Never write an email without THIS
This is how you compete with billion-dollar companies
This week’s series is written by Parker Worth—email copywriter and creator of Email 365. He helps entrepreneurs build an email list that earns $2–$5 per subscriber, every single month.
Today’s lesson is the difference between emails that sell...
And emails that make people hit unsubscribe faster than a Karen denied her coupon code.
It comes down to one word:
Emotion.
See, your reader is not some rational little calculator reading your email like: "Hmm yes, a very logical point about ROI and email automation. I shall consider this further."
Nope.
Your reader is a lizard-brain animal looking for food, threat, or dopamine.
If your email doesn’t make them feel something?
You’ve already lost.
The #1 shift that changed everything for me
I used to send emails that sounded like white papers.
And guess what?
No sales. No replies. Just dead air.
Then I started studying which emails gave me the most clicks and replies. I realized the most popular ones pointed to my readers pain points. So, I shifted my messaging with hyper focus. I told stories about people who had those problems—and the consequences of not solving them.
That’s when everything changed.
My small list of 800 people created over $18,000 in income.
And I realized was just sending emotional triggers disguised as emails.
(This is how you can stand out — even against brands with billion dollar budgets.)
So how do you decide what to write about?
Here’s your cheat code:
What is your reader struggling with?
Not in theory. Today. Right now.
Think about their emotional hot buttons. The stuff that lights up their caveman brain and makes them react.
Pick one problem and write about that.
Here are a 5 emotional pains to get you thinking:
Violations of values (They were lied to. Scammed. Ghosted.)
Disrespect (They were ignored, overlooked, underestimated)
Unfairness (They did the right thing… and still lost)
Loss of control (Chaos. Overwhelm. Tech headaches.)
Time wasted (Spinning wheels. Getting nowhere fast.)
But use these like salt.
Salt makes the steak better.
Too much? You ruin the whole meal.
Here’s your Pain Finder prompt:
Drop this into ChatGPT or Claude:
Act like an emotional copywriting strategist.
My audience is [INSERT YOUR AUDIENCE].
Give me a list of 10 painful problems they’re facing right now, written in their own voice.
Then, for each one, give me 3 ways to agitate the problem and 1 emotional consequence they’re secretly afraid of.
Use this as your source material for every email you write.
One last thing
Your job isn’t to be inspirational.
It’s to be useful.
And the most useful thing you can do? Help someone finally name the thing they’ve been feeling—but couldn’t articulate.
Once you do that?
They’ll trust you to help them solve it.
Catch ya tomorrow,
Parker
P.S. If you want to find your target audience’s unfiltered pain points—there’s a better way.
I put together a 4-step Reddit research method that shows you how to scrape comment threads, feed them into ChatGPT, and extract your audience’s biggest frustrations.
It’s like stealing a crystal ball from the internet’s most brutally honest forum.
👉 Click here for the Reddit research method.
However you come up with your list of pain points, make sure you save it—we’ll use one tomorrow to write your first 5-minute email.