How to write a recommendation email that does not read like an advert
A structure for telling your list about a tool you actually use: the problem, the switch, the caveat, then the link. In that order, for a reason.
Somebody has asked you what you use, again. That is five times this month, in comments, in a DM, and once on a call where you spent ten minutes explaining a checkout flow to a person who did not ask for ten minutes. Writing it up once and sending it to your list is obviously the right move. The reason you have not is that every version you draft in your head sounds like the emails you delete.
Why your instinct is right to resist
Recommendation emails have a bad reputation because most of them are written backwards. They open with the tool, list its features in the vendor's own words, and arrive at the link before the reader has been given a reason to care. That structure is a press release with a greeting on top, and people can smell it in the first line.
The genuinely difficult bit is not the writing. It is that recommending anything spends a small amount of the trust you have built, and you cannot get it back cheaply. If somebody follows your advice and it does not fit their situation, they do not think the tool was wrong for them. They think you were careless. That is the actual risk, and no clever subject line reduces it.
Which leaves one honest approach: only write this email about something you are already using in public, describe your own experience rather than the feature list, and be specific enough that a reader with a different situation can rule themselves out. An email that helps a hundred people decide it is not for them is a good email.
A recommendation that cannot be disagreed with is not a recommendation. It is a placement.
The shape of the two emails
Same subject, same tool, same link. The difference is entirely in the order of the parts and how much of it comes from your own week.
| The usual sponsored blast | A recommendation from you |
|---|---|
| Opens with the tool's name | Opens with the problem you had in March |
| Feature list copied from a website | The two things you use daily and the six you have never touched |
| No mention of what you used before | What you moved from, and what the move cost you |
| Everything is excellent | One caveat that would genuinely put some readers off |
| Disclosure in small grey type at the bottom | One plain sentence, in the same voice as the rest |
| A tracked URL nobody can read | join.store.fan/yourcode, short enough to say on a podcast |
Write it in five parts
Draft each part as its own paragraph and do not move on until it is true. If you cannot fill in part three, you are not ready to send this email at all.
- 1The problem, in your own week. Not "creators struggle to sell digital products" but "I was paying a monthly fee to a shop, a separate fee for a link page, and taking a cut on top of Stripe's fees."
- 2The switch. What you moved to, when, and what specifically changed. Name the capability rather than the brand promise: a storefront and a link-in-bio page on one address, payments going straight to your own Stripe.
- 3The caveat. One real limit. For store.fan, the obvious one is that physical orders collect a full address and a delivery fee you set, and then you post the parcel yourself. There are no carrier labels and no tracking.
- 4Who it is not for. Two sentences. If somebody needs warehouse fulfilment or a hundred-person team, send them elsewhere and say so.
- 5The disclosure and the link, together, at the end. One sentence saying you earn a commission, then join.store.fan/yourcode. Nothing after it except your usual sign-off.
What it looks like when it is working
Say your list is 900 people and perhaps 60 of them make something they sell. Those 60 are your entire audience for this email. Everybody else is reading it as a look behind your desk, which is fine, and is why part one has to be interesting on its own. Write for the 60 and let the other 840 enjoy the story. If your open rate for the email sits near your normal rate, you have written a normal email rather than an advert, which is the result you wanted.
The replies tell you more than the clicks. A recommendation email that works tends to produce questions about your setup rather than thank-yous for the link, and those questions are the raw material for the next one. Answer them in public. If you want to see how the incentives are structured before you write a word, the affiliate programme page lays out the 25% to 50% ladder and the 12-month window, and the pricing page shows what your reader will actually be signing up to.
If you have never used store.fan yourself, start on the free plan first. You cannot write part two of this email until you have something to describe.
Try it yourself firstThe mistake most people make
Sending it twice. The first email is a genuine account of a change you made. The second, three weeks later, is a reminder that the link is still there, and it converts the whole thing into a campaign in the reader's mind. If you want the recommendation to keep working, do not resend it. Put the link somewhere permanent instead, such as a card on your storefront under your own products, and mention the tool in passing when it is relevant. One considered email a year plus an always-there link beats a sequence.
Put it before the link and make it impossible to miss, which usually means the paragraph immediately above it. Top-of-email disclosure is fine too. What fails is a line at the very bottom that a reader only finds after clicking.
To send it through store.fan, yes. Email marketing with 5,000 emails a month sits on Pro. Your customer list builds itself on every plan and exports to CSV on every plan, so you can send from anywhere.
Then you have not used the tool for long enough to write the email. Every tool that does ten things does some of them in a way that will annoy somebody. Find the one that annoyed you and say it.
You can draft with it, but the parts that matter are the ones only you can supply: your March, your old bill, your caveat. Use the assistant for the tidy-up, not for the substance.
The test is simple enough to apply before you press send. Read the email as somebody who has no interest in the tool. If it is still worth their four minutes, because it is a story about how you fixed something, then it is a recommendation. If it collapses into nothing without the link, it was an advert all along and your list will know.
Set up your own page, sell something through it, and earn the right to write the email properly.
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