Copywriting for coaches and speakers can be a challenge – especially when it’s time to write great things about yourself in e-mails your colleagues can use to market your products.
However, it’s a skill you definitely want to acquire when developing a message platform for your books and online programs. Like all my posts, this one is intended to make this task easier for you. 
Promotional e-mails are an important tool in every coach or author’s marketing promotion. The easiest people to sell your book or program to are followers who have already opted into your e-mail list. These are folks who like you, trust you, want to hear from you …and who are most willing to buy from you.
Most likely, you’re e-mailing them regularly and interacting with them on social media.
This is your crowd. These are your people – so you probably already know exactly how to communicate with them when it’s time to tell them about your new book or online program.
Leverage Other People’s Lists
In this post, I’m going to teach you how to create e-blasts you can use to market your book to other people’s crowds. This includes your friends, your family, your business colleagues, and other industry professionals with subscriber lists. I’ll simply refer to these groups as your affiliates.
When affiliates agree to market your book or program to their subscriber lists, you’ll need to supply them with a promotional e-blast that promotes you and your product.
So, this post is going to focus on my 5-step process for writing an e-blast your affiliates can use to promote your book or program to their list.
STEP 1 – Email subject line
Focus a lot of attention on your subject line. Before anyone reads your e-mail, they must first open it. As you know from scanning your own inbox, an e-mail subject line has a huge influence on whether you choose to open it or not.
When you craft e-mail subject lines for your product promotion, think about the subject line types that typically grab your attention. Most often, they are probably subject lines that …
- Arouse your curiosity
- Ask you a compelling question
- Tease you with a nugget of partial information (i.e., “I can’t believe I’m about to tell you this…”)
- Imply an important benefit is about to be revealed to you
Use these techniques when crafting subject line options for e-mails you create for affiliates who agree to market your book or program.
Also, limit your e-mail subject lines to about 60 characters, so the entire subject line appears in an e-mail program’s preview panel.
STEP 2 – Headline treatment
When recipients open your e-mail, they need to be greeted by a dynamic, engaging headline that motivates them to dive into your body copy. Examples of good headline types include …
- A how-to headline
- A benefit-driven headline
- A thought-provoking-question headline
- A numbered list headline (7 Ways to …)
Next, complement your headline treatment with an image of your book cover or online program. To round things out, include your best endorsement testimonial just below your headline.
STEP 3 – Email intro
This may be the trickiest step for you. When you write an e-blast for an affiliate to send to his or her list, you need to begin it with a personal greeting from the sender to the recipient. And, this greeting needs to be about YOU.
This means you’re going to have to write something nice about yourself! It should be easy …but some coaches and authors struggle with this. Usually, it’s simply because they’re too humble or too modest.
But think about it. If you were to send an e-mail to your list promoting a colleague’s book or online product, you’d open your e-mail by mentioning you have a personal relationship with her, and then you’d express a few nice thoughts about her.
You might touch on her background, her credibility, her past successes, and why you’ve chosen to send an e-mail to your list about her product.
Toot Your Own Horn a Bit
The promotional e-blast your affiliate is going to send out about your book or program to their list needs to have a similar opening …and you have to write it yourself!
Now, when you send this e-blast to your affiliates for their use, you can certainly give them the freedom to alter or edit this section anyway they see fit…
…After all, they may want to say things about you that are even more flattering than what you write about yourself!
However, it is customary to send them an e-mail that includes this section, so they have a nice starting point from which to make any edits.
Again, this “personal note” about yourself may not be easy to write, but the e-blast examples I am going to share with you in my follow-post will give you additional insights on how to write this section.
STEP 4 – Email body copy
Now that you’ve gotten past the challenge of writing nice things about yourself, your next step is to fill your e-mail body with promotional copy about your program or book.
The key here is to focus on what people will get out of your product …not what your product is about. In short, don’t tell people about your product, tell them how they’ll benefit from it. That’s what people care about the most.
Be concise and tight with your benefit-driven description. Here is a simple formula you can follow for creating a sharp book or program description.
- Benefit-driven headline
- Benefit-driven subhead
- Two to three lines of detailed body copy
- Three to five precise, benefit-driven bullet points
- A couple more lines of copy that highlight your product’s primary benefit
- A two- to three-line endorsement testimonial
You can deviate from this formula as needed to craft a message specific to your affiliate’s audience, but this time-tested product description outline is always a strong starting point.
STEP 5 – Call-to-action lines
Conclude your affiliate e-blast with two simple call-to-action lines. First, ask readers to ORDER NOW. This can be a button that links to your product shopping cart or Amazon ordering page.
However, this is a quick e-blast to recipients who may be hearing about you for the first time. So, they may want more information about you and your book or program before they buy.
Make it easy for them to get this information by providing a second button in your e-blast that says LEARN MORE. This button should link to a complete sales landing page for your book or program.
SPECIAL NOTE
Make sure your e-blast body copy is “at-a-glance” friendly. You can do this by employing a liberal use of subheads, short paragraphs, and bullet points. This creates white space around your copy that makes your e-mail look fast and easy to read.
Avoid writing e-blasts that have long, meaty paragraphs. This gives your copy a dark, chunky look that discourages people from reading it – especially when viewing it on mobile devices.
Lastly, be sure your copy is written in an authentic, down-to-earth tone. Remember, this is an e-mail your colleagues will be sending to their list of followers. So, keep the voice of your copy conversational and friendly.
Within a week, I am going to create a follow-up post that provides you with an e-mail example I’ve created that uses this 5-step process. So, stay tuned for that.
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Will this post help you write affiliate e-blasts your colleagues can use to market your book or programs? Please leave a comment and let me know!
If you got a knowledge boost from this post I encourage you to share it with your crowd!
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