Copywriting
Why most P.S. lines get wasted, and what yours should do instead
Short answerAn email postscript (the P.S.) earns its place when it does a job the rest of the email can’t. It can carry a soft pitch so the body is free to teach, speak to one group of readers with their own next step, open a loop into the next email, or land one short line. Most P.S. lines get wasted repeating the pitch that’s already sitting right above them.
You’ve probably heard some version of this. People skim straight to the bottom of an email, so the postscript is the most-read part, so that’s where you restate your offer.
I’ll be straight with you. I’ve never seen a clean number on how many people read the P.S. first, and I’m not going to make one up to sound smart. What I can tell you is how I use mine, and why I think most of them get wasted.
The trouble with “restate the offer” is that it assumes the P.S. has the same job as the email. When it does, it’s just an echo.
The P.S. is the one place you get to change the subject
An email is a sales page broken up over time. Each one should have one goal and one clear action. That’s the discipline that makes an email work.
It’s also a constraint. If the email is teaching something, stopping halfway to pitch breaks the teaching. If the email is selling one thing, a second ask muddies the first.
The email postscript is the pressure valve. It sits after the sign-off, so the reader already knows the email is over. That lets it do something different without wrecking the email above it. That, more than where it sits on the page, is why I think the P.S. earns its reputation. It’s allowed to do a second job.
Four jobs a P.S. can do
Carry the pitch so the body can teach
This is one I use a lot. I’ll write a whole email that’s pure lesson, a real thing that happened and what it taught me, with no pitch in it at all.
Then the P.S. does the selling, in one casual breath. One of mine, after an email about a funnel mistake I’d made, told readers what my training was and where to get it, then said: “Sure, you could go get a burger in California for that price, but I bet you’ll be a lot happier when your ads perform better (you can then afford even more burgers, even with inflation).”
The body earned trust by being useful. The P.S. made the offer without taking any of that back. If I’d dropped the pitch in the middle, the lesson would have read like a setup for an ad. Readers can smell that, and I think it’s one reason storytelling in marketing emails so often backfires.
Talk to the people it applies to
Not everyone who gets an email is in the same spot. My webinar follow-up emails go to people who attended and people who didn’t, and they need different things.
So on the follow-ups for people who attended, I wanted one plain line at the bottom: “PS: If you wanted to watch the replay, you can do so here.” It doesn’t compete with the main ask. It just catches the people who want to see it again, and everyone else skips it.
Open a loop into the next email
In a sequence, the postscript can tease the next email’s payoff. The body finishes its own point completely, and the P.S. gives a reason to open tomorrow’s.
Keep it honest, though. If the P.S. promises tomorrow’s email will reveal something, tomorrow’s email has to actually deliver it. A loop you don’t close teaches people to stop opening.
Land one line
Sometimes the best P.S. is short: a kicker, a useful extra thought, some little truth the email didn’t have room for.
This is the easiest one to get wrong, because it’s where people get cute. A one-line P.S. still has to be true and still has to be useful. If it’s just a clever sign-off, cut it.
The honest exception
Two of them, really.
First, in a promo sequence, repetition is needed and important. When you’re selling hard over a few days, restating the offer and the deadline in the P.S. can be exactly right, because people miss emails and forget what they read yesterday. In a one-off email the echo is wasted, but in a real promotion it’s part of the job.
Second, not every email needs a postscript at all. My own writing notes say to always include one, and I don’t always follow them. One of my best-received pieces, about why I don’t use tracking tools for ads, ended on the honest limit of the idea and had no P.S. That was the right call for that email. A P.S. with nothing to do is just clutter.
What to do this week
Pull up your last ten emails and look only at the P.S. on each one. Next to each email, write which job its postscript does: carries the pitch, speaks to a subgroup, opens a loop, or lands one line. Any P.S. that just repeats the email’s own ask, outside of a real promotion, gets rewritten into one of those four jobs or deleted.
Should every marketing email have a P.S.?
No. A P.S. is worth including when it does a different job from the body, like carrying a soft pitch, giving a subgroup its own next step, or teasing the next email. If it would only repeat what the email already said, leave it off. An empty P.S. is clutter.
What should I put in the P.S. of a sales email?
Something the body couldn’t do without breaking its flow. In a teaching email, that’s often the offer itself, said casually in one breath. In a promotion with a real deadline, restating the offer and the date is fine, because repetition matters when people are deciding over several days.
Is the P.S. the most read part of an email?
It’s commonly said, but I haven’t seen reliable numbers for it, so I don’t build around that claim. I treat the P.S. as the one place I can change the subject after the email is finished, which makes it useful whether or not it’s read first.
P.S. The format I use is “P.S -” with a space and a hyphen, the way I’d actually type it. It’s a small thing, but a P.S. that looks hand-typed reads like a person added it on the way out the door, which is how it should feel.
