With spam inces­santly inun­dat­ing our inboxes and people’s atten­tion spans con­stantly shrink­ing, some have claimed that email mar­ket­ing is on the way out.

I say “nonsense.”

In fact, it’s because of those very rea­sons that email mar­ket­ing is now stronger than ever before. I per­son­ally know of some mar­keters who have made lit­er­ally mil­lions of dol­lars with email mar­ket­ing alone in recent weeks.

I’m talk­ing about legit­i­mate, law-​​compliant, optin email.

Remem­ber, the most com­mon use of the Inter­net is still email — not instant mes­sen­g­ing, social net­work­ing, or brows­ing web­sites. It’s often the very first thing peo­ple do when they log onto the web.

Granted, the biggest stum­bling block is to increase your “open rate” (i.e., the per­cent­age of peo­ple who actu­ally open your emails). And to do so you first need to get your emails deliv­ered and over­come overzeal­ous spam fil­ters.

But once they do reach your read­ers’ inboxes, the most impor­tant step in get­ting your mes­sages through to your audi­ence is with good copy. And like a good head­line in sales copy, it all starts with the sub­ject line.

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My wife and I are shop­ping for a new home. We’re quite excited as one house has caught our eye, and we’re mak­ing an offer on it as I type this.

With the excite­ment comes a bit of trep­i­da­tion, how­ever, since we know we’ll have to start pack­ing, mak­ing mov­ing prepa­ra­tions and, of course, go fur­ni­ture shop­ping in order to fill some of the “extra space.” (Our new home is dou­ble the size of our cur­rent one.)

This reminds of the last time I went shop­ping for fur­ni­ture when I bought my pre­vi­ous house. Why? Because some­thing strange occurred that reminded me of the power of apply­ing pres­sure in copywriting.

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Take­away sell­ing, for the unini­ti­ated, is a way to limit the sup­ply of a prod­uct or ser­vice in some way to increase scarcity of an offer. Because it’s a proven fact that scarcity sells.

It’s that age­less law of sup­ply and demand. The less the sup­ply is, the greater the demand will be.

Peo­ple don’t know how much they want some­thing until it’s about to be taken away from them. As Jim Rohn once said, “With­out a sense of urgency, desire loses its value.”

Why? Because pro­cras­ti­na­tion is the biggest killer of sales — par­tic­u­larly online where the chances of a prospect stay­ing on or return­ing to a web­site (in order to think about buy­ing), in today’s click-​​happy world, are just as scarce.

It’s like walk­ing into a depart­ment store and you see a shirt you’re inter­ested in. Since there’s none in your size, you ask the sales clerrk if one is avail­able. The clerk goes into the back­room and emerges a few moments later, say­ing, “I found one in your size…

“… But it’s the only one we have left in stock.”

Now, how much more do you want that shirt?

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