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Every issue of this newsletter gives you the exact systems, strategies, and principles I’ve used to generate 8 figures (almost entirely) with email marketing. So you can build your own systems that will carry you through the next algorithm change or recession. This is what actually works.

About three years into running my email list, I made a discovery that changed how I write every single email.

I was going through my stats one afternoon — open rates, click rates, unsubscribes — and I noticed something strange. One particular email had a click rate almost four times higher than anything else I'd sent that month, and I couldn't figure out why. The subject line was nothing special and the offer was exactly the same as a dozen others I'd sent that quarter. Same list, same audience, same product. Completely different result.

So I went back and read it.

I had written it differently. Not intentionally — I was tired that day, pressed for time, and I just wrote it the way I'd talk to a friend. I skipped the formality, skipped the setup, and got straight to the point. I even told a story about a mistake I'd made that week, a real one, not a flattering one. The kind of thing most marketers carefully edit out before they hit send, because they're afraid of looking like they don't have it all figured out.

That email made more money than anything I'd sent in the previous two months, and I've been chasing that feeling ever since.

Here's what most people get wrong about email marketing. They treat their list like an audience, so they write broadcasts instead of conversations. They fill their emails with phrases like "as I mentioned in last week's email" and "stay tuned for more updates" and "I'm so excited to share this with you" — language that sounds exactly like a press release and nothing like a person. And then they wonder why open rates are falling, why click rates feel stuck, why the list isn't moving the way it used to.

The medium isn't broken. The relationship is.

Before we go any further…

Andrew Lock was a keynote speaker and TV producer with 25 years in the business when Covid canceled every booking he had.

With nothing but time on his hands, he went looking for a way to make his savings work harder than the half percent his bank was paying him.

What he found had nothing to do with guessing which coin would go up next. Every time someone swaps one currency for another on certain platforms, a small fee gets collected.

Andrew figured out how to sit on the receiving end of those fees, getting paid from transaction activity whether markets were going up, down, or completely flat.

He woke up to $8.47 the morning after his first setup. Then it happened again the next day and the next. He's personally averaged around 52% in gains per year - 

And now he’s showing other people how it’s done.

Three of his students are in their 80s and none of them had any crypto experience before they started.

This Thursday at 2pm EST, Andrew is hosting a free live training showing you exactly how this works.

Now, as I was saying…

Your subscribers don't want a broadcast. They want a letter. That distinction matters more than any tactic you'll ever learn. A tactic gets you a temporary lift in clicks, but writing like a real person builds something that earns you trust and referrals and repeat buyers for years, from the same people who would have quietly unsubscribed from a less personal list.

When I look at the emails that have generated the most revenue in my business over the past decade, almost none of them are the ones I labored over — the slick ones, the perfectly structured ones, the ones where I sat down specifically to write something great and spent an hour tweaking the subject line. Those emails rarely perform the way I expect them to. The high performers are almost always the ones where I wrote fast, wrote honestly, and wrote like I was talking to one specific person sitting across from me at a table.

There's a reason for that.

Email is an intimate medium. Someone gave you their address — which is still, despite everything, a relatively private thing — and they're reading you in their inbox, which is where they also talk to their mother and their accountant and their doctor. You show up in that space writing like a brochure, and then you wonder why they don't respond. You wonder why nobody replies. You wonder why a list of ten thousand people can feel like you're shouting into an empty room.

Intimacy cannot be faked, and readers feel its absence immediately.

I've watched a lot of email marketers chase the wrong things. Better subject lines, higher deliverability scores, more sophisticated segmentation, fancier automations. All of that has its place, but none of it fixes the core problem, which is that most email marketers have never made a genuine attempt to actually connect with the person on the other end of the message. They optimize everything except the one thing that matters most, which is whether the person reading actually feels like a human wrote this for them specifically.

The question I get asked most often is some version of: "What should I write about?" My answer is always the same. Write about what's actually happening in your life and your business, filtered through what's useful for your reader. A lesson you learned this week, a mistake you made, a conversation that changed how you think about something, an observation you made while sitting in a café or driving your kid to football practice. Real, specific, dated material that could only have come from you and nobody else.

I once sent an email about a conversation I had at a petrol station in Bulgaria with a man who was completely convinced that AI was going to put everyone out of work by Christmas. Just a random exchange, five minutes long, that I happened to remember on my drive home. That email got more replies than anything I'd sent in six months. People argued with me, agreed with me, and sent me their own versions of that exact same conversation. One guy in the UK said he'd had the identical exchange with his brother-in-law the previous weekend. A woman in Australia wrote three paragraphs about a similar argument she'd had with her boss.

That's what email can do when you let it breathe. That's the thing you're leaving on the table every time you sit down to write something "professional."

The people who build real businesses on email — lists that function as actual income-generating assets year after year rather than vanity metrics that look good in a dashboard — are the ones who figured out that the goal is to sound like themselves, consistently, issue after issue, until the reader feels like they genuinely know you. That takes time. It takes showing up and being honest even when it would be easier to be polished. But that relationship, once built, is what makes someone buy, and then buy again, and then forward your email to a friend with a note that says "you have to read this guy."

No subject line trick in the world creates that.

So before you write your next email, ask yourself one honest question: would I actually say this to a friend? If the answer is no — if it sounds too managed, too corporate, too carefully assembled to protect your image — start over and write it the way you'd actually say it.

That's the whole secret. It really is that simple, and that difficult.

P.S. Want to know why I care so much about emails? I broke it down on this podcast episode. Listen, and you'll see why it should matter to you, too.