This 20-Email Sequence Made Us Millions of Dollars

after running over 20 cohorts of ship 30 for30 our beginner writing program thousands of students enrolled millions of dollars in revenue generated we've learned on average how many emails you need to send in order to convert a free subscriber into a paying customer and it's not one it's not two we did a whole analysis of all of our different funnels and what we found is that on average it's about 20 emails and so what I want to walk you through is this 20 email strategy that we've been using for the past couple years to generate

like I said millions of dollars for our beginner writing program ship 30 for 30 so how this works is the first part of this sequence is very education oriented and the second part of the sequence is very sales oriented obviously there's components of both but you sort of want to move in this order because one of the things that so many creators or business owners really misunderstand is that the reason most people don't buy certainly don't buy after one or two emails isn't because it's too expensive and it isn't because they don't see you as

credible right the problem the reason why they haven't bought is almost always rooted in some sort of Education deficit what I mean by that is they don't feel like your product answers the questions that they have or solves the problems that they want to solve that is not a sales problem that is an education problem and so what you will notice as we walk through this is why so much of this is anchored in education not necessarily sales so high level before we dive in how our funnel works is we write on social platforms so

my co-founder dicki and I will write primarily on X formerly known as Twitter and Linkedin we will then direct that traffic to a 5day educational email course hours for ship 30 the front end this educational email course is on start writing online.com this is a 5-day eec that basically walks people through a very very compressed version of a lot of the things we cover in ship 30 for30 educ email courses are amazing optins um it is a great way to provide a ton of value in a very short amount of time and once someone enters

their email and and enters our ecosystem by subscribing to this 5-day educational email course this 20 email strategy is what would be on the back end of that so you sort of think as the 5-day eec as providing a bunch of free value and then at the end of the 5 days so quote unquote day six is when this 20 email strategy would begin and this is uh how we've had our funnel set up for years like I said so what I want to do is walk through each individual email and explain why we have

that email some of the things that it accomplishes um just to get ahead of the question sure you can put these emails in a different order if you'd like really the thing that's important is making sure that you educate the customer and making sure that you hit on a lot of these notes so if you want to play with the order you can but what's important is that you hit on these notes because these are the things that people want to know before they purchase your product so let's go down the list email number one

so remember this is on the back end of what would be ideally some sort of really valuable optin so I would not think of that optin as a newsletter I would think of that optin as an educational email course or some sort of free download You Know download this white paper download this cheat sheet or download this bundle of templates right you want to give away something valuable for free and then on the back end of that is when you would begin these emails so email number one is just a plain pitch it sounds so

silly but you would be shocked how many people just don't do this they have something for sale and then they never say that they have this thing for sale because the faulty belief is well if I tell my subscribers that I have something for sale they're going to unsubscribe well let me tell you something having people on your email list who are not buying anything from you is not very valuable you either want someone to subscribe and buy or you want someone to unsubscribe having a 100,000 people on your email list don't do anything is

a vanity metric and I it drives me nuts when I see creators go I've built a massive email list and then they never mention their products and then they go I don't understand why no one's buying my products and then you talk to them and they go well I'm afraid to pitch my list because I don't want them to unsubscribe because I don't want my shiny number to go down who cares you would way rather have an email list of a thousand people all paying you than have an email list of a 100,000 people paying

you or people who don't pay you right so email number one the very first thing you're going to do is you're going to tell the customer the potential customer the reader here's what I have for sale here's the problem that it solves and here's how you can buy it it's very simple you're like hey I just walked you through five days of free value by the way we have this writing program called ship 30 for 30 here are the problems that it solves here's how you can buy it click this link and if you don't

do that bare minimum don't be surprised if people don't buy your product because you have to tell them I have a product for sale here's the problem it solves here's why you should buy it right then email number two and moving forward you'll notice how this is less and less about sales and more and more about education and I want to just do a quick pause here the real bottleneck to getting someone to buy is very rarely rarely a sales problem and it's almost always an education problem I'll give you a quick example so recently

I was looking to buy I was going to get on the bandwagon I was looking to buy a uh like ice bath for my house and I found this really great company I just Google searched around found this great company they had great branding they had t a ton of testimonials right they check all of those boxes but the reason I didn't buy was because I was on their website and they kept talking about how great the cold plunge was but they didn't answer any of my questions I I I was like how often do

I have to clean this thing and can bacteria grow in it and how often do I have to swap the water and if I leave it outside is the temperature you know this is when I was living in Miami I'm like can it survive Miami temperatures you know how long is it going to last if I leave it outside do I need to get a cover I had all of these questions and meanwhile the company was just like here's how great it is and here's all these testimonials and look at our sexy branding and by

the way do you want 10% off your order and I'm like none of those things are the reason why I'm not buying and eventually I didn't buy the cold plunge because my questions weren't answered and I felt notice the word I felt uncertain about my decision I felt uncertain about my ability to buy something that would give me the thing that I was looking for had nothing to do with price had nothing to do with branding it had nothing to do with credibility or testimonials and this is something so many people really misunderstand especially when

it comes to email marketing and setting up sequences so email number two and as we get further and further along you will notice this is way more about education because we need to empower the potential customer to feel like they can make an educated decision so email number two is who is this for so this is where your second email essentially says hey you might be one of these three different archetypes for ship 30 it's you might be someone who's never written anything before on the internet and wants to right you might be someone who

has been writing a little bit but just aren't seeing the traction that you want or someone who's been writing for a really long time but just want to keep power leveling your digital writing skills you know you're really good at Analog Legacy writing but you don't know very much about digital writing so notice how when you have an email that speaks to a couple different Arch types it allows you to sort of widen the scope and go hey we can help these specific types of people in my opinion I would avoid speaking to more than

three different archetypes and ideally just to put a fine point on this you don't want these to be three completely different people you want these to basically be three different variations of the same person so an easier way to think about it is think of your archetype and you're speaking to someone who hasn't started yet then you're speaking to someone who has already started but isn't really seeing the results they want and then you're speaking to someone who has been doing it for a while but wants to get better at it okay and so you're

it's basically like three different variations of the same person or or really the same person on um at different stages of the growth Journey if you will so in this second email who is this for the reason you want to call this out is so that your Target customer goes oh that's me this is for me this isn't a product that's for anyone this is a product that's specifically for me and so you want to call those out and then again at the end of the email you go hey by the way we made ship

30 for30 for example specifically for someone like you here's how we can help you click the link to buy email number three we get even more into the education space email number three is where you walk through the 10 biggest problems that this type of person is either currently faced with or will be faced with okay so these are problems that the person either didn't know they had or problems that they know they have they just haven't gotten around to solving yet and you want this email to be your education like you're not even talking

about your product all you're doing is saying hey email number two right we said we could help you well today in our third email let me explain how much we know you we know why you have these problems we know you've been struggling with these things and we know because and you know usually this is a key part of the quote unquote story but we know because we've been there too right so a lot of times the problems that you're pointing out in an ideal world you should be able to speak to and go I

know because I used to have those same problems right so this email number three is all anchored around what are the 10 biggest problems that your Target customer has and you have to educate them on those problems why they're happening right maybe things that they've tried in the past how they feel about those problems before you can continue talking about the solution because the person can't care about the solution or the product until they first care about and ground themselves in the problem email number four very similar but instead of talking about problems now we're

going to start talking about outcomes you could do three desired outcomes you could do five desired outcomes you could do 10 desired outcomes uh chances are problem list is usually bigger right most most of the time when someone wants to get better at something their list of problems is very long but their list of outcomes and the things they desire is typically pretty short it's like I have all these problems but I really just want to solve this one thing or I really just want to unlock this one thing so in this email basically what

you want to think through are what are the let's just call it three desired outcomes that this target person would care the most about and think of this as the carot you know first you grounded them in the problem and then in this email you want to talk about how great their life is going to be when they solve those problems and this is a really important distinction a lot of times people think hey let me tell you how great your life will be when you buy this product and that's not that's it you're missing

the Nuance here it's not that their life will be better when they buy your product it's that their life will be better when they solve those problems you are having an education conversation you are not having a sales conversation because when you successfully Link in the potential customer's mind you have the these problems I know why you have these problems I know how to solve them and when you solve them you will unlock these desirable outcomes the customer naturally assumes your product helps them cross that bridge so again it's a small Nuance but I see

people make this mistake all the time you're not talking about how great your product is you're talking about how you can help them solve those problems and then allow them to unlock these desirable outcomes Okay so email number four get him excited about the future email number five my story so this is another big misunderstanding you will hear constantly on social platforms or in writing groups or you know marketing groups or courses or masterminds you will hear people say oh the secret to marketing is storytelling you have to share your story the customer loves your

story okay let me tell you a little secret nobody cares about your story your story is irrelevant the only time your story matters is when your story provides context to the reader about something they care about okay so you talking about yourself pointless you talking about yourself to give context to the thing that you're trying to explain to the reader then it's valuable so what is the secret to sharing your story well you basically want to say listen I have been exactly where you are today that is the point of the story the story is

to help the reader relate to you and for you to demonstrate that you understand where the reader is if you just start telling your story for the sake of telling your story it's not going to accomplish what you think it's going to accomplish so you basically want to say I used to be exactly where you are today I know the problems you have because I used to have these problems I know the outcomes that you want because I wanted those same outcomes and by the way here the things that I tried that didn't work for

me either so the whole point of you telling your story is not really to tell your story it's to help the reader see themselves in your story and have the reader go oh I have those same problems I wanted those same outcomes I tried those same things and they didn't work right so it's not about you it's actually about the reader and then you go here's what changed here are the things that I started doing differently that's what allows you to sort of segue into here are the things that I did differently and by the

way these are all of the things that I show you how to do as well in our product so that's the whole line you know the thought process that goes into it you are not just telling your story for the sake of going Listen to How Great I Am and how much I love my life now you're telling your story so that the reader can see themselves in it email number six we call it the the stop start email so a very easy way of thinking about this a nice little template is in this email

you're going to go here are all the things that you're probably trying to do right now to solve this problem or to solve these problems that you have here are all the things that you're trying to do right now to unlock these outcomes that you care about okay stop here's why those things aren't working so a really easy example um like in the writing world if we go you know one of the things you're probably doing is you're sitting there just obsess in over what time of day should I post you know should it be

at 8:30 a.m. or 2: p.m. or 7:30 p.m. right you need to stop because obsessing over that isn't going to get you the outcome that you desire right so that's the first half of the emails you go what are a handful of things that you would tell the potential customer you're probably doing these things right now I'm just telling you free education you need to stop it and when you do that what what that's doing is that's demonstrating to them hey trust me I understand why you're trying to do these things chances are I've tried

doing them in the past as well if you know if you have you should definitely speak to that and then when you tell them to stop what's the natural next question the next question the reader has is well what should I be doing instead segue into the second half of the email right instead you should start doing these things and guess what things you're going to have them start doing well they're all the things that you walk them through in your product right so you give them the free education you go you should stop doing

this and you should start doing this instead oh and by the way if you want us to just tell you how all of this works or you want us to hold your hand through it or you want us to just give you the blueprint or give you all of the templates these are the things that we cover specifically in our product so this start stop email is a very powerful education tool for customers email number seven are the myths so myths faulty beliefs what are the things that your potential customer is telling themselves keeping them

from taking action and this is one of those things where ideally you know you are you want your Target customer to basically be the the former version of yourself ideally because then you understand what all these faulty beliefs are if for some reason you you don't know like you're trying to build an audience or launch products in a space where you weren't the the Target customer yourself um then you need to go talk to people and you need to listen closely and go what are the what are the narratives that they're telling themselves keeping them

from moving forward or keeping them from taking action so in this email you basically are walking through here are the faulty beliefs that most people have that keep them from whatever the action step is and a lot of times these faulty beliefs go multiple layers so you might say something like you know faulty belief number one uh they think we'll use ship 30 as an example you might think that uh you aren't a very good writer and so you don't think that you would be able to take ship 30 for30 or even start building a

daily writing habit well the the root of that problem little copyrighting technique never blame the customer always give the customer someone to blame right the root of that problem is I don't blame you you know I mean the traditional education system kind of makes everybody feel like they aren't very good writers growing up maybe that resonates with you that's certainly how I felt right and then the root of the root of the problem is not just oh I'm I'm not a very good writer or root of that blame the traditional education system but the root

of the root is and honestly like maybe you're sitting there just you feel like you have low self-confidence or or you're afraid to put yourself out there it actually doesn't have to do with whether you're a good writer or not you have this underlying fear of but what happens if I put myself out there and as you start to really dig into the psychology Behind these decisions that's where you start unlocking really powerful copy inside these emails because the again the reason people don't buy usually isn't all the surface level stuff people talk about it's

an education problem and that education problem is rooted in some sort of faulty belief or you know unhealthy narrative that the person's telling themselves I can't tell you how many times we see people go through ship 30 who at the beginning go there's no way I could write I'm terrified of putting myself out there you know I I feel insecure about my writing voice I I'm afraid of being judged and then you see him come out the other side and they go oh that wasn't so hard right I've seen that pattern over and over and

over again and I think part of why our emails resonate so much with people is because we speak to those things and so that's a question you need to ask yourself is how can you speak to these faulty beliefs that are deeply rooted in the person that you want to try to help and you have to recognize that even just you pointing these faulty beliefs out is valuable right most people aren't even aware that these faulty beliefs are happening they they can't hear that narrative going on in their head so when you point that out

to someone they're actually really grateful for it again education email number eight quick tips so this is a pure education I love throwing this in there again the goal is not really to talk about how great the product is the goal is to go look I know how to help you and I can prove that I know how to help you so whether you buy from us or not let me give you some quick tips let's say you want to go do this on your own if you're going to do this on your own here's

what I would do and everyone think it's so counterintuitive but everyone thinks well if you give away the the answers the person's not going to want to buy from you and you know I've sold over $5 million worth of ghost writing services I've sold over $10 million worth of digital products I can tell you unequivocally it is always the opposite the more you give away for free the more the person wants to buy from you because they trust you the less you give away for free the harder it is to get people to buy from

you so I'm just telling you if you're sitting there thinking if I give away things for free they're not going to want to buy it everyone makes this mistake and it is always the opposite so email number eight quick tips you want to do this on your own okay if you don't end up buying ship 30 for 30 let me just tell you what I would do right and again this doesn't need to be a well now I have to explain everything in depth this is going to be a 30,000 word email all you have

to do is just very high level these are the things I would do if you want to go figure this out on your own by all means let me just point you in the right direction what does that do it's like a no sell sell I'm not going to sell you I'm just going to tell you and then as a result the customer goes well thanks for telling me could you tell me more things oh well then I should probably go buy product right email number n this is a cool pairing with the email before

it email number eight email number nine is all about mistakes so you can sort of build you can see how uh you can construct these sequences where you can sort of build on each one they don't have to be perfectly linear but sometimes there's benefits in you know having one email come before the next one so email 9 you're talking about all of the mistakes most people make when they try to do this on your own on their own so what you can do is you can reference email 8 and go hey yesterday I told

you if you want to go do this on your own these are the things I would focus on but I also more free education but I also just want to point out to you here are some of the mistakes most people make when they try and go do that and so again what you're doing is you're helping them become aware of how difficult it is to do this thing on their own and as people become more more and more aware of how difficult it is to do something on their own they naturally come to the

conclusion boy I mean I could save myself all of this time energy and effort if I just buy the answers right and the product is all of the answers and so I love this you know email 8 quick tips going into email 9 mistakes combo because it really allows you to go again you want to do this on your own by all means let me just tell you as soon as you start heading into that Forest these are all the things you can and the more that you educate people on all the things that they're

going to expect the more they naturally come to the conclusion I don't know that I really want to walk into this dark forest all by myself right again no cell cell email number 10 this sort of rounds out the first half of our sequence email number 10 last real free education are templates templates are amazing things to give away for free because they are tangible when you give someone a template the reader can feel that template right they can copy paste the template um the way that a template typically gets delivered especially online might be

in a Google doc or might be in a notion document or might be in some sort of download even though these things are quote unquote digital air they're still objects right you're like oh I'm getting a Google that feels like an object in the digital world so I love giving away templates because it really feels like you're giving the reader something very very tangible and so what I like to do in one of our emails and in email 10 here is basically go hey one more thing I want to give you before you head into

that Forest you want to try to do do this on your own no problem keep in mind these are some of the mistakes people make so what I went and ahead and did is I put together a couple of these templates to help you avoid those mistakes so that you start your journey off on the right foot so again you're sort of like hey I know you're if you want to if you're about to walk into that Forest just wanted to give you a flashlight and it's it's the No sell cell it's like the more

that you give people the more they start to naturally come to the conclusion man you're giving me all of this for free I wonder what is inside the paid thing right that is the goal that is how you want the customer to feel and notice how different that feeling is rather than the customer feeling like H you just keep talking about how great your product is and oh do I want 20% off and like those aren't the things keeping the person from buying what's keeping the person from buying is them not feeling educated on the

decision okay so that's the first half of the sequence and notice how much of it is not about sales it's really about helping the customer make sure that they are making the right decision for them now after these first 10 emails you should like you have no problem pitching the customer because you basically and and in an Ideal World you wrote for free on social platforms free education you drove them to some sort of free opt-in free education in our case our 5-day educational email course and then you gave them another 10 emails on the

back of that that weren't really about your product they were about helping the customer become aware of a problem they didn't know they had or a problem that they know they have they just haven't gotten around to fixing and all of the the outcomes and the faulty beliefs right the mistakes that most people make that's a ton of free education so that's the first half of the sequence the second half of the sequence is is going to be much more quote unquote sales oriented and again you can only do this at this point because you

did all the upfront work on educating the customer customer can't care about the solution until they first care about the problem so in this back half you shouldn't feel any sort of way about pitching the customer because in an Ideal World you've already given them a ton of free education and content on social platforms that's probably how they found you and got into your ecosystem you ideally drove that traffic to some sort of free opt-in in our case that's our free 5-day educational email course start writing online so you gave them free value there then

on the back end of that some sort of free optin you just gave them 10 emails that are extremely education oriented right you help them become aware of problems that they're faced with uh you uh educate them on outcomes that they might want uh mistakes that most people make faulty beliefs things that are holding them back all of this is free education and so after 10 more emails of that if the person is still reading it's time to lean into look we can help you let me tell you specifically how we can help you okay

and I already mentioned it but the big thing I want to emphasize here is as a general rule of thumb selling digital products the more emails you send the more money you make the less emails you send the less money you make and every single time I see a Creator go oh sales are down or oh I don't know why people aren't buying my product the vast majority of the time it's because they don't want to send too many emails because they're afraid of people unsubscribing and I'm just we've seen it internally we've sent thousands

of emails at this point we've had over 10,000 people go through ship 30 for 30 generated millions of dollars I'm telling you the more emails you send the more that you get people over the Finish Line the less emails you send the less effective your funnel is so email 11 this is where you start pitching the product this is where you start really digging into here's how we can help you email 11 is everything that's included so what this is is this is basically a walkthr of whatever product you're selling here's everything you're going to

get here are all of the topics that the modules cover you're going to get text and video here are the different templates we give you here are the different cheat sheets we give you here are the different bonuses that we throw in there it it is just one here's everything that we're giving you and ideally this is a a really important Nuance ideally every time you say here's another thing we're giving you you're not just talking about the product but you're linking that part of the product to a problem that the customer has so you

don't just say hey we give you 10 hours of curriculum we go in a better way of saying it would be these are the 10 different modules we cover in our curriculum and let's go module by module and explain why we cover that thing in that module and the problem that it helps you solve and the outcome it helps you unlock so you you don't really just want to go product product product you want to link elements of the product to back to education the things that the customer cares about the problems they want to

solve the outcomes that they want to unlock email number 12 is when you get into bonuses so bonuses are something that a lot of people don't know how to use strategically in their digital product so I'm going to give you a quick little crash course here the way to think about bonuses are what are the three biggest objections that someone would have from buying your product whatever those objections are you turn those into bonus ideas so for example let's say uh one of the biggest objections that someone has to buying your product is them going

uh I I feel like this might work I just don't know if I have the time I'm really busy I work a full-time job I have two kids well then it would be awesome to have bonus number one if you're someone who's really busy working a full-time job you have a couple kids running around at home we created a FastTrack version of our product we compressed it down everything all of the most important ideas instead of a 10-hour curriculum is compressed down into an hourong curriculum so you get both uh you can always go through

the 10-hour one at your own pace later but if you just want to binge the FastTrack one hour curriculum you can get this done in a single well now you just over the objection with a bonus that is the way to think about bonuses and it's a very very powerful framework once once you start to understand how that works so I guess just going down the rabbit hole a little deeper here one of the mistakes that people make with bonuses is they just go how do I dump more in they almost think that you know

volume is the answer and in this case it's not like if you go uh a really great example is when people do book launches and they go hey if you buy my book early I'll give you a bonus chapter well the person hasn't even read the book so why would they care about a another chapter of a thing they haven't even read yet they don't even know if they like it so why would you give them more of the thing they don't know they like right so that's how most people think about bonuses and they

fall flat you might see a lot of people do this and think that it's successful but it unlocks a fraction of the upside as opposed to if you think about bonuses as a vehicle for overcoming objections so don't just think I'm going to dump more think how what are the three biggest objections that someone would have to buying my product and how can I create bonuses that address that objection then email number 13 notice we're just sort of checking off different boxes like what are the things a customer would need to know email number 13

want proof want proof it works want proof people are happy want proof that we're not just some random people on the internet testimonials this is a pure testimonial email it's just let me show you and talk about all the people who are happy because they bought this product and one of the things the objection that I always hear when whenever I talk about this or I walk people through the sequence is they go well what if I don't have testimonials yet well first of all you shouldn't be building this 20 email sequence until you have

first had a bunch people go through your product for free because so much of this sequence is based on you really understanding who your who the person is that you're trying to help and so what I would really recommend before you even begin assembling something like this is build a V1 a very very basic V1 of your digital product I'm talking Google Docs and Loom videos then go find 10 20 30 people to go through it for free then get all of their feed back make a V2 and in exchange for them going through it

anyone who's happy and was like hey thanks for free access I went through it by the way it actually was pretty helpful get testimonials and if you do that upfront work not only will you have testimonials for this sequence but you will also have so much more content to play with for writing all of these emails because you're going to have talked to your Target customer directly and you're going to know exactly what to improve for the V2 of your product so small tangent but you need to go do that upfront work first email 14

this is where uh this is more of a like a sales Copy Type email I love this email we use it in all of our sequences email 14 is where will you be one year from now so basically what you want to do is you want to Future Pace two different scenarios for your Target customer you go one scenario where will you be a year from now if you don't take action if you don't just let us tell you all the answers go I'm going to try and do this on my own and you've been

trying to do it on your own you haven't figured it out yet so where will you be a year from now if you just keep trying to do the same thing you've been doing versus where will you be a year from now if you allow us to help you and you basically are painting two very different outcomes and you go one outcome is you probably end up exactly where you are today your life doesn't change very much the other outcome is here are all the great things that are going to happen on the other side

right so you're getting them excited about the journey sort of like imagine uh someone at a like a a bus station or a train station you're trying to sell them on going on this long journey right well the way you sell them is you're like hey I promise you get on this thing when you get to Los Angeles when you get to the West Coast oh the weather is incredible and they have all this great healthy food and the restaurants are amazing right you're selling them on going on the journey and that's really what this

email is intended to do and you're sort of uh amplifying that decision by also presenting the Counterpoint the Counterpoint is hey and if you don't go on this journey probably going to be stuck on the East Coast during Christmas and it's going to be really snowy and slushy and cold and it's not going to be enjoyable you could be on the west coast sitting by a pool right so that's that's really the way to think about this email is you're painting these two different scenarios email number 15 is really a deep dive of one of

the testimonials from email 13 so what we like to do here is if 13 is a big Roundup of a bunch of testimonials email 15 is we will pluck out one of those testimonials usually someone who has seen a lot of success like someone who's really enjoyed the product or program uh someone who had a huge transformation and we amplify it we Spotlight it we're like in this email we're just going to tell you about suie here suie started exactly where you are Susie was faced with all the same problems Susie had all of the

same faulty beliefs Susie was making all of those the same mistakes that you're probably making by the way she decided to take the plunge join ship 30 for 30 now here are all the things she's unlocked here's how different her life is so you're taking one testimonial and you're really spotlighting it so that the Target customer can see themselves in that other person right it's not just your story that's going to get them across the the Finish Line it's actually walking them through and showing them someone else's story who was also successful and again if

you don't have this in the beginning that's totally fine but the easiest way to power level this give your product or program away for free to a handful of people and get these testimonials I promise it is the faster Road it's the shortcut because it just power levels all of this for you email 16 another one of my favorite emails uh we we templatized it we call it the tale of two archetypes but this is based on a very very popular sales letter uh that was Run for the Wall Street Journal years ago and I

think the sales letter was called like a A Tale of Two Men or something and basically the sales letter was there's one person who doesn't read The Wall Street Journal and there's one person who does and it sort of paints very similar to the email we were just talking about but it paints these two outcomes of well if you don't do this here's what your life is going to be like and if you do do this well here's what your life could be like and the Nuance what makes this email different is I always like

writing this as sort of a fable I write it almost like a creative writing exercise where I go here's a quick story of two different types of people and I basically create fictional versions of the person who doesn't take action and just keeps you know trying to do what they've been doing forever versus the people who does take who who who does decide to take action does you know join ship 30 for 30 does build a daily writing habit does implement all of these things that we talk about and by telling it as a fable

it again it allows the potential customer to sort of see themselves in it from a different Vantage and I've always found this email to be very very powerful we use this in our Evergreen sequences we use this in in fomo sequences we use this in uh sporadic product launch sequences this is one of my favorite emails to use um and if you want to if you really want to know the history I would encourage you just Google you know Wall Street Journal Tale of Two Men sales letter and it'll probably come up email 17 this

is where we're sort of getting to the end of okay you haven't bought so let's just let's just get direct here email number 17 is what has you on the fence so you could do this in a couple different ways the advanced version is you could set up a little survey um where you can track links clicks so you basically say what has you on the fence and you you know you write out three potential objections and you hyperlink each one and you go can you just click which thing has you on the fence and

then you can gather data in the back end of whatever software you're using like convertkit for example and you can look at well how many people clicked objection one objection two or objection three that gives you some real data as to why people might not be buying right usually the things that we list out are um it's too expensive so I want to know if price is an issue um I just don't have the time right is time an issue and then the third one is usually some sort of like context specific objection to whatever

industry you're in like I I just don't think I'm a very good writer or or um I I think I might be too advanced for this right so it's usually something that's specific to whatever you're talking about or whatever whatever the product is the manual version especially if you don't have a ton of people on your email list this is what we did in the very beginning is we just said hey do you mind responding to this email letting us know what has you on the fence is there are are there any questions that we

can answer for you and this is one of those things that don't doesn't scale very well but in the beginning you don't need things that scale to the Moon you know especially if you have 50 people on your email list or 100 people or 500 people like imagine if all 500 people bought from you you would be ecstatic that's amazing and so do some things that don't scale and just ask people hey if you're reading this do you mind emailing me and letting me know what has you on the fence open a dialogue right work

with them directly the these things that don't scale are worth doing in the beginning because a it's going to get you sales but B because it's going to teach you so much about what's holding people back and as you learn those things you can go back and refine all of these emails and refine your funnels right so a lot of this is a learning game for yourself email 18 is you do a behind the scenes look so something we love to do it's very easy to execute is in this email uh I might record a

loom a loom video walking through the product and there's something about just showing the person inside right it makes it feel tangible so I'd go hey Cole one of the co-founders of ship 30 for30 uh just wanted you to see what you're getting yourself into so here let me let me pull up my screen this is what we use to host all of the modules let me click through all the different modules here's how long they are here's a bunch of the things that we cover right you're basically giving them a tour of the product

and I've always found that that is another really helpful thing it helps the person see that it's real um it might just give them a little different perspective like oh I had no idea that there was a whole vault of videos included in here like I I didn't know that I missed that in one of the emails right so nothing like a good behind the scenes tour email 19 this is where you can really just play into the fomo a little bit think about one of those final objections so what's maybe the last thing keeping

someone from deciding to purchase and then what you want to do is you create a disappearing bonus that addresses that objection so so it sort of depends on obviously what you're selling and and what the objection is but for example uh let's say for ship 30 for 30 someone goes um you know like we look at the data and what we get from one of those previous emails is someone goes I just feel like uh I've been writing online for a while and I don't know if this is Advanced enough for me well if we

wanted to really bump this up we might take a couple weeks and go you know what let's build an entire separate mini that's all like more advanced uh writing techniques and things that the the be an average beginner might not need but someone uh further along would find a lot of value in let's just build a whole separate product for free and what you can do and I would only go through that effort if you saw that that objection was the thing that was keeping like 30% 40% 50% of people from buying right you wouldn't

do that if it was small minority of people that weren't buying but if you felt like it was worth the effort that would be the level 10 version and so then you would add that into the funnel into this sequence as a disappearing bonus so you go hey by the way we heard you uh if you've been writing online for a long time and you just don't know if ship 30 for30 is Advanced enough first of all I will say every single time someone says that they end up going through ship 30 and they still

end up learning something but just to sweeten the deal we went ahead and created our Advanced Digital writing techniques mini course and if you join ship 30 in the next 48 hours we will give you this as well for free and that is an amazing way of just you're you're killing so many different birds with one stone and the whole key here is if you're going to take the time and deploy the effort to create a separate product as a disappearing bonus to to address that objection you also want to price anchor that bonus so

uh the way that we would typically execute this we would say something like we made this whole mini course it was specifically for your archetype of person um to be honest we were thinking about launching this as a separate course we were thinking of launching it as a $500 product but to sweeten the deal for you here if you join ship 30 in the next 48 hours we will give you this $500 product for free when you do that is a very powerful and compelling offer and again like you're hitting on all these different notes

right you're like we hear you you you're saying we understand like that that objection is what's keeping you from joining uh we have this other thing that we went and built that is specifically for that overcoming that objection we price anchor it this is you know you could even make it the same price as the the normal thing so that way you're like oh I'm basically getting two for one right and you're price anchoring it and you're making uh you're forcing the decision to be urgent you're you're injecting urgency you go you only have 48

hours in order to do this and by the way we don't sell this anywhere else so it sort of becomes a hidden bonus only for people that get all the way through at this stage of the sequence and then still haven't bought it's very very pinpointed very strategic thing to add into your funnel and then of course email number 20 this is the absolute Last Resort okay so many people will send one email and then go oh you didn't buy it for one email well here's 50% off huge mistake it's not price it's always education

so the very last email in the sequence this is for everyone who's gone through the entire sequence and still hasn't bought you might go hey let's sweeten the deal just a little bit more we really want you to take action we would hate for price to be a barrier to entry for you if you sign up in the next 48 hours here's x% off or here's $50 off or here's $100 off so you would do a disappearing discount and again I can't emphasize enough everyone always races and they put the discount at the very beginning

and that is the biggest mistake you can make you're leaving a ton of money on the table and you are really missing the point of these types of sequences these are education sequences these are not discount sequences so the discount should be your absolute Last Resort and the other reason and I just want to sort of round out here and close you know how does this sequence work the reason that you make the disappearing bonus email 19 and the disappearing discount email 20 is because when someone is going through this sequence whenever they buy whatever

email they that that gets them over the finish line that is where you would pull them out of the sequence okay so let's say they read uh the first 10 emails and then email 11 they finally click the link and buy you would not send them emails 12 through 20 right you would pull them out of that sequence at that moment and what we do and what we've done in the past is the moment someone buys we pull them out of the sequence and we just put them on our ever newsletter if they're not there

already right so you're either moving them to your your Evergreen newsletter or you're just pulling them out of the sequence and that's it they don't receive any other emails because you wouldn't want someone to buy email 11 and then you know eight days later go oh you were going to offer me a discount at email 20 right so the only people that you're pitching The Disappearing bonus and the disappearing discount to are people who have gone through the entire sequence and for whatever reason still haven't bought and then you can go all right well let's

sweeten the deal and you know we we made this specifically for you but you you have to take action in the next 24 hours or the next 48 hours to be perfectly honest we don't use e even at the at the back end of these sequences we might do disappearing bonuses uh we will lean in that direction first very rarely do we do discounts I think just generally when you default to discounts you're training your customer base to go well you'll probably discount this later so I might as well just wait around for it right

and you might not notice it right away often times it this problem gets masked when you uh present discounts very early on because you're like well it got a bunch of people to buy it's like okay well yeah I got a bunch of people to buy but what did that cost you in the long run right so just as a final note um I really don't like relying on discounts I think it often masks other underlying issues that are keeping customers from wanting to buy from you and so if you are going to do it

do it as an absolute Last Resort otherwise the whole name of the game is all education