A few weeks ago I was interviewed by Welly Mulia of new email marketing service BirdSend about how to use email marketing win clients and sell online training.

You can listen to the interview (and check out the bonus infographic, interview summary and full transcript)  here:

>>> Ian's Email Marketing Interview <<<

One of the questions Welly asked was about how to find your own style for your emails and this is such an important topic I wanted to talk about it a little here.

One of the big mistakes I see people making – and frankly which I've fallen into many times myself – is flip-flopping between styles.

You've probably done this yourself. You're told the best way of doing email is to broadcast daily, so you try that.

Then someone else says use autoresponders, so you do that.

Then someone else says it's all about “gain, logic, fear” or infotainment or “soft teaching” or a whole other bunch of techniques.

So you try one, then another. And never really get any results.

The truth is that there isn't “one best way” to do email marketing (or any marketing come to that).

Lots of different ways can work – if you get good at them and if they're a good fit for you.

It's a bit like playing tennis. 

There are aggressive players and defensive players. Serve and volleyers and baseliners.

And different types of style work best on different surfaces.

But it's almost unheard of for a successful player to serve and volley one week, then play baseline the next.

It's incredibly difficult to be a skilful proponent of more than one style.

Same with emails. Much better to find a style that works for you (and your audience) and stick to it.

Of course, that begs the question “how do you find a style that works for you?”

My experience is that the best way is to read a lot of emails. Subscribe to a bunch, see a range of different styles and find one you like.

Don't copy it, of course. But learn from it.

Maybe you'll write short, entertaining emails. Maybe you'll do longer more informative ones.

Maybe yours will be all stories. or more conversational. Maybe quite sales focused. Maybe a slower build.

Within your target market, some people will love your style. Others won't.

But no one will like an inconsistent flip-flop between different styles.

You can hear me talk more about this, along with:

• How to get people to buy even when your email sucks
• How to build a 5-year monster email sequence without pulling your hair out
• How to combine sequence and broadcast emails to engage with your subscribers
• The 2 types of course sales
• How I got started with email marketing and wrote my bestselling book Email Persuasion
• The #1 roadblock for online course creators
• How to talk to your target audience even when you don’t have a customer
•  How to know if your idea for a course sucks
• My #1 advice to build a successful online course business

>>> Click here to hear my interview <<<

– Ian