When it comes to email marketing, here’s what doesn’t work… spam. In fact, because of this, many businesses fail to ever even consider email marketing. They don’t want to be labeled as another spammer.

And this is for good reason: Spam sucks! And in case you are wondering, newsletters suck too. Most newsletters are simply a prettied-up version of spam. After all, you can dress up a prostitute in the finest of clothes, but at the end of the day she (he) is still a prostitute.

Yet, there is a form of behavioral email marketing that is highly effective. It’s emails written using the linear progression technique.

This is how it works:

The subject line of the email is written to strike curiosity. It’s sole objective is to build enough interest, desire and curiosity that the reader elects to open the email. The subject line must be consistent with the email content itself (don’t deceive the reader – duh!), but needs to strike a chord of curiosity.

The first sentence in the email’s body is written to create a strong desire for the reader to read the second line. The second line is written to build a strong desire to read the third line and so forth. The structure of having each sentence, in fact every word, encourage the reading of the next is where the term “linear progression copy writing” came from.

We are not done yet! While the first 2 steps, executed well, will have your subscribers reading through your entire email there will be no benefit to you or them if there is no call to action. So, the second purpose to each sentence is to build a significant desire to follow the call to action. Calls to action may include clicking through a link or replying to your email. But often the call to action is simply creating a strong emotion in your reader (perhaps appreciation, surprise, reciprocity).

And this brings us to the final stage of liner progression email copy… each email your write, should leave a strong interest to read the next email you send. You do this by bringing value consistently. The vast majority of your emails give, give, and give some more. This brings about appreciation and reciprocity (see step 3), and the desire to receive more from you.