How to brand your inbox, build a list of raving fans, and sell something every single day
Over $200 million in email sales : for me and my customers
Write every EPIC email with BNSN : bnsn.aiWhat's Inside
Start Here
The origin of EPIC
This system did not start as a clever product idea. It started 13 years ago with a book I wrote called Fit Over 40, and a hard lesson I never forgot: a good product that nobody markets goes straight to the graveyard with all the other good products.
I knew Fit Over 40 was good. I had no idea how to sell it. So I paid out 50% of my royalties to an A-list copywriter just to write the emails and the sales page. Half. If you think great copy is cheap, think again. That was also the best money I have ever spent, because more than 90% of the sales came directly from the emails. Not the sales page. Not the ads. The emails.
That tipped me off to something I have built a career on since: email is the most important thing you send, because it is the one thing you send every day. I went and learned to write it from the top down... sales pages, then the video sales letter, then the email sequences that tie it all together. Along the way, the emails I have written, for myself and for my customers, have done over $200 million in sales. Email has been the engine under all of it.
For seven years I collected, with permission, the best emails and sequences from the A-list marketers I wrote for. I broke them down, found the structure underneath, and turned that structure into a system anyone can run. That system is EPIC.
EPIC stands for the four kinds of email that build a business: Engage, Promote, Inspire, and Consume. Before we get to those four, you have to lay the foundation underneath them, which is inbox branding: the art of being the one sender your prospect actually wants to open. That foundation is what this opening section is about.
This works whether you are a marketer, a content creator, an entrepreneur building rapport, or a local business owner who wants to stand out from a field that mostly ignores email entirely. If you send email to sell anything or to engage anyone, you are in the right place.
How BNSN fits
Everything you are about to learn is wired into BNSN. BNSN is trained on the EPIC system, so once you understand the moves in this book, you can have BNSN write them for you... inbox-branded subject lines, the engagement openers, the trademarked terms, the persuasion triggers, full sequences. Read this to understand the why. Lean on BNSN for the how, at speed.
Chapter One
Inbox branding
Let's start with money, because email has the highest return on investment of any marketing you will do. Done right, a dollar spent on email can return 40. Nearly double any other channel online. The catch is in those two words: done right.
Most marketers make the same handful of mistakes. They email without vision, so there is no sense of where the relationship is going. They never build trust. And they email too rarely, terrified that the list will unsubscribe or feel bothered. Your list wants to hear from you more than you think. The fear of sending is costing you far more than the occasional unsubscribe ever will.
Trust is your single greatest asset in the inbox, and it is about to matter even more. As attention keeps fracturing and filters keep tightening, the senders who have not earned trust simply stop getting seen. Think of it as an extinction event for lazy email. You avoid extinction one way: by building genuine trust, email after email, until opening your message is a reflex.
Your list will love you if you do three things before you ever ask for the sale: you educate, you inspire, and you remind. You will absolutely promote too. You just earn the right to, inside that context.
The average person gets around 172 emails a day. Picture how many you deleted today without opening a single one. That reflex... delete, delete, delete... is what your email is up against. The way through is what I call your inbox brand.
Your inbox brand is the experience a prospect has when they see and read your email. It starts the instant they spot your name and your subject line, before a word of the body is read. Experience is the most underrated force in marketing. Starbucks did not win on coffee, it won by selling an experience. CrossFit is glorified circuit training, and its members treat it like a religion, because the experience towers over an ordinary gym. You can build that same pull in the inbox, even with no storefront at all.
The key to creating that experience is what I call targeted intrigue. It is what cuts through inbox white noise, and it works by opening the psychological door of persuasion through focus. If you have ever prayed or meditated, you know the state where everything fades and your attention narrows to one thing. We draw that same focus to specific words that spark emotion, and emotion leads to action... an open, a click, a purchase.
Targeted intrigue captivates, builds curiosity, and keeps subscribers tuned in for years. People tuned in for years are people buying for years. You build it with three tools we will keep returning to: trademarking, persuasion triggers, and a little storytelling. You will not write much. A few well-chosen words do most of the work.
How BNSN fits
Inbox branding is a pattern, and patterns are exactly what BNSN executes. Hand it your offer and your market, and it will generate name-plus-subject-line combinations engineered for the open, then carry that same branded voice through the whole sequence.
Chapter Two
Own the words, own the market
Trademarking has nothing to do with the patent office. It means taking a problem, a solution, or a concept that already exists and restating it with a term you coin... a clever new label that becomes yours.
In the 1970s Budweiser started calling their beer "Beechwood Aged." Most beers are. They were simply the first to name it out loud, and those two words earned them billions, because once you name it and nobody else does, you become the only place to get it by default. You never have to claim it. The naming does the claiming for you.
You will trademark three things: your primary cause, your unique mechanism, and your offer name.
The primary cause is the mechanism behind your customer's problem. Not the problem itself, the thing underneath it. If people are gaining weight, the lazy version is "you're gaining weight." The trademarked version names the mechanism: I call mine "metabolic adaptation." It makes someone stop and wonder what it is, and from then on it is linked only to me, because I am the only one using it.
Say your reader cannot figure out what to write next. Watch what naming it does:
Subject: Blank Page Paralysis... the email marketing killer
The reader has never seen that phrase, so curiosity opens the loop. Then: "You may be suffering from what experts call blank page paralysis." Notice "may." We never say you do have a problem, we say you may. It opens the loop instead of arguing with the reader.
A primary cause can carry an entire campaign. Two words become the seed of a whole email series, an ad, even a sales letter.
Your unique mechanism is the thing that makes your product work... the secret engine behind it. It is never the product's name. When you market the mechanism instead of the product name, you market away from hype and toward benefit, and since you are the only one with that named mechanism, you become the only one they buy from.
Subject: A mysterious tip for getting your emails opened
Gift-wrapped, not a clear box. Inside: "Something I call persuasion triggers." The label is what makes it land. "N.L.P. terms that get good emotional response" is clumsy and forgettable. "Persuasion triggers" is a brand.
To coin a mechanism term, go to a thesaurus and type the feeling or idea underneath it, then combine two or three words into something that sounds like a discovery. "Caloric staggering," "rotational refeeding," "inbox branding"... each one makes a reader stop and wonder what it is, and from then on it points back to you.
The title should say it all. Never make a prospect guess what you sell. Fit Over 40 tells you exactly what it is. Open Click Buy tells you it is about email. Clever is fine, obvious is better... lean toward obvious. A client once had a book called Scaling The Mountain, with a mountain on the cover, and it was about her Olympic swimming career. Nobody could tell what it was. When you can, run three candidate titles as cheap test ads and let the clicks pick the winner, because clicks are exactly what the title has to earn on a shelf or a search page.
How BNSN fits
Coining terms is one of the highest-leverage things BNSN does. Give it your offer and BNSN will generate primary-cause names, unique-mechanism names, and offer-name options... then build the emails that drill each one in until it belongs to you.
Chapter Three
The four doors to the buying brain
Your prospect has a buying brain, and persuasion triggers are the words that unlock it. Buying does not only mean reaching for a credit card. It means buying into you, your ideas, your way of seeing things. There are four doors: wants, needs, fears, and actions.
The first question a prospect asks is "what do I want?" But the want gets stronger when you widen it: who that I look up to also wants this, and who in my life wants this for me? Phrase the want as a question to build intrigue rather than stating it flat. "How does this build your buyer's list so fast?" presupposes that it does, while sounding like curiosity instead of a claim.
Needs sound like wants and are nothing alike. If your partner says "let's go to Hawaii," the want is the trip. The need underneath is "I want to reconnect, I want time alone with you." Needs are the why under the what, and you have to speak to the why.
"If you, or someone you love, is suffering from lousy sales..."
"Someone you love" fires two of the deepest needs at once: love itself, and the drive to protect. The conscious mind reads a sentence. The subconscious reads the code underneath it.
Around 75% of human motivation is driven by fear. Most decisions are made in the primal brain and then justified by the rational one. We tell ourselves we bought the SUV because the family needs it, while the lizard brain quietly wanted the rims. So speak to the fears your prospect already knows, then name a fear they should have but do not.
"Email the traditional way can be brutal."
"Brutal" is chosen on purpose... it is one of the words we fear most. Then come the known fears (subscribers not opening, sales dropping) and one they had not considered: "you can end up worse off than where you started." You surface the hidden fear, then you relieve it.
Always validate a fear before you resolve it. A prospect whose fear you brush past reacts exactly like a partner whose worry you wave away. Honor the fear, then point to the way out.
The action trigger does two jobs: it moves the sale, and it resolves the tension you built through wants, needs, and fears. Think of a piece of music that stops on the second-to-last chord and refuses to resolve. You ache for the final note. A call to action is that final note. Every click even delivers a small hit of dopamine, so if you have something genuinely good to offer, you owe it to your reader to give them something worth clicking.
Make calls to action specific, and lean on command words. "Look" pulls the eye on its own. Pair it up... "look and click here," "see more here," "hop on over and check out what's on this page." And "check out" is doing quiet double duty: checking out is exactly the transaction you want. None of this is trickery. With a product people genuinely need, this is simply the clearest way to help them take the step they already want to take.
How BNSN fits
Wants, needs, fears, and action triggers are patterns BNSN applies on demand. Tell it the emotion you are aiming for and it writes the lines... the want framed as a question, the need under the want, the fear named and relieved, the command-driven call to action that resolves it all.
Chapter Four : E is for Engage
The three engagement emails
Now the system itself. EPIC stands for the four kinds of email that exist: Engage, Promote, Inspire, and Consume. Most emails blend several of these at once... a promotional email opens with engagement, a content email carries inspiration. Only one type stands alone, and we will get to it last. We start with the E.
Engagement does one job: it builds rapport. Write this down and keep it where you can see it. Your job is to make your prospect feel completely understood. That is the entire definition of rapport. Engagement also reminds people why they are on your list in the first place, because people forget. Life gets in the way. So you keep reminding them, gently, that they are in the right place.
There are three engagement emails, and the difference between them is simply how warm the reader already is.
Use this with someone who just opted in or has been around 30 days or less. The tool is what I call duality inquisition: you ask, rather than tell, and you swing from a worry to a relief inside two sentences.
"Are your emails being opened... still a concern for you?"
That first line touches the fear and earns a nod. Then: "How would you like to discover a tip for getting them opened almost immediately?" Now you have swung to relief, and you have a yes before the body even starts. You asked. You never declared their problem for them.
Use this at 30 to 90 days, when someone is on the list but has not bought. This is the "I feel it too" email. You build rapport by sharing your own journey or asking about theirs.
"What's up, overwhelm... we both know that feeling all too well"
"We both know" is inclusion. "You're not a quitter, and the fact that you opened this proves it" is a declaration almost nobody argues with. You put the feeling on yourself first, and the reader nods along.
Use this for anyone who has not opened in 90 days or more, which is a huge slice of most lists. Handled right, these can pull 20 to 25% open rates from people who looked gone. Two ways to do it. The first is the nine-word email, made famous by Dean Jackson: subject line is just the reader's first name (or the word "question"), body is a single question like "Are you still interested in getting your blood sugar under control?" Plan to reply by hand, because real human replies are the whole point... an autoresponder firing a pitch at someone who just shared bad news is how you look heartless. The second is a softer "are you okay?" note that swings from genuine care to a small "here's what you missed" hook, which you can automate.
How BNSN fits
Tell BNSN where a reader sits... brand-new, warming, or cold for 90-plus days... and it writes the matching engagement email: the duality-inquisition opener, the "I feel it too" rapport builder, or the nine-word resurrection email, ready to send.
Chapter Five : P is for Promote
The three promotional emails
Selling is not the dirty part of the job, it is the kind part. Nobody likes to be sold, and everybody loves to buy. Every purchase you have ever made happened because, somewhere along the line, someone sold you on wanting it. You owe it to your customer to sell as well as you can, because people want to change and stay stuck in their habits. A good offer, sold well, is how you break the habit for them.
There is a line between coercion and compelling. Coercion lies, fakes the numbers, and strong-arms. Compelling makes a case: here is the problem, here is why my answer beats the others, here is how your life changes for the better. Make that case with a genuinely good product and you can, and should, sell hard... just not every time.
Keep the 10-80-10 law in mind. The top 10% of your list buys almost anything you offer. The middle 80% need to be inspired into the sale. The bottom 10% never buy, so write them off kindly and still give them good content. That shapes the three promotional emails.
You spell the whole offer out inside the email. This works on the hangers-on at the bottom of the 80%, the ones who need a nudge off the high board. Hard does not mean fake pressure or used-car deadlines. It means clarity and conviction, and genuine scarcity only when it is true.
"Do not open if you're alone"
An intrigue subject line, then escalating stakes: "what I recently figured out chilled me to the bone... you're less safe in your marketing than you think." You tighten the screws by showing why this matters, not by chanting "buy now." Then you lay out the offer plainly.
This is where most of your real money lives, because it converts the 80%. You build a case in three beats: question the affirmative ("is this still something you want?" earns a yes), dimensionalize the problem (paint what life looks like if it goes unsolved), then provide the answer. It points to a sales page, a VSL, or a webinar, and it can run often.
Lead with heavy, genuinely useful content, then add the pitch as an afterthought... usually a P.S. promo. The P.S. earns its keep, because after the subject line and the headline, the P.S. is the next thing most people read. They scroll straight to it.
"P.S. If you want to go a step further, pick up [your offer] here"
All the value sits up top. The ask is light and sits at the bottom where the eye lands. Lead with "remember to" rather than "don't forget," because remember is a positive command.
How BNSN fits
Tell BNSN which slice you are writing to and it picks the gear: a clean hard-sell that lays out the offer, an inspire-and-sell that questions-dimensionalizes-answers, or a content-first soft sell with a P.S. promo... all built on ethical persuasion, not hype.
Chapter Six : I is for Inspire
The three inspirational emails
Content is the I, and content is king for trust. You can mail every day, even twice a day, as long as you inspire while you do it. One rule never bends: never send a content email without a call to action, even if it is only a P.S. A great content piece with nowhere to go throws money away, and it frustrates the reader who finally gets it and finds no door to walk through.
Inspiration builds what I call click trust, and it comes in three forms.
Anchor the content to your reader's passions and pains... the wants and needs on one side, the fears on the other. Genuine scarcity is one of the strongest ways to inspire action, as long as it is true. A clean version that keeps your price intact: offer a time-limited bonus that gets removed if they do not act. People hate losing a thing they have not even claimed yet, the same way nobody wants the leather seats swapped back to cloth.
Your reader often does not believe they can do it. They have tried before and been let down. So hand them the belief back. Shift into "we," because not being alone is a need, not a want.
"A gentle reminder: you are more capable than you think"
"We all need reminding that we're not alone. We're better than we believe, and we really can do this." When the reader hears you say "we can," the subconscious reads it as "he did it, and he thinks I can too."
Tell your before-and-after, and tell it often. Share customer case studies ("here's why Linda did so well, and she's a lot like you"). Borrow inspiration from people your reader admires, even when the story has nothing to do with your offer. Story is how you become relatable... a few steps ahead, never so far ahead that the reader cannot picture standing where you stand.
How BNSN fits
Give BNSN your wins, your origin story, or a customer result, and it builds the inspirational email around it... action, capability, or story... and never lets it go out without a call to action attached.
Chapter Seven : C is for Consume
The three consumption emails
Consumption emails go only to customers, and they are the most overlooked money in the business. They lift customer retention by around 180%, push profit close to 2 times normal, and your customer list is worth roughly 8 times your prospect list. People who already bought are the easiest people to sell to, and they usually want something else.
Consumption emails get buyers to actually use what they bought, reassure them they chose well, and turn them into your sales force. Three types.
Welcome the new customer, then give them a strange first step instead of the usual "turn to page 5." The legendary Gary Halbert once told buyers to put a pebble in their pocket for 7 days and never explained why. The pebble made them think about the product for a week. Odd beats obvious, because odd gets remembered.
"You hit rock bottom... and you made the wise decision to fix it"
"Rock bottom" and "wise decision" sit in one breath, which links the purchase to escaping the pain. Then a weird first step that earns curiosity, followed by the reason it works.
Sell your existing customer the upsell they passed on, framed with zero pressure. Earnings here run around 8 times what cold traffic returns.
Subject: "[Your name], just checking in"
First, make sure they got in okay. Then: "I noticed you didn't add [the upgrade]. No big deal, ordering anything new can be nerve-wracking, and if you're like me you just wanted to get started. So here's your second chance." Everybody loves a second chance, which is exactly why you name it one.
This is how raving fans become your best salespeople. Happy customers will spread the word, they just need to be asked and reminded, because people get busy.
"Would you forward this to a friend who wants to succeed alongside you?"
"Succeed alongside you" presupposes their success and taps the need for community. Gentle words, but the nail goes all the way in.
How BNSN fits
BNSN writes the full post-purchase sequence... the weird-first-step welcome, the second-chance upsell, and the referral ask... so the revenue most marketers leave sitting on the table gets collected automatically.
That is the whole system: inbox branding as the foundation, then Engage, Promote, Inspire, and Consume. Four email types that turn a list into a business. Now go send your first one... and let BNSN write it with you at bnsn.ai.