I get weekly messages from people telling me about the amazing things that happen when they send a 9-word email, as I describe in the Email Mastery book.

Like from this UK plumber who sends an email asking his client list, “Have you had your boiler serviced yet this year?” – and books appointments as fast as they can take them.

I heard someone asking, “Are you still interested in coming to the workshop next week?” and getting flooded with last-minute attendees.

The cool thing about it is they come from all different kinds of businesses, and all get consistently great results.

Maybe 1 in 10 times, I hear about someone trying to use that same nine-word approach as a COLD email tactic and ending up disappointed because it didn’t work.

“You’re not supposed to use the 9-word email as a cold opener,” is what people conclude.

Really?

Let’s take a look at what usually happens when it fails to work:

Let’s take Matt, the marketer.

He is cold-emailing audiologists to sell them the idea of trying a 9-word email on their dead leads.

Matt sends that first 9-word email out. Something like, “Do you sell hearing aids?”

Because this is such a short, conversational message expecting a reply, Matt gets a lot of responses back.

The next message in the sequence he sends is something like this:

“Great! I’ve got this amazing lead generation system that will work wonders for your dead leads. You pay only $99 to try it, and if it doesn’t work, I give you your money back.”

And all Matt hears back is… crickets!

What happened?

The tone switched from being all cheese (the first email) into “whiskers mode” (the second email), and it immediately felt like trickery.

Matt felt like he tricked people into replying, and the audiologists were probably feeling tricked, too! The first email looked like it was from a potential customer that turned into a sales pitch.

I see this happening a lot.

“How do I reveal the whiskers?” is where people get stuck and face all sorts of friction.

The answer is you don’t reveal the whiskers. Make it all cheese.

The one time this 9-word email approach fails to work is when you use it as a quick tactic forgetting the principle it is built upon:

What would you do if you only got paid when your client gets the result?

Here’s what you need to remember:

Every person on every level of every business is 100% authorized to bring money into the business.

But only a very small percentage of those people are authorized to take money out of the business.

When you’re going in with an approach that feels like it will take money from them, the natural tendency of people is to deflect.

To protect the money.

They’ll do everything in their power to stop it from leaking out.

What you need to do instead is to start with their end result in mind. Make sure they are 100% winning before you ask for any money.

If the second email in the hearing aid example said:

“Great! I’ve got 5 people who would like to get hearing aids. Can I refer them to you?” it wouldn’t come across as trickery.

See the difference?

The end goal in the second example is a 100% win for the audiologists.

All Cheese.

No sales pitch, but all based on bringing money into their business.

Can you devise a similar “all cheese” offer and use it in your own 9-word email experiment?

My favorite thing to do is hatch evil schemes and apply the 8 profit activators to all kinds of businesses.

Big businesses, small businesses, professional services… I do it every week on my podcast show “More Cheese, fewer Whiskers.”

Check it out at MoreCheeseLessWhiskers.com

Maybe we can hatch some Evil Schemes for YOU.