No door to walk through.

If your editorial emails mention your products but never link to them, add links where the product comes up naturally, without adding a pitch or discount. For one author's daily email list, links added to the existing content matched the previous 30 days of email-attributed sales in two days, and a review of 164 emails found courses mentioned dozens of times and linked almost never.

A client writes to his list every day, and people read it. The emails teach, he tells stories, and the open rates are the kind most businesses would be thrilled with. When I started digging into what those emails actually did for the business, though, I noticed there was nothing in them to click on.

He'd mention his community in passing, or talk about something one of his courses covers in depth, and the sentence just ended. The only time a reader saw a product was during a planned promotion. The rest of the year the list was engaged, warmed up and interested, with no door to walk through.

A few words that go somewhere.

So we started adding links where they belonged. The content itself stayed the same, with no new pitch and no discount added.

When an email mentioned the community

“community” linked to the membership.

When it described what a product does or the benefits/results of a course

that phrase linked to the sales page of that product/course.

Everything else

stayed exactly as written.

In two days, those links matched the previous 30 days of email-attributed sales.

How much was still sitting there.

That got me curious, so I went back and mapped all 164 editorial emails from the previous six months against the product catalog.

The content was doing the selling, and the links weren't there to finish the job.

If you publish content to your list regularly, ask yourself one question.

When your emails mention what you sell, can the ready buyer click and buy?

Jason “Just Link It” Resnick

P.S. Nothing about the writing changed. A few words in each email just started going somewhere.