A lot of people baulk at the idea of writing their own autoresponder email campaigns.
You can see that as soon as you search for done-for-you campaigns or sort through affiliate offers that have pre-written swipe files to help you promote their product.
But should you use those pre-written campaigns or would you get better results if you wrote your own emails, even though it will take longer and be more effort? As usual, the answer is a heavily qualified "it depends".
Most actors don't write their own scripts.
Many comedians don't write their own jokes.
So surely the same logic can be applied to your email campaigns? And, to an extent, that's true.
The difference comes from the level of expertise involved.
Professional script writers and joke writers are just that.
Professionals.
They've had years of experience and are paid accordingly.
But we tend to assume that those rules don't apply to us when we're internet marketing.
Most people can't afford the scarily high fees commanded by the top people in the field.
And most people don't have the confidence in their own abilities to even consider writing their own email campaigns.
So most people opt for what they consider to be a good "second best" and look for pre-written email campaigns.
Either complete campaigns or, more often, just a handful of emails until they feel their list has had enough of that particular product being promoted to them.
Usually via the swipe files offered by most of the bigger products available to affiliates.
You can tell this in places like the Clickbank marketplace where they even allow you to drill down to just those products that have help for affiliates in the form of pre-written emails, articles, blog posts, maybe even adverts.
But just because something is available doesn't mean it's the correct thing to do.
Otherwise we'd all still be smoking cigarettes or always eating fast food.
In truth, unless your email sequence is either written by you or by someone who knows you well - and can therefore write in your "voice" - your list will instinctively know and will react by either unsubscribing or not reading your emails as often or buying less from you.
That applies even if you're not a top level writer.
Because something in human nature works to tell us that something isn't quite right.
That's part of our survival instinct and it comes from all the processing that our brains do in order to sift out the important things.
It explains why you aren't quite sure why you avoided something or took a slightly different route or did something you can't quite account for.
And it explains why pre-written, bought in, email campaigns don't work as well as the ones you write yourself.
Something - and no-one could particularly tell you what that "something" is - says not to react.
Which usually means either don't read the email in the first place or, if you do read it, don't buy.
Which means that if you care about your list and want to give the maximum benefit to them (which, in turn, usually gives maximum benefit to you as well) then you should make the time and effort to write your own email campaigns.