5 Email Formatting Rules To Increase Your CTR

This program is brought to you by the ThePodcastFactory.com.

Hi, my name is Igor Kheifets and this is the List Building Lifestyle, the only podcast
which delivers cutting edge conversion strategies from the online trenches straight to
your earbuds. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilidnglifestylesshow.com. I also invite you to grab a free copy of “The Wealthy
List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival and now
once again it’s time to claim your List Building Lifestyle.

Jonathan: You are listening to the List Building Lifestyle show but you knew that
already because you looked at the album art and you saw the picture, you click and
you’re here. So now what? What’s next? Igor, will tell you.

Igor: [laughter]

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: Beautiful, beautiful. You know, Jonathan, have you ever got those emails
that look like spam but they weren’t really coming from a spammy person or I mean
they were just bad formatting. Have you seen those?

Jonathan: Bro, the formatting that gets me and I don’t know if you’re going to
talk about this, is that crap where they do this skinny email like it’s 1980 where
they’re only putting five words per line. I’m like, “You’re a moron.” [laughter]

Igor: Yeah, but that’s because everybody in IM was told that people can’t read a
long line. You know as if people don’t read books these days or whatever. Yeah,
it’s really, really stupid in my opinion too but a lot of people are guilty of
that. They would literally limit themselves to five words a line.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: And that’s like a long poem as if you’re a poet but you’re writing
marketing.

Jonathan: Yeah, a sonnet. [laughter] That’s a new product, new info product coming
at you next year.

Igor: Poetic email marketing. [laughter] Yeah but you know the formatting is a
huge issue with email marketing because some people they are sending you spammy
emails with lots of yellow and red text and images and stuff like that and other
people they try to make it seem official and beautiful and they pay designers 1000
bucks to create this email template with a banner and lots of different graphics
and shit like that. So I wanted to kind of looking at that in my inbox every day,
I wanted to devote today’s episode to sharing with you, List Builders, how to
properly format your emails for maximum profit. Now I don’t really care what
you’re selling be it canned foods or info products or vibrators, it really doesn’t
matter. I assure you the formatting rules that I’m going to share with you, these
rules I’m using myself as we speak and have been using for a long time now, these
are the rules to stick to if you want to have your words and your emails influence
other people to give you money. Okay? So there is really six rules that I stick
to. First off, no colors, forget about colors because Jonathan, I can’t even begin
to tell you how many times I get emails for review that look like a frickin’
circus.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: And somehow the people writing them, they are using the bright red and the
bright blue and the yellow highlighter on the bright red which makes my eyes hurt
and the green, it’s like they use every single color because they try to make
everything stand out. Now what this does is it tells your reader that you’re
basically an ass clown.

Jonathan: [laughter]

Igor: You’re making fun of yourself. You’re making a fool of yourself and it’s not
going to work. You need to keep yourself composed. You need to appear
professional. You need to appear serious. You need to ñ not an ass clown ñ
whatever you want to appear that’s fine but don’t be an ass clown. So what you
want to do is you want to use white background, black text and no fancy
backgrounds, no nothing. Try to keep your images to a bare minimum. Like at best
you can maybe put your photo in the signature, if you really want to do that, to
give a face to the email, if you want but not a fan of that either. So plain black
text on a plain white background that is the perfect color scheme. The second rule
is to avoid bulky paragraphs and use lots of one liners. Now don’t confuse this
with doing the whole five words per line routine. No, what you want to do is you
want to in the beginning of your email to create a greased slide which means you
want to go from short one liners to longer one liners and then paragraphs creating
this cascade almost of content for your reader and then deeper in the email you
want to interchange between your one liners and your paragraphs. So what it
creates is a feeling of somebody who is not an idiot and an ass clown who wrote an
actual thought through email because they took the time and they cared about the
person reading it not somebody who just realized that they could use email and
made a fool of themselves. Now this is a big concept because the one mistake is,
Jonathan, just like you mentioned is the poem thing but the other side of it is
people writing huge blocks of text. I’m talking 300 words a paragraph.

Jonathan: Ooo.

Igor: Something crazy, something really overwhelming, that was not a gun everybody
that was ….

Jonathan: [laughter] Hit the deck, hit the deck. [laughter]

Igor: Although, I’m in Israel, shit happens here, people get shot in coffee shops
all the time so… Every time I go out, every time I go into my virtual office, I
actually risk my life so you know…

Jonathan: Thank you for doing that for us, Igor.

Igor: Yeah, yeah. Appreciate it, appreciate my service to you.

Jonathan: The “Saint of Solo Ads”. [laughter]

Igor: The sacrifices I make, the sacrifices I make. Anyway, the other side of it
is huge paragraphs with very little breaks and just too overwhelming for people,
too overwhelming. Remember the average reader is about 3rd grader, right? I think
that there is a study that proved that. The average American reader is a 3rd
grader. If you make it difficult for him or her, you’re going to lose the
customer. So don’t, don’t. Now at the same time don’t insult their intelligence
with a poem. So you have to keep…

Jonathan: Delicate balance. [laughter]

Igor: Keep that balance going. Yeah, balance, it’s a high wire act. So the other
thing has to do with the 3rd grader thing because you need to avoid long and
complicated words and you need to avoid long and complicated sentences. Now don’t
confuse this on not using paragraphs but make sure that the words you use are
really easy to understand and really easy to read. For example, using the word get
instead of the word understand, right, using the word fake instead of preposterous
or something. You really need to pay attention to the words that use because you
want to use short and simple words instead of long and complicated ones. Now to
check whether or not you’re doing it right, read your emails out loud. If you’re
using long and complicated words, it will be really hard to read and if it is
rewrite it. Okay, do yourself a favor, rewrite it. Now the other thing is you have
to use short sentences so if you find yourself writing sentences that are longer
than 10 words. It doesn’t mean that every sentence you write needs to be 10 words
like if some sentences I write have two words, or one word in them or three or
five but I try not to go over 10 and maintain my rhythm because the moment it
becomes too long, it basically means the reader will have to read it in one
breath. That’s also something you’ll notice if you ever read your stuff out loud
or if you ever turn your emails into videos or your emails into podcast which I
had to do. I actually took an entire email and turned it into a podcast and when I
did so I recognized that there were certain points where I just ran out of air.
Now if that happens, you need to shorten your sentences. Break down one sentence
into two or maybe three sentences if you have to but you will be doing your reader
a huge favor and making it easier for them to go through your stuff. Now you
definitely want to minimize the use ñ this is rule number four, minimize the use
of bold, italics, and underlines so just like I explained with the whole color
thing, right, same thing applies to formatting with the bold and italics.
Sometimes you see an entire email where every paragraph has an italicized portion
or bold portion. So the rule that I stick to is less is more. If everybody paints
lime green, lime green does not stand out. So if every single word that you’re
writing is bold or underlined or italicized, it beats the whole purpose of using
these things. Minimize the use of these things to bare minimum and when you do use
them try not to like highlight a sentence. You know what I mean, try not to bold a
paragraph. Try to bold a word. It’s actually harder to do that ñ to choose the one
word that you want to highlight in the entire thing rather than trying to
highlight everything but it will have a much powerful effect. So choose your
bolded words carefully. Now the number five is actually a game changer, it will be
a game changer for people that are struggling to write, for people that consider
themselves writers, for people who basically have mental blocks and writers’
blocks, you know what I mean? Like people who are drawing a blank every time they
need to sit down and “write” something, don’t write, talk. So either write as if
you’re talking, as if your prospect is sitting right across the desk, maybe you’re
grabbing coffee with them and you’re just chatting, write like that with all the
grammar mistakes and everything. Or don’t write at all and record yourself to
Audacity or there is a great application to that you can download on your iPhone.
I don’t know I’m not an Android guy but if you’re using iPhone, an incredible
application that you can use is called Voice Record, it has this red background
and a sliver of headphones and microphones on it. The beautiful thing about this
application besides the fact that it allows you to record instantly and its really
high quality is by the time you’re done recording, okay, I’m showing this to
Jonathan so he can see, like all of these extra option here, you can upload this
stuff like you can email this to somebody. You can text message it, You can upload
to Google Drive, to DropBox, to OneDrive, to BoxCloud, to iCloud, to FTP, post to
Facebook, post on YouTube, you can do whatever you want and it’s an easy way to
share. So what you need to do is you basically talk into a microphone then upload
it to your Dropbox, your Google Drive or whatever then send that link to a
transcriber person that can be somebody that lives in India or the Philippines and
will transcribe it for like 5 bucks an hour for you. They send it back in a Word
document and all you have to do is format the damn thing according the rules I’m
sharing with you right now. That’s your email. You have just written an email. In
fact, here’s a big secret if you haven’t figured it out yet. You can write and
entire sales letter this way. Seriously! That is what you can do, it’s super easy
to do and it doesn’t stifle you because you’re simply recording yourself as if
you’re talking much easier than “write” because writing is this mythical skill
that is only ñ I don’t know whatever ñ people are really afraid of it for some
reason kind of like driving in traffic. People are afraid of that too. Again, I’m
saying, you can overcome the block if that’s your problem. If the mere act of
putting words on digital paper is your problem then this is your fix, this is your
magic silver bullet, okay, I have just saved your life. So that’s number five.
Number six is actually number five, I have made a mistake to say that I’ve got six
rules. [laughter] So basically I had five rules for you and I’m not sure why I had
six but five rule and the last one was if you suck at writing, talk your emails
out. We have already explained why that is important. So there you go, Jonathan,
five rules to format your emails to the absolute maximum CTR.

Jonathan: Okay before you recap them, I want to throw in a tool. I like the one
that you just shared. Something that I’ve been using lately is Rev.com and they
have an app and so you record right into it and it automatically gets transcribed
and sent back to you if you have an account. So you don’t have to do any of those
middle steps.

Igor: Oh my God. Well I had no … not the first that I’ve heard about Rev and I
know that Ben uses them as well. They are really high quality so when it comes to
like getting that thing done right, you don’t have to go over the transcript and
look up all the different mistakes and all the lingo and stuff. So that’s good.
They are a bit more expensive than somebody you can find on Upwork or Fiverr so
just FYI. But I had no clue they got an app.

Jonathan: Yeah.

Igor: That is bad ass man. That is bad ass.

Jonathan: You talk your emails in the car and by the time you get home, they are
written. [laughter] It’s crazy. So Igor before we wrap this up, can you just give
us a quick overview of the five ñ was it five ñ yeah five not six steps.

Igor: Yeah absolutely, so the first rule, very important, so you don’t look like
an ass clown to your list is no colors, plain black and white, black text white
background. The second is avoid bulky paragraphs, use lots of one liners but do
not write a poem. If the line has to be long, make it long. If the line has to be
short, make it short but don’t write a poem, it’s really bad and don’t overwhelm
the reader by creating a paragraph that’s like nine lines long. You don’t want to
do that. Three, avoid long and complicated words and same thing for sentences.
Avoid long sentences. If you find yourself when read your emails out loud which
could be ñ actually this is number six, Jonathan. Just read your emails out loud,
read everything you write out loud. This will make you a better writer. So if you
read your stuff out loud and you find yourself out of breath, you need to go back
and break down that sentence into two or three sentences. Trust me, it will do
wonders for your engagement. Four, minimize your use of bold, italics and
underline. Try to use it as little as possible and if you do come down to using
it, use it once or twice throughout the whole email and only highlight one word.
Don’t try to highlight the entire paragraph. It’s not going to work well. You will
get the best results by finding the one thing or maybe two things to highlight
depending on the size of your email. Five, write like you talk. Literally write
exactly like you would talk and if you can’t do that, simply talk your emails out
into a microphone on your phone or on your computer and transcribe what you said
that will produce the absolute most baddest emails you can possibly write with the
highest engagement, hitting the right button, saying the right things with the
right tonality, the right emotion and choosing the right words.

Jonathan: Excellent. Good stuff. I think that is a wrap for another List Building
Lifestyle show, go talk out your emails and have better results and we will be
back in your earbuds next time.

Thanks for listening to The List Building Lifestyle Show, make sure to
subscribe on iTunes or Google Play to never miss an episode because who knows just
one conversion tactic we share on the show might double your list and double your
business. Download the transcript of today’s episode and all future episodes at
listbuilderslifestyleshow.com and don’t forget to claim your complimentary copy
of “The Wealthy List Builder’s Survival Guide” at listbuildinglifestyleshow.com/survival .
This is Igor Kheifets until next time we talk, have a good one.

This is the ThePodcastFactory.com.