If you want people to take action and eventually to hire you or buy from you, you've got to make an offer to them.

But make too many offers and a lot of your audience will bail on you.

Some people tell you not to worry about it. That people who unsubscribe if you hit them with a few sales pitches were never going to buy anyway. 

But that's simply not true. And especially not for large, infrequent purchases with a long sales cycle.

(Typically the people telling you not to worry don't have much experience with those types of sales.)

If you're ready or close to being ready to buy and you see some kind of sales offer your reaction is very different to someone who's a long way off.

In one case the offer could be quite useful to you. In the other it's irrelevant and feels pushy.

But since you don't know how ready people are, what can you do?

Play it safe and not make any offers and you won't get many sales.

Be aggressive and make lots of offers and you'll lose a lot of potential clients before they're ready.

The answer, in my experience at least, is twofold.

Firstly, you can make offers in ways that don't feel so aggressive.

You can give value first and then make a relevant offer, saying “if you'd like to know how to do this faster…”, “if you'd like my in depth training on how to do this…”, “if you'd like someone to do this for you…” – anything that positions your offer as the logical next step for someone who's ready.

That way the people who aren't ready get something useful from you,  but kind of mentally disregard the offer because of the “if…”.

Or you can give useful info in the form of a video and make a similar offer at the end. If people aren't ready they most likely won't even make it to the end of the video to see the offer!

Or you can give options for people at different stages. For example:

“If you're beginning to see the signs of this in your business, your best next step is to [something free they can do themselves]. But if it's already hitting you hard and you need an immediate fix, we have [something they can pay you for]”.

Just giving people options and making it OK for them to say no or to do something else takes the pressure out of your offer and means it won't push away the people who aren't ready yet. But it will attract the people who are.

Next email: a more advanced technique for making offers only to people who are ready.