3 Things That Make People Buy From Email 📚

June was my brand's best revenue month yet, and it came down to one thing: disgustingly good emails. And it's way simpler than you think.

Most people treat email like a megaphone, blast the whole catalog, hope someone buys. The brands that actually make money treat it like a doorway. Here are the three rules I follow, and a prompt to write an email that follows all three.

Your email has exactly one job: get them to your website. That's it. The email doesn't close the sale, your site does. So stop trying to cram the entire pitch, the reviews, the specs, and the guarantee into the inbox.

Keep it short. Make them curious. Give them one clear reason to tap through, and let the website do the heavy lifting. A curious click beats a fully-informed scroll-past every single time. If your email reads like a landing page, it's too long.

When you put thirty products in one email, you don't give people thirty reasons to buy. You give them thirty tiny decisions, and a confused mind does nothing. They browse for four seconds and leave.

So pick one. One item, or one collection, that pulls people in emotionally. Build the entire email around that single hero and let it carry them to your site. Once they're on the site, they'll find the rest on their own. The email's job was just to open the door with your strongest thing.

People decide whether they trust you in about one second, and that decision is almost entirely visual. A beautiful, on-brand email gets read. A clunky one gets deleted before a single word lands, no matter how good the copy is.

Design used to be the hard part, slow, expensive, and dependent on a designer. That's the piece that changed for me. The team at Flodesk gave me early access to Flodesk Studio, and the emails came out looking genuinely incredible. I dropped in everything about my brand, described what I wanted, and it built perfectly on-brand emails in a few seconds. It's actually powered by Claude under the hood, and every design starts from real work by professional designers, so it never has that generic AI look.

It won't replace your creativity, it just accelerates it. I built the designs for our entire summer sale in about ten minutes, then exported clean HTML into the tools I already use. That's the whole unlock: you keep the taste and the strategy, and hand off the slow part.

Once those three rules are second nature, these are the fundamentals underneath them. None are flashy. All of them quietly decide whether your emails get seen, opened, and clicked.

• Win the open before you win the click. None of this matters if the email never gets opened. Keep your subject line short, under about 40 characters so it survives on a phone, and treat the preview text as a second line that adds to the subject instead of repeating it. And stop grading yourself on open rate. Apple hides real opens now, so watch your clicks. That is the honest number.
• Let your automations sell while you sleep. The highest-earning emails are the ones you set up once and never touch again. A simple welcome email for new subscribers and an abandoned-cart email for the people who almost checked out are the two that pay you back the most, dollar for dollar. Set them up before you plan a single campaign.
• Email the people who actually want it. Blasting your whole list every time quietly kills you. Inbox providers watch who opens and who ignores you, and too many dead contacts can send you to spam for everyone. Email your engaged people more, let the cold ones go, and make unsubscribing easy. A smaller list that opens beats a huge one that does not.
• Send from a real human. A "no-reply" address tells people you do not want to hear back. Send from your name, use a reply-to inbox you actually read, and let people respond. Replies are one of the strongest signals to Gmail that you are real and worth delivering, and they build the relationship that makes the next sale easy.
• Design for the thumb. Almost everyone reads on their phone, so build for that first. One column, big readable text, and one fat button they can tap without zooming. Before you send, open the test on your own phone. If you would not tap it, neither will they.

Here's the prompt I use to draft a hero email that follows all three rules. Paste it into Claude (or Flodesk Studio for the design), fill in the brackets, and it writes the copy that sells the click.

You are my email copywriter. Write a short, high-converting marketing email whose ONLY job is to get the reader to click through to my website. Do not try to close the sale in the email.My brand:- What I sell: [product / category]
- Brand voice in 3 words: [e.g. warm, bold, playful]
- Who's reading: [customer type]The ONE hero for this email:- The single product or collection this email is built around: [name it]
- Why someone wants it emotionally (not the features, the feeling): [fill in]
- The offer or reason to act now, if any: [sale / new drop / restock / none]

Rules, follow all of them:
1. Sell the CLICK, not the product. Build curiosity and desire, then send them to the site to learn more. Never dump specs, reviews, or the full pitch into the email.
2. One hero only. Do not mention other products. Everything serves the single hero above.
3. Keep it tight: a scroll-stopping subject line, a preview line, 3 to 5 short lines of body, and one clear call-to-action button label. No walls of text.
4. Match my brand voice exactly. No corporate filler, no hype words like "unlock" or "elevate," no em dashes.
5. Make them feel something before you ask for the click.

Give me:
- 3 subject line options (different angles: curiosity, benefit, urgency) with a preview line for each
- The full email body for my favorite direction
- 2 button label options
- One sentence on what the landing page should show first so the click converts

Then ask me the one question that would make this email hit harder, and revise.