Email
Archery

Before you start

You already have a list. This is what to do with it.

It might be ten people. It might be ten thousand. The size doesn't matter as much as you think.

I've run a list of under two thousand people since I started online in 2012. It has served me well in building six figures over and over. There are people with hundreds of thousands of names who make less.

This book isn't about building a list. It isn't about funnels or ads or landing pages. It's about the emails you send once people are there, and why most of them get ignored.

The one idea underneath all of it

You're selling the click.

Not the product. Not the service. Not the coaching. The click.

This is where most people go wrong. They try to close the whole sale inside the email. They stuff in every feature, every benefit, every reason to buy. Then they wonder why nobody moves.

The email has one job. Get the person to the next place. That's it.

The WORC formula

Four things have to happen, in order. Miss one and the rest stop mattering.

And then there's a fifth part, the one the name of this book promised. WORC makes one email work. Aiming decides who each one is for.

That's the last (bonus) part, and it's the reason any of this pays.

Who this isn't for

If you're here for a magic bullet for making sales, this won't work for you.

If you don't care about the people on your list, they'll feel it. You can't fake caring at scale. It leaks into every line you write.

And if you're selling something you haven't done, used and don't believe in, no email tip will save it. Fix the thing first.

1.1

Care about the person, not the sale

If you don't care about your customers, you're just trying to make money. People feel that. It comes through the screen.

I'm not a money-first person. Everyone on my list knows it. So when I do ask for money, nobody feels weird about it.

You're selling a change in someone's life. Not a widget. Keep that straight and the writing gets easier.

1.2

Be who you're, and say so early

A lot of people put on a face. They copy a marketer they admire and write in a voice that isn't theirs. Readers see straight through it.

Here is the opening of my own welcome email:

Say what you stand for. Say what you stand against. My list knows I don't believe in the grind. I'm all about making things as simple as possible. They know I'm not about bling. Anyone who is doesn't stay long, and that's fine.

My first three emails are built to push people out. On purpose. I would rather lose someone in week one than get a spam complaint in month six.

1.3

Know what you're actually selling

You're selling two things.

A change. Not the thing itself. You're selling the move from where someone is now to somewhere better, and the feeling waiting for them there.

A fire extinguisher. There's already a fire going in your reader's life. Your job is to walk into the conversation that's already happening in their head, not the one you wish they were having.

Here's where most of us go wrong. We know what the person needs. So we sell the need. But people buy the want.

Prevention is hard to sell. The fire happening right now is easy. Meet them at the fire, then take them where they need to go.

So your job is to describe their situation better than they can describe it themselves. When you do that, there's no convincing left to do. They already trust you.

1.4

The three jobs an email can do

Every email you send is doing one of three jobs. Know which one before you write a word.

1.5

The three ways an email gets sent

Broadcast is where the real work happens. I usually send 2-3 a week, and none of them go to the whole list at once. They're split by what people have told me they care about.

Is that more work? Yes. It's also the difference between talking at a room and talking to a person.

1.6

Soft teaching beats hard teaching

This is the mistake I see most. Someone writes an email that teaches the whole thing. Every step. Every detail.

Two things go wrong. The reader is buried, or the reader is finished. You handed them the whole meal. Why would they buy dinner?

Soft teaching is different. You give the shape of the thing. A few top level points. An example. A story. Enough to make them hungry.

And use ten words, not a hundred. If you're a doctor or a PhD or a specialist of any kind, this matters more, not less.

Your readers aren't stupid. They're busy. Every big word costs them a second of processing while they're standing in a coffee line. Give them that second back.

1.7

Write like you talk

People tell me they aren't good writers. I'm not a copywriter either. I just write the way I speak.

The test is simple. How would you tell this to one good friend sitting across from you? Write that down. That's the email.

Because that's how it gets read. Nobody gathers a group to read your email together. One person, alone, on a phone. Write to that one person every time.

Two checks before you send.

The "so what" check. At the end of a paragraph, pretend the reader asks "so what?" If you have no good answer, that paragraph needs rewriting.

The "is it about them" check. Read the whole thing back. If it's all about you, spin it. "This reminds me why I built this." "Here's what that means for you." If it stays about you, they stop caring.

1.8

Open loops

An open loop is a question your reader's brain wants closed. Start one, and they keep reading to close it.

The easiest way is to start in the middle of the story, at the loudest moment.

The other kind of loop holds something back for later, or for tomorrow.

Think of the TV and Netflix shows that kept you up too late. They open a few loops every episode, close a couple, and leave the rest hanging. Your brain won't let go. That's why binge watching has become so powerful for streaming services.

Use open loops sparingly. I fell into this trap early on. "I'll tell you tomorrow" every single day. People got bored and stopped opening. Sprinkle them in. Don't build your whole list on them.

1.9

What to write every week

Start with the 3-5 questions people ask you most. Those are your pillars. Almost everything you write comes back to one of them.

Then come at those three from different angles.

I know it feels repetitive to you. But it's brand new to them. You're talking about the same five things in a hundred different ways, and that's the job.

And when you go blank, go back to the exact words your dream clients have used with you. Not your summary of what they said. Their words. Pull a line out and start there.

1.10

Four formulas worth keeping

You don't need these every time. You do need them at 9pm when nothing is coming.

1.11

The writing method, step by step

1.12

Define the vague word

Go back to the doctor test for a second, because there's a deeper cut to it.

Your market talks in vague words. "I want to feel better." "I want my life back." "I want to get to the next level." They mean something real by it. They just can't say what.

Your job is to define their words better than they can.

On one of the live calls, a coach who works with people rebuilding after divorce told me her clients all ask the same question. "Is there life after divorce?" That's the vague word. Life. It can mean anything, so it moves nobody.

The fix is to answer with a real person. "I was talking with a client last week and he asked me the exact same thing. So I asked him what life would actually look like. And here's what he said."

Then you describe it. The specific mornings. The specific fear about dating again. The specific worry about repeating the pattern.

People call this empathy.

It's more precise than that. Empathy is "I get you." What I'm talking about is describing the journey better than they can, and showing you have the road out.

And when you need to show the cost of standing still, use other people's stories, never the reader's. "I watched a client rush into the next thing and end up worse off."

Third person. The reader draws their own conclusion, and nobody got blamed.

1.13

Two story frames, taped above the monitor

When people ask how I write stories so fast, this is the honest answer. Two frames sit printed above my monitors, and every story email follows one of them.

1.14

Keep their words where you can reach them

In 1.9 I told you to go back to the exact words your dream clients use. Here's the system behind that.

I keep a running map of the language my market uses. Not my summary of it. The actual sentences, collected from calls, replies, and conversations, sorted by topic.

When I'm stuck on a blank page, I open the map, pull one line out, and the email writes itself from there.

People tell me all the time, "it's like you're in my head." I'm not in their head. I'm quoting them back to themselves.

That's the whole "secret," and it never runs out, because your market never stops handing you material.

Start yours this week. One spreadsheet, 3-5 columns, one for each of your pillars. Every time someone says the problem in their own words, it goes in. Today I use tools like Notion to store and resurface my data.

2.1

First, check you can even get there

Before subject lines, make sure your email is allowed in the building. Three checks, once, and then once a quarter.

2.2

Rethink the From line

Most people set this once and forget it forever. It's the first thing your reader sees, before the subject line.

And put your photo on your sending address. Plenty of large companies send a blank grey circle with a letter in it. Don't be one of them.

Most inboxes pull that photo from Gravatar. It's a free service that links a photo to your email address, so when someone gets your email, they see your face before they even open it.

Go to gravatar.com, create an account with the exact email address you send from, and upload a clear headshot.

It only takes a few minutes, and it makes every email look like it came from a person, not a company.

2.3

Four kinds of subject lines

A subject line is a promise of a reward. The reader should know what they're getting before they open.

Curiosity

Did you try email tip number three yet?
Did you get the free report?
Are your friends holding you back?

Direct benefit

40% off our best selling course
Seven proven ways to grow your business
Three simple ways to shed belly fat over 40

Look at the last one. "Over 40" is doing all the work. It sorts your list for you, and people who are thirty eight still open it.

Proof and results

Malcolm Gladwell's advice to business owners: don't be one thing
The secret to Shark Tank's success
64% of people say they read email in the toilet

You can borrow authority. If a name your people respect said it, everything under it lands harder.

Urgency and scarcity

Sale ends Friday
Only 48 hours left
Gone at midnight

2.4

Two subject line tips

Call out the exact interest. If two hundred people on your list raised a hand for one topic, say it back to them.

"The email program you asked about." "Ready to use AI?" They know you're talking to them, because you are.

Use their name. Their name alone in the subject line is powerful. So powerful that I only use it a few times a year, when I really need attention.

The rest of the time I put the name inside the email instead.

2.5

The lead starter

This is the biggest thing in this section, and almost nobody uses it.

The lead starter is the first line of your email. Your reader sees it in the inbox, under the subject line, without opening anything.

It's a second subject line you're probably wasting.

I put more effort into the first line than into the subject line.

Starters worth keeping near your desk:

This is important...
Just recently...
Unless you...
Do you...
There can...
Would you...

Keep the first line to six or ten words. On a phone it may wrap or cut off, and a cut off line isn't a problem. It's another open loop.

2.6

Plain text wins

Look at the emails I send. Always simple text. No template, no header image, no columns.

The moment an email looks like a newsletter, it trips the reader's own spam filter. They think "marketing" and move on.

You want it to look like you opened your mail, typed it, and hit send.

One thing to be clear about.

Plain text doesn't mean the plain text setting your provider can't track.

Every email tool has a simple text template. It's HTML underneath, and it looks like typing. That's the one you want. It also happens to be the most mobile friendly thing you can send.

2.7

How often, and when

Weekly is the floor. If you aren't in front of people once a week, they forget you. This is a distracted world and nobody is waiting by their inbox for you.

I usually send three times a week. Monday, Wednesday, Friday.

The fear I hear from people is always the same. "I'll send too much and people will leave."

Some will.

Here's the thing. If someone leaves because you sent three useful emails in a week, they were never going to buy from you anyway.

You haven't lost a customer. You've found out sooner.

2.8

Goodwill emails and promotion emails

People ask how many of my weekly emails are selling. The honest answer is all of them and none of them.

I send goodwill emails. Mostly.

Stories, ideas, things I noticed.

But there's almost always a link at the bottom to something worth doing next.

Almost every email I send has a way to buy in it, and almost nobody feels sold to.

A real promotion is a different animal.

When I run one, it takes over. Four or five days, one message, nothing else going to that segment.

For those days I'm a marketer and everyone knows it. Because I'm not one the rest of the time, they let me have it.

2.9

The nine word email

This one I learned from Dean Jackson, and it's the fastest way to wake up a quiet list.

The whole email is one question.

It doesn't have to be exactly nine words. It has to be short enough that answering feels like nothing.

Then the part that matters: when someone replies, you reply. A real reply, from you, that day.

That's the whole point. You aren't sending a campaign. You're starting a conversation.

I use this at the front of my welcome sequence too.

Four hours after someone joins, before I've told them anything about me, they get one question. "Do you market or sell anything online?" People answer. I answer back.

And they find out there's an actual person here.

2.10

Words that trip the filters

Some words are powerful to readers and poison to spam filters. "Million." "Rich." "Free money."

The words people most want to read are the words the bots are trained to catch.

So I misspell them. On purpose.

A word like million gets an altered spelling. A curse word, when I use one, gets a symbol in the middle of it. It reads exactly the way I meant it.

It does two jobs at once.

It slips past the bots that would have sent the email to spam. And a misspelled word snags the eye. The reader stops on it, which is exactly where I wanted them to stop.

Don't overdo it. One altered word in an email is a wink. Five is a ransom note.

3.1

Why you mail as often as you do

There are only two reasons anyone is on your list.

Some are collecting free things. They'll never buy. Nothing you do changes that.

The rest genuinely want help. Your job is to prove you can give it. You can't prove that once a quarter.

And here's the math behind consistency. Of the people who will ever buy, about half buy almost right away. Half of who's left buys inside three months. The rest take as long as eighteen months. Not always from you. From whoever is in front of them when they're ready.

That's the whole case for mailing every week.

You're not nagging. You're making sure that when month eleven arrives, the person in front of them is you.

The goal is simple. If you disappeared, they would notice. That only happens with consistency.

3.2

The six parts of an email

3.3

Make it read like a regular email

You're writing a marketing email. But it shouldn't look like one.

3.4

Short sentences, and why they work

Long paragraphs frighten people off. They open your email, see a wall of text, and think "later." There's no later.

Short sentences do something to the reader. Every line finished is a small hit of progress. They keep going because going is easy.

I write emails between 300 and 700 words and people read them. Seven hundred words is a blog post. They read it because it doesn't feel like one.

And mix your lengths. A long story email lands harder when the one before it was six lines. If every email is long, long stops meaning anything.

3.5

Kill the commas. Use the period.

This one changed my writing more than anything else on this page.

I used to write in one long ramble. Commas everywhere. Clause after clause, joined with "and," never stopping. Go back and look at your own emails and you'll probably find the same thing.

Here is the fix. Where you would put a comma or an "and," put a period instead.

3.6

Cliffhangers and dots

A cliffhanger is an unfinished thought that pulls the eye to the next line. Three dots at the end do most of the work.

Try ending a line on "but" or "yet." Then stop.

And things got worse...
Then came the part I didn't expect...
But boy, am I glad I did...
That I now regret...

3.7

Formatting that makes long emails feel short

3.8

One email, taken apart

Here is a real example email of mine with the working parts labelled.

3.9

Bullets, and formulas for writing them

A bullet list is a sales list. You can make a lot of sales with nothing else. But only if it stands apart from the text around it.

Step away from the preset bullet. Use a plus sign, a dash, an arrow. Italicise one list and not the next. Give each list its own white space.

Not everything should line up. If two lists sit close together, make them look different on purpose. It should look like you typed it, not like you filled in a template.

Here are a few formulas to write them from:

How to [ result ]
How to [ result ] without [ the annoying part ]
Where to find [ thing ]
The little known [ secret / reason / rule ]
The [ number ] deadly [ things ] that [ bad outcome ]
Give me [ X ] and I'll give you [ Y ]
The quickest and easiest way to [ result ]
What never to do when [ situation ]
How to eliminate [ problem ] with [ simple method ]
The truth about [ topic ]
The single most important [ thing ]

3.10

How to talk about yourself without being the hero

Look back at that example email. Every time I talk about me, I'm talking about a mistake. What I got wrong. What it cost me.

That's the tip. Your readers want to know you've been in the same mud they're standing in.

But don't stay down there. If you only knock yourself down, they start wondering why they should listen to you. So climb back out. "Here's what I did about it." "Here's what changed."

Down into the mud, then back out with the answer. That's the shape.

3.11

Segues, the invisible push

Cliffhangers pull the eye down the page. Segues push it. They're different tools and you want both.

A segue is a short line that closes one thought and forces the next one open. Look back at the email in 3.8 and you'll find them doing the work.

Here's the thing.
But that didn't happen.
Which brings me to...
Or that's what I thought.
Now here's where it gets interesting.

"But that didn't happen" is the strongest of these. You can't stop reading on that line. Your brain demands to know what happened.

Start noticing them in every email that keeps you reading, mine included.

Then steal them. A segue every few paragraphs and the reader arrives at the bottom without ever deciding to keep going.

4.1

One clear thing to do

Open your inbox right now and you'll find ten emails offering you six different things at once. Read this. Watch that. Book the other. Buy the thing.

A confused reader does nothing.

Go back to the question from part one. What is the goal of this email? Segment them? Get them to a video? Get a reply? Pick one and let everything point at it.

4.2

Two kinds of call to action

Almost every email I send has a way to buy in it. Almost none of them feel like selling. That's because there are two very different tools here.

The offer CTA

This is the standard promotional email.

Three links spread through the copy, sometimes four with the PS.

Even though I rarely write this type of email, I included it here because just about everyone uses it. Just know what it is. The reader can see it's a sales email, and that's fine when you're actually selling.

Three links is normal. Four is the ceiling. More than that and it turns into spam.

The soft sell CTA

One link, dropped in like an afterthought. This is the one that lets you sell every day without ever running a sales email.

Two phrases do almost all of the work. "By the way" and "Speaking of."

4.3

Why people buy

Four reasons. Your call to action should touch at least one.

4.4

What every offer has to answer

Writing offers is a whole subject of its own. But these six questions are in your reader's head whether you answer them or not.

4.5

Ask directly

Don't dance around it. When you want the sale, ask for the sale. People want to be told what to do next.

Click here to [ get it ]
See how it works here
Here's where you learn more
Get [ thing ] here
Find out why here
Here's where you [ do the thing ]

4.6

Change your verbs

Small change, real difference. Move your verbs out of the past and into what's happening right now.

4.7

Show the advantage

A call to action isn't just "click here." There has to be a reason on the same line. Ask yourself what this actually does for them.

4.8

Drop the "if"

This is the smallest change in this book and the one that has helped my clients most.

The word "if" in a call to action tells the reader you aren't sure. It says they don't really have to. You're asking for permission to be asked.

4.9

The PS

Most people leave the PS empty. It's the second most read part of any email.

Readers remember the first thing they saw and the last thing they saw.

Plenty of them scroll straight to the bottom without reading the middle.

The PS is how you still reach those people.

Two rules.

Change the words. Nobody says "PS" out loud. I use "By the way." "Just one more thing." "One last thought." I still use PS sometimes, because people expect it, and the odd time is exactly when it stands out.

Summarise, then ask. Two or three sentences that restate the offer, then the direct command.

4.10

The Super PS

This is the one I would keep if I had to throw the rest away. I learned it from Dean Jackson.

It's a separate block at the very bottom of every email, listing the ways someone can work with you. It sits outside the email. It has nothing to do with what you just wrote about.

Yes, it breaks the one call to action rule. That rule applies to the body of the email. The Super PS is its own thing.

It does three jobs at once.

4.11

Two things that will cost you

Bait subject lines.

You get good at writing openers and the temptation shows up fast. Write something wild, get the open, and the email has nothing to do with it.

You can do that exactly once per person.

After that they're gone, and they were right to go.

Whatever is in the subject line has to connect to what's inside.

If you want to be strange, be strange and then tie it back. "I mentioned a purple turtle because I needed your attention today." That works. Once.

Selling something you wouldn't buy. People come to me asking how to sell better. Sometimes we go a few questions deep and it turns out the thing itself isn't good. They haven't used it. They don't believe in it.

No subject line fixes that. If you wouldn't hand it to a friend, don't send an email about it.

4.12

How many links, really

People argue about this like it's religion. It isn't. The number of links is decided by the purpose of the email, the question you answered before you wrote a word.

A goodwill email gets one link, at the bottom, after the transition. That's 90% of what I send. A promotional email gets the three link treatment.

And the three link system is not the same link pasted three times. That looks like spam because it is.

It's three different phrases, woven into the copy, all pointing at the same place.

"I made this video for you. Go check it out."
"...and on this video I walk through the whole thing."
"Here's that video again when you're ready."

Same destination, three doors in. Each one catches a reader at a different point in the email, and none of them looks like a repeat.

5.1

Why this is called archery

You've heard that email is dying. Look at who's saying it. People with hundreds of thousands of names, watching their open rates fall.

What's already dead in my opinion is blasting. The same email to the whole list, every time, forever. Readers are done with it, and the inbox providers are too.

I never blasted, and not because I was smart. I never had a huge list. So I talked to people individually, by what they'd shown me they cared about.

It turned out that was the strategy the whole time.

Here's the operating system, and it runs on one move you already know from the Super PS. Every click is a raised hand.

That's the bow. Everything in the first four parts was fletching the arrow. This is aiming it.

5.2

Three buckets, no more

Your list isn't one person. But it isn't a thousand people either. It's about three.

Ryan Levesque calls them buckets, and his rule is the one I use. Three at most. Beginner, intermediate, advanced. Or three stages of the journey your people are on. More than three and the work buries you.

Here's what makes this workable. You don't write three emails. You write one, and swap the opening.

The divorce coach from 1.12 has three natural buckets. Just divorced. Starting to date again. Rebuilding for good. Same email body, a story, a point, one link. Three different first lines.

"If you just signed the papers and can't imagine what comes next..."
"If you're back on the dating apps and second-guessing everything..."
"If the new life is finally taking shape and you're scared to trust it..."

One email. Three intros. Sometimes a swapped closing line too. Each bucket reads it and thinks, this was written for me. Because it was.

5.3

Aiming small made me more money

The fear is always the same. "If I aim at one group, I lose everyone else."

My first company sold records to DJs. Not all records. Specialty remixes of popular tracks, for club DJs who wanted to sound different from every other DJ in town.

But that's not all, I charged three times the price of a normal record. Because of the exclusivity (another story for another time).

I chose a tiny slice of a tiny market. And I made more money than I would have selling everything to everyone, because that slice knew I was the only one talking to them.

What about the people outside the slice?

Think of a realtor who sells lakefront homes exclusively. Somebody walks in wanting a condo. Does the realtor say "I don't do condos"? No. They sell the condo.

Aiming at one bucket doesn't turn the others away. People outside your aim still hear you, still buy, still hire you.

You're not closing a door. You're choosing where the light points.

5.4

The extra half hour

Every time I teach this, someone says it. "That's too much work."

Here's the work, honestly. On a sending day, it's an extra half hour. Swapping an intro. Splitting a send. Writing a second short email for the rest of the list.

If you send twice a week, that's one hour a week. And it's not extra. It's the job.

Tuesday morning you write the email, you aim it, it goes out at 2pm.

That's part of running the business, the same as invoicing.

The people who say email doesn't work anymore are the people who wouldn't spend the half hour.

It's the difference between talking at a room and talking to a person, and your readers can tell from the first line which one they're getting.