Rory, a loyal email list subscriber, wrote to me the other day with a good question.

It was something along the lines of “what would be my best piece of advice for someone new to writing emails.”

Although this can be taken a few different ways, I’m going to imagine he is someone like me who wants to write emails for others or for his own business.

Ok, here goes nothing:

I always like to think of questions like this in the context of… if I was on my deathbed… and I had to pass my skills on to my currently non-existent children… what would I tell them?

How would I “hand them the keys to the kingdom”… so to say?

Welp… I’d start off by saying this:

Email is pretty simple:

When you break it down you start to realize that your email list is traffic that you own. And the emails you send each day simply direct this traffic to whatever offer you’re promoting.

In order to write an effective email you simply have to get four things right:

Your subject line.

Your story.

Your ‘lesson’

Your pitch.

That’s it.

Look at the best emails you get each day.

I start off with a story, teach a small lesson, and then tell you to do something.

I’d then show a few examples of what good email copy looks like and I’d explain to them why I wrote what I did in each email. I’d explain what I was thinking… why I chose certain words… or phrases.

And then, I’d instruct them to go write 1,000 emails within the next 12-24 months.

Write them for yourself. Write them for clients. Or launch a new venture.

That right there is the basics. There… I just saved you $1,000 in courses.

Chris Orzechowski