By Neil Patel | Source NEILPATEL

You don’t sell in an email. That sounds counterintuitive, right? But it’s true! How many times have you purchased something directly in an email? Not often, most likely.

Instead, the goal of your email is to get someone to open it and hopefully click on what’s inside. That’s it! Emails get people interested enough to click on a link, and then the page where they end up does the selling.

The problem is that there are over 269 billion emails sent each day. That’s a lot of competition for attention.

Email service providers, like Gmail, have tried to help their users by filtering out the ‘junk’ before it even hits their inbox (even though it’s not technically labeled spam).

That means you face an uphill battle to ever get your emails opened (let alone clicked).

I’m going to show you a ton of examples today that have been able to overcome those challenges.

And at the end of this article, you’ll be able to tweak email campaigns to instantly increase results.

Does that sound good? Let’s get after it then.

1. WP Engine

Do you want to see one of my favorite sales emails of all time?

Here’s what it looks like:

What?!

How is a simple, text-based email like this with dry language a “good sales email”?

Don’t you believe me?

Check out what the CEO of the company had to say about it:

“It permanently moved the needle on sign-ups after just a week of work.”

See, I’m not lying!

But there is a trick at play here.

It’s not that this individual email is amazing. For example, there are obviously no images or exciting graphic details. And the copywriting is pretty simple, too.

There are no clever hacks or tricks inside.

Instead, what makes this email perform so well is what happened before people ever received it.

The people who received this email originally signed up for WP Engine’s Speed Tool. Basically, you plug your URL in, and they’ll tell you not only how fast your site is, but also what needs to change or improve to speed it up.

The catch is that users have to provide their names and email addresses to get the customized report.

Then, over the period of a few weeks, training emails were sent out to help those users implement all of the ‘action steps’ needed to speed up their sites.

In each email, the writer first pointed out the mistakes, then told the reader exactly how to fix each one.

That built a massive amount of credibility over time.

So when someone does finally receive that original email above, they’re much more inclined to move forward with the purchase.

Robert Cialdini calls this “pre-suasion.”

It’s based on a psychological principle called “priming” that says that people are more likely to buy a product after they’ve been essentially pre-sold a concept or idea.

Pretty simple, right?

And yet it’s also incredibly powerful when done correctly.

Here’s another example of a company that uses a similar trigger to get you to take action.

2. Time Etc.

Most free trials never go anywhere.

People might sign up for one, try it out for a few minutes, and then leave forever.

The trick is to get those people back — somehow, some way.

Just telling people to “come back” wouldn’t be very compelling, though.

Instead, you should focus on the specific value that prospects are bound to get from the service.

That’s what Time Etc. does below. They’re introducing a feature (repeating tasks), but more importantly, they’re emphasizing what you can get out of the feature (as a benefit or outcome).

Here’s a similar example from Behave (formerly WhichTestWon).

The company compared two email variations for investors. One featured an in-depth investment analysis (like yield and rates of return) while the other simply focused on key house features.

Guess which one won?

Surprisingly, the one with key features nailed an impressive 33.8% click-to-open rate increase.

In other words, the focus was on the short-term value as opposed to the long-term investment benefits.

Read the full article here.