I told you yesterday that I would give you stage one today.

I changed my mind because I want the stages to be consecutive and tomorrow is a gap day.

So, today I’m giving you an exercise to do.

Stage one is the next email.

Block out forty minutes.

You’ll probably use twenty-five.

1. Open a blank email. Not your standard template.

Blank.

2. Write it to one person. Not the whole list.

Pick one person from your list whose name you actually recognise, and write to them.

The others will read it over their shoulder and it’ll feel like it was meant for them.

3. First line: one thing you’ve noticed about them.

“You’ve asked me before how to get more engagement from your list.”

That’s the whole line.

No “hope you’re having a good week.”

No warm-up.

4. Then one short paragraph saying where this is going. “The next few emails are about fixing that.”

This is not a teaching moment, it’s a teaser moment.

No selling or the replies don’t happen.

5. Then the call-to-action, and tell them exactly what to type: “Hit reply and send me either ‘Interested’, or ‘Not Interested’.”

That’s it.

If you’d rather the question was about them than about you, use an either/or instead: “Which is closer — opens but nobody clicks, or clicks but nobody buys? Reply A or B.”

Both work.

Pick one.

Two questions get you zero answers.

6. Take every link out. The obvious ones, and the sneaky ones.

No P.S. with a link in it.

No link in your signature.

They can only reply to it, or ignore it.

7. Keep it under 150 words. If you’ve gone over, you’ve started teaching.

Cut back to the noticed thing, the paragraph, the ask.

8. Send it to the whole list. Today.

Not a segment.

Not a test batch.

9. Now stop. No follow-up tonight, tomorrow, or anything else.

One send.

Most people ignore this and it’s the part that makes the result real.

10. Twenty-four hours after it goes out, open your inbox and count. Write the number down.

Then write down three of the names.

That’s your result, a number and three real people, not a feeling that the list seemed a bit warmer.

Do this and you should have replies sitting in the inbox tomorrow.

Names on them.

People who’ve been on your list for months and hadn’t said a word to you until you asked them a question they could answer without thinking.

You should think about that for a moment, because it tells you what was actually wrong.

The list wasn’t dead.

Nobody had asked it anything.

One email that gets replies doesn’t pay for dinner.

It proves the mechanism works on your list, with your name on it, which is not nothing, it’s the thing you’ve been missing for months.

But you can’t run a business on one good email.

What you’re still short of is twenty of those in an order, each one leaning a bit further toward a date, so the replies turn into money instead of a nice afternoon.

That’s stage one, and it’s what the next email is about. Who’s buying, what they’re buying, and why the date gets fixed before the material is finished rather than after.

I lost years to getting that the wrong way round.

Doors open 15 September.

If you already know you’re in, reply with the word “consistent” and I’ll make sure you see it before the list does.

Regards,
​​​​​​​Brent.