TCC Podcast #395: Email Strategy with Donnie Bryant

The demand for emails is enormous. And there are probably more copywriters writing emails than any other product. But that doesn't mean those emails are great. Some are barely readable. Others go straight to the junk folder—where they belong. There's never been more need for better emails than today. So for the 395th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, we asked email strategist and copywriter Donnie Bryant to share what he knows about email. Donnie is the author of Subject Line Science, a short book that will help you get more emails opened. If you write emails for clients or your own business, you'll want to lick the play button below, or scroll down for a full transcript now.   Stuff to check out: Subject Line Science by Donnie Bryant Tricks of the Mind by Derren Brown SubjectLineScience.com The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground   Full Transcript: Rob Marsh: Let’s talk about email. When copywriters reach out to us, they often ask what’s the best way to learn how to write emails and probably more importantly, land clients who need help with regular emails. And it kind of feels like there’s been a sea change around email over the past couple of years. Maybe it’s because email is a great way to connect one on one… or at least in a way that feels one to one. OR maybe it’s the shift in buying behavior that’s happened over the past decade. I’m not sure… but what I am sure about is that email isn’t going anywhere. It’s getting more important, not less. And it’s a great service to offer for clients who need ongoing help… that is the kind of clients you can work with long term. Hi, I’m Rob Marsh, one of the founders of The Copywriter Club. And on today’s episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast, I interviewed copywriter Donnie Bryant.  Donnie recently wrote a book about subject lines and what it takes to write them, so he was the perfect guest to invite on the show to talk about email, strategizing a campaign—which I asked him to walk through step by step, as well as what it takes to break into the financial copy niche. If you want to write emails as part of your business, you’ll want to listen to this episode until the end. Now before we get to the interview… you’ve heard me talk about the copywriter underground and what it includes. If you’ve been thinking about joining this amazing community, I want to give you two reasons to jump in now. The first is a limited time Client Emails Masterclass with copywriter Michal Eisik. Michal launched her business after completing the copywriter accelerator and think tank. What she’s built is amazing. We asked Michal if she would share her masterclass with The Underground. But because Michal actually sells this to her own email list, she asked us to limit access to just a couple of day in May.  Which means if you want to get the Client Emails Masterclass for free, you’ve got to jump into The Underground now. NOTE: Sorry, this bonus is gone. We also have a second bonus… it’s the strategic plan that copywriter Daniel Throssell used to make his client’s book a best seller in Australia. Daniel has only shared this plan one time… to subscribers who paid to recieve his newsletter. It’s not currently available anywhere. Even new subscribers to his newsletter don’t have access. But he offered to give this strategy—completely free of charge—to members of The Copywriter Undergound. And like the Client Emails Masterclass, this member exclusive is only available for one week during the month of May—and only for members of The Underground.  If you were to purchase these bonuses sepearately, you’d pay more than what you pay to join The Underground for a single month. Plus you get all the other training, coaching, and community stuff that comes along with your membership in The Underground. There’s never been a better time to visit thecopywriterclub.com/tcu to claim your free bonuses now. And with that, let’s go to our interview with Donnie. Donnie, let's kick this off with your story. How did you get to be a copywriter? I think you've been described as one of the best email copywriters, sales copywriters out there. So tell us your story. Donnie Bryant: Yeah, well, it didn't really start out that way. Right. I think I feel like a lot of us copywriters kind of stumbled into it. When I was a very young boy, I always wanted to write. But I really thought I would write science books or some kind of nonfiction books. I often tell the story. My grandmother had, in her house, 25,000 books—kind of like your wall there. That's nuts. Rob Marsh: People won't be able to see it because we don't have the video here, but yeah, there's a lot of books behind me. Donnie Bryant: Okay. So I grew up loving books. I thought I would write them, but it's kind of a childhood dream. I also wanted to be an astronaut, but that didn't happen. Getting into regular life, I went to college, got married, and then got into the working world, retail, to provide for the family. And over time, I continued to find myself in roles where I was doing marketing and or communications for the companies I was working for, even though that wasn't in my job description or anywhere near it.  But these opportunities kept bubbling up. And my wife, being the intelligent person that she is, she said, you always said you wanted to do something with writing, so why don't you just explore that? And I did. And so in 2007, while I was working 70 hours a week at Kmart, for everyone who remembers Kmart. There's a handful of them left. Rob Marsh: Blue light specials.  Donnie Bryant: That's right. I started to study while I was working. There was a library directly across the parking lot from the Kmart I worked at and Bob Bly’s books were over there. So I just went over and started to study and that's where that's where it all began. I love the written word and I like selling. And so the two married pretty nicely. Rob Marsh: So it's one thing to love that and to think, “Hey, I want to do something with writing.” It's quite another to start making money at it. So as you discovered, what this thing is, how did you turn that into a business opportunity? Donnie Bryant: This is funny. I don't remember how I discovered this, but at least back in the day on Craigslist there was a little section at the bottom called gigs and in various cities they would have gigs and I would just look for writing gigs. Anyone who I thought I could help or who I thought I could convince, I sent messages. And because you instantly know or quickly know, if I ever want to have a crack at this, I’ve got to start making some money. So I probably started soliciting clients before I was responsibly capable of earning their money. Actually, that may not be true because some of my early projects I think turned out really well. But I started very quickly trying to solicit clients. I began through Craigslist and I looked at some job boards, but the first clients came through the little gigs section on Craigslist. Not long after that, you know, as you study, you see the experts say you got to have an online presence. So I started doing a blog, and I started my own email newsletter. And I got on LinkedIn, which seemed like ages ago, must have been about 2010. Started spending a lot of time on LinkedIn, and things kind of developed from there. Rob Marsh: Cool. So again, I just kind of want to follow the career path. With those initial gigs, if I remember right, and I was writing way back then as well, a lot of those were like $15 jobs, $25 jobs. Basically, you'd spend three or four hours or maybe even longer writing a project and make less per hour than you might at a retail job. What was it about it that made you think, “hey, this is what I'm going to lean into and I'm going to make this work?” Donnie Bryant: I think it was something that I could see and control because job boards—it's the same—but everything else was different. A mystery to me. I didn't know anything about promoting myself. I didn't know anything about outreach or anything like that. But I knew that these jobs existed. People were paying people to write. And so, like I said, I don't remember how I found out about it. Maybe someone mentioned it. But yeah, I remember I got some very tiny projects. I did an eight-page sales letter for $25. And the client paid me $35 because he gave me a tip for doing a good job. And he actually ran that sales letter for at least three years. So I have no idea how much money he made from it. Rob Marsh: That's like $7.70 per page, and probably less than that per hour. Donnie Bryant: Yeah, it was bad. And it wasn't a topic that I wasn't super well versed in, so I had to do some research. I just was reading his material to get a hang of it. I think it performed well. Otherwise, he wouldn't have used it for three years. And that was how it went.  The breakthrough job for me, it was similar in the pay per project thing. It was a very small payout. But they had an unlimited number of pages that you could do. You got paid per page. It was actually for speed dating. Speed dating, I think, was a new phenomenon at that time. And we needed to do SEO. And we had speed dating pop-ups in every city in America. So unlimited may be a stretch, but there were thousands of sites, geographically, specific sites, and they all needed four or five pages. And so it was like, write as much as you want. And I would work all day and come home and write all night. And I was able to start making some good money and gain some confidence that way. But you're right, they were small paying jobs. But I also met a great client. The first person who told me “You need to charge me more than you asked me for this.” But he was a consultant who used to work at Microsoft. And I met him on Craigslist, surprisingly, and turned that into a long-term engagement with higher-paying projects. You kind of build brick by brick,