Fool-proof way to write banger sales emails
Stop trying to reinvent the wheel
Let me let you in on a little secret:
A good chunk of the best ads, hooks, and headlines you see on the internet today can be traced back to another hook, headline, or ad from years (sometimes decades) ago.
That’s because the best marketers understand something most people don’t:
No matter what you’re creating, you should NEVER start from scratch.
Instead, you want to find what’s already worked for other people and remix it.
Now, this doesn’t just work for paid ads. It works just as well for email.
In fact, one of my favorite ways to come up with sales email angles is to study legendary sales letters from OG direct response marketers, then use them as a framework to write my own sales emails.
I call this Sales Letter Remixing
Here’s how it works:
Find a legendary sales letter from one of the direct response greats (Gary Halbert, Gary Bencivenga, Joe Sugarman, etc.)
Reverse engineer the structure and the psychological principles behind it
Use that as the framework for your own sales email (while injecting your own style, offer, and audience, of course)
Pro tip: Share the sales letter you wanna remix with Claude and have it break down the structure and the principles that make it work for you.
Then write your email off that framework.
Why this works
There are 3 reasons I love this tactic:
It de-risks the email - the framework behind a legendary sales letter is already proven. You’re not gambling on a brand-new structure, you’re adapting one that’s already made people buy before.
Tactics change, but human psychology doesn’t - the triggers that made people buy back in the 1900s still make people buy today. So if you borrow the psychology, it’s very likely it will still work.
You’ll never run out of angles - there are decades of proven sales letters out there. Every time you need a fresh angle for a launch, you’ve got a nearly endless library to pull from and remix.
Now, this all sounds good on paper but let me give you a quick real life example.
How a Wall Street Journal sales letter became one of our best selling emails
Years ago, my biz partner Cole wrote a sales email for our flagship writing program at the time, Ship 30 for 30.
Now, he didn’t write this email from scratch. Instead, he modeled it off of one of the most famous sales letters of all time:
The Wall Street Journal’s “A Tale of Two Young Men.”
It instantly became one of our best-performing launch emails the first time we tested it.
And after that, it’s gone on to generate multiple six figures in revenue since.
So next time you’re staring at a blank doc trying to write a sales email, please don’t start from scratch.
Go find a sales letter that’s already printed sales, and make it your own.
The Prompt
And to make your life even easier, here’s a prompt to help you remix legendary sales letters into your own sales emails:
