How To Write A Polite Email Asking For Something

byLazyblogger

6.9K followers

6 years ago

When you are building a business, learning how to write a polite email is a skill you will have to develop. I hope you are doing email marketing as one way to create a profitable income for your business. You are always going to walk a fine line between providing useful information and selling.

You really cannot make money online with email marketing if you do not sell at some point. The trick is to establish yourself as a helpful partner that is there for your list to access.

This means you need the skills to write a polite email asking for something back from them in return after you have already given something to them.

How do you do that?

Avoid Begging

For starters, you want to avoid coming across like you are begging. Have you ever sent or received an email that feels like this...…

Please, buy my stuff, please, please, please. This is not being polite, but it is very annoying!

Begging is a bad image to project in any aspect of your business, but it is particularly so with email marketing. You may be at a point right now in your business where you really need someone to just buy something from you.

This is the worst image you can project. It may make you feel better to open up and reveal that things are not going great right now, but NEVER do that.

In the long run, always project an image of having a successful business. When you email someone they need to see that things are great, they have never been better.

People love to be associated with a winner. They will buy from you more when you project a position of strength as opposed to a position of weakness.

WIIFM Radio

What's in it for me? Put the emphasis on them and not yourself.

What's in it for me is not what you should be thinking. What's in it for me is best viewed when you put yourself in their shoes.

Your email will seem very polite to them when they think you have their best interest at heart. You cannot do this when every sentence has the words I and me in them.

Instead, replace them with you and yours. There is a skill to this and you may even want to look at taking an email writing course if your goal is to make a lot of money with email marketing.

One such course can be found at American Writers & Artists Inc. Don't let the $497 scare you away. Sometimes they run specials on this as well. https://www.awai.com/email/p/

Udemy is another source for courses on various subjects. Check out "Writing Effective Business Emails" here: https://www.udemy.com/writing-effective-business-emails/

Sell Benefits

When you are writing an email that is going to ask for something, you need to focus on benefits. Do you know the difference between benefits and features?

A feature is what a product has, while the benefit is what a product does specifically for you. Let me give you an example.

I promote Wealthy Affiliate as my number one income source. I think it is a great product that anyone who is trying to make money online can benefit from.

One feature of Wealthy Affiliate is their free 10-day training course on affiliate marketing. The benefit to you is after taking this training course you will be able to start making money online as an affiliate marketing.

Features are more factual where benefits are more emotional. When you write an email that you’re trying to get somebody to do something you want, focus more on benefits because that is the emotional side of what somebody is reading. Laying out features is always good, but you want to tie those back to benefits if you’re going to ask them to do something.

Some of us that grew up in the old days of selling remember FAB selling. Features, advantages, benefits.

Advantages are what the feature does. So when you’re looking at FAB, you are looking at a feature of a product or service, an advantage of what that feature does, and a benefit showing exactly how it will benefit them.

Make sense?

Anticipate Objections

Professional closers understand one thing better than the rest of us. They anticipate objections and deal with them in their presentation so they do not have to deal with them when they are closing the sale.

You can do the same thing when writing a polite email you are going to ask for something in! This is easier to do when you view things through the eyes of your reader.

By putting the emphasis on them, and not yourself, you can begin to anticipate what kind of objections they may have to what you’re going to ask them for. This gives you the chance to deal with those in the body of your email if you choose to do so.

Sometimes a simple question followed by a response that includes a benefit will overcome that objection. When you deal with objections now you avoid dealing with them later.

Conclusion

I personally do not do hardcore selling in emails I send out. Many times your emails are going to be more pre-selling in nature.

What you may be asking somebody to do is just click on the link that takes them to a blog post where you’ve gone into detail on something that you’re selling.

I like using emails as a click-bait because it is easier to inject them into an email series. This way you are not asking somebody for something before you have already provided them value or a gift first.

This could be the free ebook or report you gave them when they join your list. It should also be all of the free content you are giving and not asking for anything yet. Taking this attitude helps you put the emphasis on them until you feel they are ready for what you want to politely ask of them!

As always, please be kind to add your take on this by leaving a comment below.