way across my screen and then come back over to the left and then actually move. 


I have to move my head to follow the line of text because it's so long. And then when I come back to the other line, I've actually lost my place with my eyes. It becomes difficult to read. Your paragraphs should be narrow, narrow in width. They should be no longer than four lines. 


Now, you can make that two sentences, you can make it three sentences, but what I'm talking about is lines. You should not make them longer than four lines. And you should use a size 12 font because it's generally accepted as a good size to read. I'm impartial as to whether you should use a serif font or a sans font.


Right now you're looking, the fonts that you're looking right here, these are sans fonts. They don't have little lines at the ends of the letters. So that's called sans the different schools of thoughts of whether you use one font or the other. I generally just use the default font of AWeber. 


Let's talk a little bit now about the length. Now, there's all different schools of thought on this. Should you send mediums? Should you send long, should you have short emails? They've all worked for me. And, the important part is that they're entertaining education and engaging. 


Like I said before, I personally tend to use all of them, and I promote during an entire week, I'll usually send a couple of emails to promote a product. And what you'll find is that in the beginning, I'll send a shorter email, and as we progress in the week, I'll send a longer email.




And then finally, at the very end of the product launch, I'm using a quick short swipe. Why? Because this kinda raises the impulse, right? So if I'm telling somebody, Hey, hurry, go buy this right now before it closes down. Well, it doesn't make sense for me to tell them to hurry up. 


But then I sent them six paragraphs to read in the email. It's like, okay, wait a second. He just put a link here and he's telling me to hurry, or I'm gonna miss out. But wait, there's three other paragraphs to read. You're creating a conundrum. You're creating confusing stuff for your reader. Just keep it simple, man. 


I start with a quick, short email at the beginning of a promotion. I'll say, Hey, guess what? This thing was just released. This is amazing. I know this guy, this thing is awesome. You're gonna wanna check this out 'cause I'm sure it's gonna be a huge launch. Bam. Here's the link. Go check it out the sec. 


The next one is gonna be, Hey, did you see that email I sent you yesterday? Wow, wasn't it amazing? I went and I looked and there were a whole bunch of testimonials. I actually saw one guy, he said that the product was so good that this, that, and then the other thing happened. As a matter of fact, if you don't have the link, check it out here. 


By the way, did I ever tell you how I met this guy that actually promoted blah, blah, blah? So it's gonna be a little bit longer. The third email might even be longer, where I actually give them a description, a list of the features of the products that I'm promoting, and then you'll see that towards the end of the promotion, I reduce the amount of things that I'm saying in my email, because I just want them to go over there and click the link.


So again, all three tend to work. And when I'm communicating like that, I'm actually building a relationship with myself. I'm just sending relationship building emails and value emails and content emails where there really isn't anything for them to click on. I tend to keep those from medium to long length. 


And another thing that you should do is, when I'm just writing relationship building emails, I tend to put the content or the message of that email in a blog post. And what I do is I send them a short email that says, Hey, I've just written a long and well thought out content for you or whatever. 


I want you to click here so you can go read it on my blog. So now they're gonna go to my blog and they're gonna read it there, and they're gonna leave a comment. And that's cool because what's gonna happen is you're engaging them to interact now and leave a comment and talk to you about how they felt about your message. That's more likely to happen. 


People are more likely to actually leave a comment on a blog or on a post than they are to click the reply button and type you up an email. Okay? So that's why I do that, because when other visitors come and they see that other people have commented, and they're like, oh, okay, cool, then I'll comment too. And that's the greed factor kicking in. 


Okay, so now let's talk a little bit about the formatting. Don't be afraid to actually stress important words. I use highlighting. I use underlining. I use italics as well, but I am gonna tell you this, go easy with the colors. Don't send rainbow emails in and think that every other word should be stressed and everything. 


Listen, contrary to popular belief, every single word in your email is not so eagerly important that it should be bright red, okay? You should just use a bold face, the typical bold face, use a basic black font, the basic color, the default color that comes. These are web optimized colors.


Don't start throwing in pink and yellows and all kinds of stuff, because again, you're just kinda messing up the process, and you're gonna make it a little bit tougher to read. And it's I’ve found in my own experience that going with a whole bunch of colors in the emails tends to not really work as well. 


It kind of kills the link clicking a little bit. So don't be afraid to, like I said, highlight and stress important things, but don't get crazy and colorful and stuff on your emails, because that's just gonna hurt you. At least I've found that you can do that. Add the colors and add the images out, and do all that stuff on the actual site. 


Use the email to just get them to the next step. The other thing you can do is if you're that creative, colorful and stuff, consider using a pre-formatted HTML template. These things work great guys, and they're not that hard to use. You can actually have some, some like for instance, AWeber has some pre-built ones. 
Most email editors actually have a little HTML tab, and you can drop the HTML. So you can actually put images, you can put colors, you can put headers and footers and all that in the actual email. And this really does help get into the inbox because the filters, when they see this, they're like, okay, this is formatted properly.


This looks like an actual newsletter. They're more likely to put your HTML message into the inbox. And there, and I actually was, I thought completely the opposite, but I learned that an HTML template in a properly formatted HTML email actually is more likely to get into an inbox than one that's just plain text. 


That's something that I learned myself the hard way. And finally, images, I just mentioned images. And here's the thing with images, images work really well when your readers can actually see them. You gotta always use description text when you're using an email in case and when you're using images in your email.


In case that image doesn't display, the alternate text needs to display, and you gotta assume that your reader is not seeing emails. So there should be text in that email.
The only way that your reader's gonna see the images inside of your email that you've placed in your image is if they've clicked a button on their browser, actually choosing to see images from you. 


In the first couple of emails that you send somebody, so in the confirmation email, maybe in the welcome email, there should be a message telling them to make sure that they click the button on their browser to always display images from you. Because if not, you might have a really cool image in an email, and there's nothing more frustrating than putting an image in an email. 


I get a response back from somebody saying, Hey, I couldn't see what you sent. And it's like, oh. And then I gotta go and tell them, Hey, listen, make sure you click the view images. And they're like, oh, okay. So make sure you let them know. And always remember that when you're using images, you're running that wrist that people aren't gonna see the image links. 


I said earlier, I like to use anchor text. I use action text as anchor text, and I tell people what to do. I always avoid displaying an affiliate link because number one, they're, they're long, they're ugly, they're scary. People are like, oh my God, what's this big, long scary link? Is this gonna take me to a virus? You know, you gotta keep it simple. 
I always cloak my links. I have a cloaker that I use that works very, very well for me. What I will tell you is you should cloak your links, but you should avoid free public cloaker, things like bit ly and tiny URL.


A lot of people say, Hey, I use Bitly because it has the metrics and all that. Look, your, your autoresponder has metrics, okay? You should be using the metrics in your autoresponder. Here's the thing. When you use things like Bitly and Tiny URL spam filters, internet service providers and email service providers called email clients, like OL Gmail, Yahoo, they all use filter algorithms and they try to keep offensive and spam emails. 


They try to keep offensive emails away from you. It's one of the protective measures that these email clients install, okay? And they create these things called spam filters. Well, every single email that you receive, you actually have a little button, a little spam button on that email, and if you click the spam button, you are educating the client.


You're educating a OL or you're educating Gmail and you're saying, Hey, I don't like emails like this. That's why I clicked the spam button. So what's gonna happen is the email filter is gonna take some information from that email and say, okay, well, he doesn't like emails from this user, from this sender. 


He doesn't like emails that can take these links. And they're kind of creating a profile about you. And then what's gonna end up happening is whenever that sender sends you that email or another email that's gonna go right into spam, or whenever another sender sends you an email with that same link, or pointing to that same page, that's going to spam as well. 


So consider this, there's millions and millions of people cloaking their links with Bitly, right? Even spammers. So a whole bunch of people have mailed porn and have done all kinds of unnecessary things using services like Bitly and Tiny URL, and that means that a whole bunch of recipients have clicked the spam button on those links.


So what happens is that now your email contains a link that has been clicked as spam by other users and may potentially end up in the spam folder. That's why I do not use third party services that are free or public services like Bitly or Tiny URL.


I use a cloaker that I've either installed on my own site or one that sits on my desktop, or I use PHP redirects to actually send people to one page hides the actual link and it sends them to the page in the background that I want them to go to. So it's important that you avoid free public cloakers, but it is important that you hide the affiliate id. 


There's a few reasons for that. Number one, it's ugly, and, and they're long. And by using Anchor Text and cloakers, you can shorten the link and you can just make it say what you want to say and still be clickable, and it will still navigate the user's browser to the page that you want them to go to.


So you're gonna wanna avoid free public cloakers, you're gonna wanna use one that you installed on your own site. I used one that works right off of my desktop. And the important thing is that the user is not seeing that long, ugly affiliate link. You know, it's scary. 


And as long as the cloaker is displaying some action text, and it's still, you know, as the link, and that link is clickable and it's gonna take the user to the page that you want them to go that that's really all that matters, I'm gonna recommend that you don't use those public services again, because they're likely to end keep, you know, and you're gonna end up in the spam folder. 


Your auto response service is gonna say that it was delivered, but then you're gonna see that you have a low click through rate, and that's because the reader is never actually seeing the email. It's ending up in their spam folder. So, I always bold face my links. 


The important thing with this is make sure that you're setting the link apart from the rest of the email. So if the user's eyes are gonna drift from the email, you want them to drift right to that link, and you want them to click that link. 


I bold face the link, I make sure that it's blue, I make sure that it's underlined. Sometimes I set it apart by putting it inside of a box. That works very well. And if you're gonna put it inside of a box, make sure that it's an orange box with a blue border around it. And you can do that using WYSIWYG, the editor inside of your autoresponder. You can usually create little tables, make sure that it's a little box that actually looks like a payment button.
I've tried button images that don't work very well, because again, it's an image and it doesn't display. Putting it in a box is completely different because this is an HTML table. It's not an image. It will always display. So what I do is I put it inside of an orange button, an orange box with a blue border that looks like a button. And then my actual link is inside this button this box. 


This actually looks like a little square button. And as we know, orange buttons with a blue border are the highest converting buttons. So finally, the last thing that I wanna say is, if you're just using a plain link, a link should always be blue, and it should always be underlined. 


Why? Because that's the general understanding and accepted formatting of a link. Don't make your links look like something different. And this is what I was talking about, stay away from a whole bunch of colorful stuff. You want the color to stand out of the link, and that is blue and underlined. 


People know that that's clickable. People automatically go and click things that they see are clickable and that's just the way that it should be. The signature. Finally, I'm gonna talk to you a little bit about how you should put together your signature. I'm not opposed to putting an honest and entertaining deterrent to unsubscribe.


Now, I've seen people do this differently. I've seen people try to scare people into unsubscribing. I don't like that. That's just kind of silly. Your autoresponder client is gonna put an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every single one of your emails. That's part of this spam law. Every single email that you send needs to give the user an opportunity to unsubscribe from your list. That's a law. 


What a lot of people do is they put a little message above that link, so the very end of your message says, Hey, there's a link below, but don't click it. Or I'll come over to your house and I'll strangle you. That's not cool. Don't do that. But there's no reason to entertain somebody or to try to deter them from unsubscribing. 


I've seen somebody put a little picture down at the bottom that says, if you, if you unsubscribe, I'll be so sad. It's got a sad face. You know, I'm not a big fan, but I don't think, I'm not opposed to it either. That's just, you're just trying to keep the person from unsubscribing.
Maybe they didn't like this particular email, but maybe they'll like the next one. So you're just doing a last ditch effort to try to keep them on your list. I'm not opposed to that. But then again, I'm not a big fan of it. I don't do it myself. But you do wanna try to get them to the next step, the next step or the next email. 


I'm not opposed to doing that. And it might be something that you'll consider. I definitely will tell you that you should include some sort of a copyright notice at the bottom of your emails and some contact details. I personally use a business address and a business phone number. 


It is important that you have contact information there so that the person doesn't think, doesn't think that you're trying to be anonymous. It's important that they know that if they have to, they can contact you.


This makes them feel safe. It makes them feel secure. You're seldom gonna get contacted by somebody that receives your email. It's very rare, but it makes every reader know that if they do wanna contact you, they can. And that is very important. It's a very important step in establishing trust. 


Trust obviously, is a very compelling factor on whether or not they're gonna remain your subscriber and they're gonna go on to buy things from you in the future. So I use a business address. I wasn't comfortable with putting my home address. So I actually got a PO box for my business, and that's what we use on our actual emails. 


You could put your office address there or whatever, or maybe you're okay with using your actual home address there, but there is some sort of contact information that's required. That's also part of the Cans Spam Act, and you do need to have some sort of way for people to contact you. 


Finally, feel free to add social links. I've seen people on their signatures. I used to do this, sometimes I do it, and I go back to my pre-written signature that has links to my other products and stuff like that. Feel free to add social links. I've seen this as very common. 


People say, Hey, visit my blog here, or subscribe to me on Facebook here. Just remember, any additional links in the message are gonna be competing with the links in the body that you're trying to get the user to click on. So that might actually hinder your conversion rate. So think about it, you're putting the reader in a completely different path.


You're telling them at the end of the email, so they read the entire email. They were about to go back and click on the link to see what the hell you're talking about and go check out that product that you're promoting. But they just saw a little thing that says, Hey, why don't you to, you know, become my friend on Facebook? And they're like, oh, okay, let me do that. 


Now they click your Facebook link, and now they're over there and they spend the next 30 minutes looking at pictures of your dog. You know, so this is gonna hinder. Now, what are the chances that person thinks, oh, oh, look, you let me go back to that email and let me go click that link again. 


Now, you're not competing, you're adding other links. So when I'm promoting things, I tend to not put those extra links down at the bottom when I'm just doing regular informative emails and I'm just telling them providing value and content for them.


Yeah. Then I will put those other things down there. But keep in mind, whenever you're putting links on there, you're competing with any other links that you have. You know, so if you put three links to three different things on there, they're not gonna click all three. 


They're gonna choose one, and they're gonna go to one on, okay, let's talk about reader engagement. Remember that the purpose of each step that we talked about is to get them to take the next step. Okay? That's the only purpose of each one of the steps in the, in the, and all the breakpoints is to get them to the next step. 


When you're gonna engage the reader, the way to do this is you've gotta make them feel special, but there are specific things that you should do and you shouldn't do. Here's one thing that you should do. You should use variables. Most email clients have little short codes for their first name. 


Remember when that person subscribed to your list, they entered their name in their email. So now when you're sending broadcast emails to them, you should address them by their first name. And I always use the first name fix variable with AWeber, because what it does is it fixes the case. 


So sometimes when people enter their name, they use all lowercase, or they use all caps or whatever, and I want the case to be correct. So the first name fix variable, it actually is, it's the word first name fix. Inside of little brackets. When you put in your email, you write something like dear, and then you insert the first name fix variable in there.


What the reader is gonna see is the email is addressed to them by their name. So it'll say, dear John, in the actual way that John is supposed to be written with a capital J, and then the OHN. So that's what the first name fixed variable does in AWeber. I use the variable, not just in the greeting, but sometimes throughout the body as well. 


I'll ask them a question while engaging them by using their name. Again, I just insert that variable. When you're writing an email, you should always write the email, like you're writing it to one person. It doesn't matter if you're sending it to a hundred or a hundred thousand. 


Remember that one individual is reading that email. It's not a group of people reading it together. You're addressing one person. So you always have to write it as if you're talking to one person, one friend, one person in front of you, tell a story.


Stories really pull people in. They make people like you. They make people resonate with you. Stories are what make people really, like get into your head and wanna be a part of what you're doing. You need to educate them, and you need to entertain them. That's the way you're gonna engage, educate, entertain, and engage. 


I often talk about the factors of impulse. They are the figs, fear of loss, indifference, greed, and sense of urgency. If you're trying to persuade someone to do something, to take action on your email, you should use the figs. Because remember, when somebody receives your email, their impulse level is zero. If you want them to take action, you've gotta raise that impulse all the way to a point of action. 


The way to do that is by using impulse factors, fear of loss, making them feel that if they don't take action, they're gonna miss out on something. Indifference, letting them know that, Hey, look, I'd love for you to take action, but it isn't the most important thing in the world. The world isn't gonna end tomorrow if you don't. You know, that has to do with the posturing greed factor. 
Let them know that they're not the only ones. That there's other people taking action and that this is gonna be great. And we're a whole group of people. Nobody likes to be the first one on the dance floor. Remember that, and sense of urgency. It's important that they do it now, not later, not tomorrow. 


Don't put it off. You might forget, take action right now. I can't promise you that it's gonna be up there tomorrow, but I know that it's up there right now. So go take action and take a look right now.


These are the impulse factors. They work. Find a way to put them, to implement them into your copy, into your text, and what you're telling people when you want them to take action. Finally, don't be afraid to mail as often as you need to. You will essentially be conditioning your list to expect emails from you in a particular interval.


Don't be afraid to mail every other day or mail every day even if that's what you, what it's gonna take for you to actually deliver your message. Let me tell you something. People that are unhappy with receiving emails from you every day, they'll just unsubscribe. And that's fine. 


The only type of people that you want on your list are people that want to be there. You don't wanna force someone to be on your list or to join your list, because then you're gonna have to like you don't wanna convince them to do something that they don't wanna do, because then you're gonna have to convince them every single day for the rest of your life to not stop doing it and to not unsubscribe, and you don't wanna do that.


Don't be afraid to mail as often as you need to, to get your point across and to build your relationship. During a promotion, I'll mail every day. Like if I'm in a launch week and I'm promoting a particular product that I want people to know about, and I want them to take action on this product, I'll mail every day, and on the last day, maybe I'll mail twice. 


It doesn't matter. As long as you are following the steps that I mentioned to you, and you're educating and entertaining. You know, as long as people feel that they've gotten value from your email, they're not gonna unsubscribe. It's when they feel that you're blasting them with no value, that's when they're gonna feel that they're being stepped on and they're gonna unsubscribe. 


And you know what? Don't be afraid of getting unsubscribed. We all get unsubscribed. Your list will grow when you stop focusing on the unsubscribes, and you start focusing on the subscribers. So don't be afraid to mail as often as you need to, especially during the launch. I hope you take action and use these steps and these things that I've mentioned in here to build a huge email marketing campaign and become very, very successful online.