Avoid this ‘Email Neutering’ Mistake

Continuing yesterday’s theme of “pummeling my best students”…

Here’s another tip I gave Jason on his “learn to build 3D games” course launch emails.

(Jason’s officially at least a brown belt at this now, so he can take it.)

The fourth or fifth email in his launch series tells the “origin story” of his product.

He takes a stroll down memory lane to the “bad old days” of video game development, back when accomplishing even seemingly simple tasks like creating a shadow took days of work and rooms full of computers to crunch the resulting code.

The email did a great job of showing how accessible game development is today—the contrast to today made it seem like anyone could create a video game now.

He killed the “game development seems to hard” objection stone dead.

Brilliant.

Then he wraps up the email with this clunker:

Anyway, it’s getting late, and the reminiscing put me in a mood to share..

Thanks for listening,
Jason

P.S. I’ve created a special offer for the VR course that’s valid until Sunday. If you think you might be interested, you can check it out here before it’s gone: <product link>

Blargh!

I called him out on it, and Jason fessed up:

Yea tbh I had a really hard time ending that email.

Was trying to figure out how to tie everything back together and struggled a bit.

Yes!

This is NOT easy.

Invariably I find that the 3 hardest parts of an email to write are:

Subject line, first sentence, closing CTA

If I spend 30 minutes on an email, 15 will probably be on those bits, which account for maybe 5% of the entire email.

However they’re also the most important parts.

The subject line determines whether they open your email.

The first sentence determines whether they keep reading.

And the closing CTA determines whether they click through (and ultimately buy.)

Figure on spending a little extra time on those parts.

Even a few small tweaks would make Jason’s ending much stronger.

For example:

Anyway, it’s getting late, and the reminiscing reminded me how much easier we have it these days as game developers.

In fact today you can create a game and have it live in the App Store in as little as 3 days.

My new VR developer course shows you the entire process step-by-step.

And it’s on sale right now (special pricing ends Sunday).

Details here:

<product link>

Writing a solid CTA isn’t hard, but it does take a little thought and practice.

For more examples of how I’ve done this in “live” campaigns, check out my Six-Figure Email Courses seminar:

http://joshuaearl.com/products/six-figure-email-course/

 

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