So you listened to all the advice and built an email list, but then you send emails to your audience and nothing happens.
Nothing good anyway.
Instead of more sales, only 5% of them even open the thing, while the others:
- Ignore you
- Unsubscribe
- Or worse? They send you to spam impacting the delivery of all future emails….
This means that the 5% of people who DO open your stuff, might not even see your emails any more.
Not great right?
The thing is, there’s a simple solution to this that’ll help you write emails faster and easier, but without sounding like you’re writing them at 1am with a fried brain, or worse, sounding like generic AI slop.
So in this article, I’m going to show you:
- Exactly why your emails are currently invisible,
- The manual “slippery slope” framework to fix it forever,
- And how I use a custom-trained AI to do the heavy lifting for me so it stays “human” and high-converting
So let’s get into it.
Don’t want to read? Watch the video version below.
If you enjoyed that and want more videos like this, click here to subscribe to my YouTube channel so you don’t miss out.
Otherwise, let’s get on with the article and you can carry on reading.
To start though, we need to talk about your car…
Why your emails are invisible
Have you ever bought a new car, only to suddenly start seeing the same model everywhere you go?
Your neighbors have one, you see them on the way to work, or at the supermarket etc.
The thing is, they were always there.
You just didn’t notice them because before you got one, it wasn’t relevant to you and your life, so you ignored them.
This same thing is happening with your emails and it’s why they’re not getting opened, because the majority of headlines don’t appeal to the audience and their problems or desires right now.
For example
Think about how you use your own phone.
You wake up to 50 notifications and they all want your attention, but you don’t have the mental bandwidth to deal with all of them, so you start to filter down to what’s important.
You scan for names you know or topics that solve a problem you have right now and anything else can wait, or doesn’t even register in your brain.
Same thing with your email. They scan the list to see what’s important.
That’s why your headline needs to hook them in by talking to them exactly where they are right now.
Make sense?
Good, because until you master this, they’ll never even open your email. However, as important as this is, just getting their attention isn’t enough. Because we need them to actually read and click through off the email.
How?
Well to understand this, we need to talk about Jiu Jitsu and ‘high calorie’ grapplers….
Why you need a slippery slope
So here’s the thing. I’ve been doing BJJ for about 5 years, and I’m one of the heavier dudes in the gym.
So I always roll with the other big guys.
However, one of my friends turned up recently who I hadn’t seen for a few months, and he had dropped from 130kgs to 100. (That’s just over 66 lbs).
Even crazier, he’s in his late 40s but the dude was moving like he was 20 years old, so I needed to know what was going on.
It turns out he was getting back injuries, and as I lay there on the floor trying to stretch my own pulled back, he explained how he had started just 3 basic exercises each day at work to help him drop the weight.
He lost the first 5kgs and his back was immediately better, so he kept going. What was a habit to help an injury soon helped him feel 10 years younger.
I wanted to ask him about the exercises he used but he was running late and had to go. However, you can bet your ass that as soon as I see him next, I’ll find out what those moves are.
Because who doesn’t want abs in their 40s right?
The thing is, without realizing it, our conversation was following a classic copywriting formula called the P.A.S system.
My friend didn’t just ‘sell’ me on exercise. He merely talked to me about something I was interested in, but hit the 3 major plot beats of the PAS sequence:
- He called out to a Problem I was literally feeling as I lay there on the floor. I was in pain and he was in shape and looking great
- Without meaning to, he Agitated the problem by showing me how much better life could be without it. He looked at felt 20 years younger
- and then teased the Solution because I wanted to know how he did this. There were 3 exercises and I still don’t know what they are…
See how powerful this is?
You need to do this with your own emails, because getting them to open it is not enough. We’re fighting to keep their attention, so you need to build in this organic ‘Slippery Slope‘ where each sentence makes the reader crave the next one.
Here’s how
Go ahead and ignore the headline for now. Writing it from a blank idea doesn’t work. Instead, start with the body section and make sure it hits on these first 3 steps:
- Problem: Identify the ‘back pain’ your audience is feeling right now and name it in the introduction and how it makes them feel
- Agitate: Show them the cost of staying with this problem, and what the knock on effects are. This keeps them interested and makes it feel like something more important because it is. But if we don’t do this, they’ll go to another email, so keep pulling them through and feeling the issue
- Solution: Only once they are ‘leaning in’ do you present the solution which is your link that you want them to click on. However, because you’ve pulled them through the story, the click feels like a relief, not a sales pitch.
- Then, finally go ahead and write the headline so it ties into that problem and calls out to that audience. Not only will this hook them more, but it’s far easier to write a good headline that stops them in their tracks when you write them like this. The headline matches the body, not the whole email being written to match a weak headline idea.
Smart eh?
If you follow those steps then your emails will get opened, read, and more importantly clicked on so your list takes action and you make more sales.
That being said, even when you know all of this, sometimes it’s hard to put it into action, because the coffee isn’t hitting like it should and your brain just isn’t doing its magic.
I know this happens to me all the time, which is why I decided to make my life easier with AI, and built a tool to help me do this.
Even better?
You can have this for free too.
How to use the PAS system with AI
To be clear, this tool isn’t a generic prompt that you copy and paste. It’s a custom GPT built inside of ChatGPT, and trained to only do one thing which is to write emails using this process.
It knows what it’s doing and it even has a backlog of my best emails in its database to keep learning from.
Why does this matter?
Because rather than having generic AI slop try to help and fail, this means that I can send an email at the end of the day for far less effort, that actually works and gets opened, read and clicked.
Heck, I can even write something good and this tool can sometimes write something more effective. (More on this in a second).
The best part is, it’s so easy to use.
So let’s break it down
Go ahead and grab the tool from the link here.
Once you’ve clicked on it, it’ll come up here in the sidebar of ChatGPT so you can reuse it again and again. (Just make sure to pin it to your sidebar so you don’t lose it)
You’re gonna click on that so that it loads up, and then click on the ‘Lets get started’ button.
The tool will then ask you for some information:
- Who is the email for? Who are they as people? Why are they subscribed to you? What do they care about?
- What’s the goal of the email? What’s the main problem it solves and what do you want the audience to do after reading it?
- Why should they care about this? What’s the specific benefit to them?
- And is there anything that they might miss out on? Are there limited spots, a special deal, or a deadline?
Why do this?
Simply because the better it understands your audience and what you want them to do, the easier it is for the tool to write the email. So all you need to do is fill that out.
For example
Let’s say that I want to promote my article on my new traffic generation challenge.
So I’ll go ahead and answer the questions like so:
Once I’ve given it this information, it then asks me 3 more questions.
Why?
Well here’s the cool thing about this tool. I can either get it to write an email from scratch, or I can give it an email draft that I’ve tried to write already and it will improve it.
So if I want it to do that, then I simply paste in:
- My current email subject line
- The body text of the email
- And the link of where I want to send them to so it can include the link in the email
For now though let’s write a new draft from scratch using the tool.
Notice that it says at the bottom “If you don’t have a draft yet, just say so and I’ll write a completely new draft for you”.
I want it to write a brand new email for me, so I simply:
- Tell it that I don’t have a draft yet
- Paste in the URL of the page that I want to send people to
- As well as copy and paste the entire page that I want to send them to. I do this because sometimes these AI tools only partly pull the info from the page. But by pasting it in, it now has the full page info to work from
All I need to do now is click enter and it will then pick an angle to approach this email, based on what it thinks my audience will best respond to.
In this case it chose to be benefit driven and then starts to write the email:
Not bad right?
However, like it says at the bottom, AI isn’t perfect and can always need a human touch. So if you want to refine this, you can simply give it some feedback on what you want to change.
This is never a bad idea, because it can help get your tone of voice. Also you might think of new things to add after being inspired by the tools first attempt.
In this case, I’ve asked it to add these things in, and let’s see if it improves even further:
As you can see the first version was good, but the 2nd version is great, and it’s all done in under 5 minutes.
Not bad right?
Time to get more sales from your own emails
As you can see this saves me so much time and effort, and makes sure that my emails actually grow my business instead of being ignored, or being a huge chore at 11pm at night.
I know you’ve been in the same situation, and I feel your pain.
So, if you want this prompt so you can improve the performance of every email you send, go ahead and click the link here and I’ll send it to you.
The problem of course is once you’ve done that and your emails are pumping, you’re going to want to add even more emails to your list. So grab the prompt first, then come back and read this guide next to learn how I convert anywhere from 15-83% of my blog readers into email subscribers.
No that’s not a typo and it works even on a low traffic blog.