Are you spending money on demographic profile data? Are you doing customer surveys? Are you creating customer avatars?

Have you ever found yourself wondering why people buy the things they do? Ever caught yourself driving down the street and asking yourself, "why did she buy that color, or that model of car?" Have you ever wondered why Baskin-Robbins has 31 flavors? (Or is it just me?)

Demographic and psychographic data is great. Customer surveys are helpful too. I use customer avatars all the time when writing my email copy because I send different types of emails to different types of customers.

But let's not get too technical. Let's just break everything down to it's simplest form. At the end of the day, every customer is a person; a human being. You can't get more basic than than.

​There are three fundamental rules that you need to know about sales and about people. Once you understand these three rules, then everything will fall into place. Your customer avatars will be easier to develop, and ideas for your email copy will really start to flow.

Rule #1: People dislike the idea of being sold

​Let's say you're in your front yard and you see a door-to-door salesman two houses down. What do you do? Do you run down to the curb and stand there anxiously waiting for him to come to you? C'mon -- be honest.

What you really do is you immediately find a "conveniently legitimate" reason to go inside the house and suddenly become too busy to answer the door.

I know this from experience. I used to be that door-to-door salesman. And speaking of honesty ... I'm also that person who hides in his house until the coast is clear.

People have an aversion to being sold. it's a perfectly natural human reaction. That's why nobody likes pushy, sales-y, gimmick-y emails. You're super-excited about your product. That's great. You want to be passionate. Passion sells. But don't be pushy. People don't like pushy salesmen.

Rule #2: People buy for emotional reasons

Does this rule surprise you? It surprised me when someone first told me.

I first learned this rule from a guest speaker in my Entrepreneurship class back when I was in Business School. He was an Angel Investor in startups who made his fortune selling enterprise accounting software that large corporations use.

After he made this statement, I thought about myself, and oh yeah – I am an emotional buyer.

But then I thought some more – wait a moment – this guy sold enterprise accounting software. How left-brained of a buyer can you get? So I raised my hand and asked him, “how does emotion come in when you’re selling something like accounting software?” He then told us his secret why he was so successful.

He said to me, “Manny, my Ideal Customer Profile is the company CFO. And the one thing you need to know about CFO’s is that they are highly motivated by FEAR – BLIND, SHEAR TERROR. If the ledger doesn't balance every quarter, then it's their necks on the line.”

And because he knew that, he knew how to connect with the decision makers at an emotional level. And his sales proved again and again how good he was a crafting his message.

He said that one of his most effective sales pitches started out something like this, "Wouldn't it be great to wake up in the morning at the end of the quarter and feel absolutely wonderful?"

We are all emotional beings -- it's what drives us. For every decision a person makes on a daily basis, there is always an emotional reason at its root. That's why your most effective emails are always those that have an emotional undertone.

Here's some examples:

Rule #3: People use logic to justify their buying decision AFTER they've made it

This Rule #3 is exactly what that Angel Investor told us right after telling us Rule #2. The secret to his success was his ability to blend Rule #2 and #3 seamlessly in his sales copy.

I can personally relate.

A few years back, my wife, my son, and I went back home to spend the holidays with my parents. My father picked us up at the airport in a brand new, shiny red and gold mini van. It was shiny red on the body with gold trim all around. Power seats, power cargo doors, a fold-down flat mini-screen to watch movies from the back seat, built-in buttons to open the garage door, you name it. Electric, power everything.

I asked my Dad, “What happened to your other minivan? Did you sell it?”

“Oh no,” he said, “We still have it.”

So here’s the story – he took their original minivan in to the dealership for routine service. While he was sitting in the waiting room in the service department, a salesman walked up to him and said, “Dr. Ju – since you’re just waiting why don’t you come over to the show room and take a look at our new models.”

My Dad said, “I’m not interested in buying a new minivan. I’m perfectly happy with the one I have.”

The salesman says, “Oh don’t worry – I’m not trying to sell you anything – it’s a slow day in the showroom and you’ve got time on your hands while you're waiting. Let’s just take a walk around.”

Well – one thing lead to another – and there you have it: my Dad picking me and my family up from the airport in a brand new, shiny red with gold trim minivan.

So I asked my Dad, “Why did you buy a new minivan when you already have one?”

And this former University professor gave me his “perfectly logic reason” why he bought a brand new, shiny red with gold trim minivan: “It’s because your mother needs heated seats to keep her warm in the cold winters.”

And you know what my mother said when I asked her? “First I heard of it.”

Your emails should always give your a reader a "logical" reason why making the emotional decision to buy your product was (past tense) the right decision. The best way to spoon-feed that logical reason is to provide proof of the value of your product. Did you win any awards? Have you been voted the "Best of"? Do you have customer testimonials that you can add to your email? Do you have a patent or a trademark? Do you have any statistics about the success of your product? ("Last year, we helped our clients get back $435,709 in tax rebates from the Federal government."). Even if you don't have any statistics about your own business, you can always include statistics about your industry ("With an average ROI of 4300%, email marketing is the top performing marketing channel worldwide".).


Well there you have it. These are the 3 fundamental rules you need to know a about your sales and about your customers.

​​ 1) Don't be pushy. Don't be sale-y. That's a big turn off.

2) Think about who you're writing your email to, and what's that person's emotional state.

3) Give logical proof why making the (emotional) decision to buy was the right choice to make.