There is almost nothing more thrilling than sending an email out to your list or a group of prospects and getting a flood of responses and sales. Unfortunately, it gets harder and harder every day to generate big responses from the emails you send out. The people getting your emails are inundated by more marketing messages today than ever before. And you have dozens of other messages to compete with (and that’s *with* effective spam filters in place).

So how can you make *your* message stand out from the crowd and get that response or click you’re after? While there are many proven approaches and formulas to writing high response email copy, I’m going to give you a simple one that has worked well for many of my clients and is easy to replicate.

Part 1: The subject line

This is one of the most critical elements of an email, because at this point in the process the recipients of your email have dozens of other messages screaming for their attention. In order to win their attention, you need to laser in on a core problem or desire they have and do it in a unique way that makes your email stand out.

For this template, we’ll use the question subject line. With this type of subject, you ask the recipient an unusual question that teases them and makes them curious to open the email and find out the answer/find out more.

Here are some examples:

[Powerful benefit] from/by/with [unusual action]? - “Double the size of your tomatoes by changing when you water?”

Are you [problem/frustration]? - “Are you struggling to grow bigger tomatoes?”

How can [unusual action] help you [benefit]? - “How can sprinkling some of this each day make tomatoes juicier?”

Part 2: The body of the email

Now that you’ve grabbed their interest, you need to follow up with something even more compelling in the body of the email to get the click or reply.

This template is going to focus only on getting that click or reply. NOT on selling whatever product or service you’re offering. While you can use your email to explain and sell all the benefits and features of your product or service, it’s often much more effective to keep things simple and focus only on getting the click or reply. Remember how attention deficit people are when they read their email. Breaking your sales process up into a few steps will help you overcome that lack of attention and move people toward the sale.

So, because we are just trying to get them to click to your web site for more info or request more info by replying we’re going to keep this email very short. If you have their name, start with a salutation like “Hi/Hello [name]”. I generally like to keep this informal because most emails people receive from friends and family are informal, but you may want to be more formal depending on your market.

Next, you want to expand on the teaser in your subject. I never like to give away everything in the email, because by keeping their curiosity high they’ll want to click to your site to find out more. Instead, reveal a little bit more and build up the benefits. Remember to target the underlying emotions of the benefits to get them feeling the excitement and urge to click the link and learn more.

You might tease them with some unique aspects of the story behind the product you’re promoting, highlight a couple of the top benefits they’ll get from it, and mention something about what makes it unique from anything they’ve seen before. Throughout the email, you’ll want to place around three links to your site (the magic number for high click rates). Usually one after the first paragraph or two. One in the middle. And a final one at the very end (after a P.S.).

The finished body copy should look something like this…

Hi [name],

[Elaborate on the subject line teaser. Give them a couple hints on what the answer/solution is without giving it away.]

[link #1]

[Mention one or two big benefits of what you’re promoting. Share something that makes it unique from anything they’ve seen before.]

[link #2]

Signed,

Your name

P.S. [Share one last outrageous thing that makes what you’re promoting really stand out… a powerful benefit, something unique that makes it work so well, etc.]

[link #3]

Final tip: Make sure you track click and open rates and TEST different subject lines and body copy variations. Test different angles and different benefits to uncover what you’re market is most interested and concerned about.

Ryan Berg is an email copywriter with a 10 year track record of creating high response email marketing campaigns. For more free email copywriting tips and resources or to learn more about his direct response copywriter services visit his web site now at: http://www.highresponsecopy.com.