Use This Powerful Email in Your Autoresponder Campaign

Engagement emails are powerful pieces to add to your email campaign because they get your subscribers to interact with you, and that builds trust and creates a bond. One of the engagement emails that I absolutely love is the homework email. A homework email will take this to the next level. Because not only does it create this engagement, but it asks them to take physical action.

It gets them to engage in a higher level. This is done through this type of email. Why do you call it a “homework email” rather than an assignment or exercise? The reason is, psychologically, all of us went through grade school having to do homework assignments. Normally, a homework assignment took more than 15 seconds. A quick exercise may only take 20 seconds.

Hopefully your wheels are turning right now and you can think of quite a few different types of engagement emails. You can have an “assignment email,” a “20 minute break email,”” a “write me and I will personally respond email” and so on. Engagement can take many different forms. I’m giving you some killer examples so you can begin to think on them and you can create some for engagement in your niche.

If we call this a homework email, then people are thinking in their mind that this is something that they’re going to do and they should not get distracted. They know that it can take them anywhere from 15 to 30 minutes. How do we get people to take 15 to 30 minutes on a homework assignment, especially if they have only been on a campaign for three days?

Here’s exactly how we do it:

1. We call it a homework assignment. As mentioned, this gets people to think; their mind is going to take them along the 20 seconds to complete an exercise.

2 Adding blank lines in the email: your prospect is more likely to answer and do your homework assignment. When you write your question out add four physical lines. What do humans do when they see lines? They fill them out. Be sure to add lines under each question.

Question: 1
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________

Question: 2
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________
_________________________________________________________

Like so.

Why 4 lines instead of one line? Because with four lines we are hoping that they’ll write more. What is going to happen to their emotional attachment to you when they write more? It’s going to be deeper. If I can get someone to spend 45 minutes with me rather than 15, what is going to happen?

They’re going to engage with you and me on a deeper level.

Anything that we can do to make this homework assignment last longer so they engage deeper with us (within reason) is beneficial for both us and them. Once they begin to engage with us on a deeper level, it will move them into a deeper emotional contact with us. This is what you want.

Let me give you an additional method.

At the beginning of our homework assignment, we say, “Today’s email is going to be a little different, in today’s email we are going to have a homework assignment. This assignment may take you 10 or 15 minutes or longer. Here’s what I suggest: print out this email.”

When someone prints out your email and fills it out with a pencil and paper then this action will cause deeper bonding than if someone just types an answer. This is what we want.

We also need to give them a reason for why they need to print it out. The reason is so they can refer to this over the next few days. Every time they refer to this, they’re going to get more value out of this than if they just typed it on their computer. They print it out, fill it out and look at it for the next few days.

Why are they going to look back at it? Because it’s a physical copy. If it was an email or text document then it would more than likely get lost in the shuffle of everything that they’re doing online. There’s a tremendous amount of distraction when somebody surfs the Internet and even when they get on their computer. In addition, people will very rarely go back to their email.

If they don’t like the exercise then they’ll more than likely throw it away, but if it’s helpful to them, and you can control this, then they’re going to lay it down where they hang out when they’re on the computer. If they hang out on the computer in the living room then they’re going to put it on the coffee table, and tomorrow when they come back into the living room they’re going to see it.

They’ll pick it up, look at it and then begin to engage with us all over again. The same goes for where they hang out at an office; it will go on their desk. They may mull over their answers. We want them to see this three or 45 times – we want them to engage. This allows them to emotionally and physically engage with us.

Why do we want this additional engagement? Because it will increase the probability of them buying from us if they ever decide to buy a coaching program or membership program or product in our niche.
There are quite a few different reasons why this happens. One reason is because they trust us more. Another reason is because they’re more emotionally involved with us.

There’s another reason: it has to do a soft cost. When someone already has stake in the game they’re more likely to proceed ahead rather than stop, reverse, and move in a whole other direction. For example, if a person owns a piece of property and they spend one million on the foundation, and they spend another million dollars in the building, then they find out that there’s a flaw in the foundation, most people will go ahead and spend the extra money to fix the flaw rather than take a loss on it, break even, and move on to a new project.

This is just an example. It does not reflect your coaching programs. Let’s relate this to the fact that they’ve spent two hours engaging, reflecting, bonding and writing their answers over a period of a few days. And another coach has a similar program to yours but they’re not emotionally bonded with that person. Even if your program costs twice as much and the other one is just as effective, they’re more likely to buy your program at twice the price. This is as opposed to paying for the same program that might be just as effective but they have no bond with that person.

That sums up the exact reason why we want to create engagement emails. It’s extremely powerful.