I don’t usually send you emails on Thursdays but this one had to be done.

Because I’ve been watching an email marketing disaster unfold and I need to exorcise the demons. If you sell stuff via email (or plan to) you gotta read this.

Then carve it in the walls of your office so you never forget it.

Quick backstory:

I’m on a lady’s email list. We’ll call her Molly. Molly is legit awesome and I love her content to pieces.

But right now Molly (more likely her marketing team) isn’t being so awesome.

See Molly’s running a store-wide discount on all of her courses. 40% off of everything.

But I've been trying to buy her stuff for two days and right now just wish I had a punching bag to let off some frustration.

(And I do this stuff for a living. If I’m feeling this way, how do the rest of her customers feel?)

Here we go:

Lesson 1: Check the damn links

The emails Molly is sending out describe each of her 6 courses on sale.

After each description is a link to her website where you can buy that course.

Yesterday I saw something I wanted and clicked to go buy it…

WHOMP WHOMP

Links were broken.

(I know having links that work isn’t exactly a revelation to you but hold up…it gets better. Er…worse?)

Lesson 2: Link DIRECTLY to the thing

The email Molly sent this morning had links that actually worked!

But now there was another problem…

The links to each of the individual courses (all 6 of them) led to ONE location:

A page on her website showing “All My Courses”.

And on that page is – you guessed it – the same brief descriptions for each of the 6 different courses and links to buy them.

I'm like, "But...I just read about these in your email. Where's the one I wanted? I clicked to it so what gives?"

All this extra, redundant work destroys the vibe. It feels complicated. It prolongs the sale. And there's a percentage of customers who just won't do it.

Just link to the damn thing and let me buy it already.

(There's a very important addition to this lesson in the PS of this email by the way.)

Lesson 3: So…wait…what’s the actual price?

By now I'm thinking, "I'm not giving up. I'm gonna buy this course if it kills me." Because I want the course and I want to support Molly.

So I grit my teeth and summon my patience.

Eventually I find a BUY NOW button and click to a checkout page.

The course I want is $97. I'm in...but wait...

This is a 40% off sale, right?

So is $97 the sale price? Or the old price?

I look around the site and...nothing. Literally ZERO mention of a sale anywhere on the site.

No "Your Price Today Only" notes.

No discount codes like "Use the word FRUSTRATION to get your 40% off".

No crossed out prices like this:

Just nothing, so I go back and look through her email. Nothing there either.

So I emailed her to ask. And you can be a whole lot of other people are emailing her the same thing.

This is how you make "automated email marketing" not very automated at all.

The Big Takeaway

The word I always use in marketing is "greasy".

Your marketing has to be greasy af. Smooth. Obvious. Don't make customers work. Don't make them think. Don't make them find things more than once. Don't make them figure it out.

Pretend your customer's in a dark room. Tell them where the flashlight is. Tell them what it does. Tell them to pick up. Tell them to flip the switch on the side to turn it on. Then tell them, "No, man, don't shine it in your own eyes. Turn it around."

This stuff is the lowest of the low-hanging fruit in email marketing. The “put your pants on before you leave the house” type stuff.

It can be painful to think through all of this but my god your bank account will thank you.

You dig?

Thanks for reading,

Charlie

P.S.: Regarding Lesson 2 because I know someone’s gonna email me blasting me about it. Yes it is generally a good idea to link to only one thing in your emails. But if you write an email with descriptions and links for specific different things you should either:

1. Just link directly to a dedicated page for them, or
2. If you must link to a page with multiple items, use what's called an anchor tag. An anchor tag can automatically scroll your customer to a specific location on a page. I can tell you how to do that if you're curious. Let me know.