Boost Your Email Sales With This Gary Halbert Weird Opener Tactic
There are days when you sit down to write to your email list and your brain goes completely blank.
You know you need to send something that pushes your subscribers to take action and buy, but you are stuck on how to actually do it.
Going straight for the hard pitch rarely works.
Readers can smell a direct sales pitch from a mile away, and the moment they do, they tune out completely.
What you should do instead is disguise the sales message as the kind of content they already enjoy reading.
When you do this, they cannot resist reading it, and the sales pitch goes down easily, almost like hiding medicine in a toddler’s favorite food.
To pull this off, you can use something called the Gary Halbert weird opener tactic.
It is one of the simplest email persuasion triggers to master, so it is a great tool to keep in your back pocket whenever you are stuck.
The reason this works so well is that it does not start the way a normal marketing email would.
It starts with something genuinely interesting and different.
People naturally pay attention to things that are different, and that curiosity instantly drops their buying resistance.
Once you have them hooked and their guard is down, you simply transition into the meat of your marketing message.
Let me give you a quick example.
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I was writing an email for a client recently with the subject line: “The billion-dollar mistake this local business made.”
The opening lines read: “I hate bananas so much, but I love apples… This is one of the reasons why…”
And then the email continued.
If you just look at that subject line and the opening, you have no idea where the email is going or what it is trying to sell.
The only way to find out is to keep reading.
By the time you reach the end, the words have already pulled you in, and the selling happens naturally.
The weird opener grabs your attention with something unexpected and drags you right into the sales message.
Here is another example of how this looks, focusing just on the lead.
Imagine starting an email like this:
“In 1976, a man named Ronald Wayne sold his 10 percent stake in a brand new startup for just $800. Today, that startup is Apple, and those same shares would be worth well over three hundred billion dollars. That sounds like an absolute nightmare for him. But this is a perfect illustration of why patience and timing are everything.”
You then pivot and say that timing is not just important for investing, but also for whatever you are selling.
You can use a lead like this to sell a deadline offer, a crypto product, or even a weight loss and nutrition program where timing matters.
The easiest and most consistent way to use this tactic is to browse a news site, a forum, or even a gossip blog.
You look for a shocking, weird, or highly interesting story that can act as a pattern interrupt to grab your reader’s attention.
Then, you use your marketing skills to link that story back to your product, seamlessly plugging your link so you can get paid for the value you provide.
This is just one of many conversion triggers you can use in your emails. If you stick around, you will definitely pick up a few more.
