My mentor – who specialized in email copywriting – taught me to think of emails as having 3 parts:
1. The Hook
2. The Transition
3. The Pitch
And ever since, that’s been my go-to outline for basically every email I’ve written. So let’s talk about it.
(1) The hook is where you grab your reader’s attention & build their desire. And lots of things can serve as your hook:
- Statistics
- Stories
- Current news/events
- Interesting/surprising facts
- Quotes
- Specific, compelling promises
- Parables
- Valuable information
How do you choose a great hook? Refer back to the simple formula for crafting headlines that I gave in an earlier blog post: I = C + B (Interest = Curiosity + Benefit). Great hooks ‘catch’ a person’s curiosity. And they also catch the person’s desire for personal benefit. And then they ‘reel’ the reader into reading the rest of the email. Good hooks play on either people’s curiosity or their desire for personal benefit. Great hooks play on both.
Once you’ve chosen your hook, you can start writing the first chunk of your email. Using your hook, craft your opening lines to catch people’s attention. Then use the following lines to make them more and more interested in reading further and further. Because they get the sense that there will be some ‘pay off’ at the end.
Then comes the transition.
(2) The transition is where you take all the desire you’ve built in your reader… and redirect it so that it’s aimed directly at your offer. Whether that’s clicking through to a sales page… scheduling a phone call… or buying a product.
…because with many emails, the hook isn’t always directly related to the offer. For example, take an email that’s selling a $10 book on digital marketing. And the hook for that email is an interesting/surprising fact about fishing. Obviously the fishing fact isn’t directly related to digital marketing. So you – the writer – will need to do a bit of copywriting gymnastics to bridge the two. That’s the work of the transition. Smoothly funneling the reader’s desire (which was built up during the hook) directly towards the pitch.
(3) The pitch is where you ask for the sale. You link to the sales page. You link to the order form. You enter your phone number and ask the reader to “call now.” Your goal here is to take all the desire that you built up in your hook… and have the reader “convert” their desire into action.
There you go.
Very simple outline.
But it gives you a framework for understanding how to write basically any email you’ll ever have to write.
