Six Traits to Writing Great Email.
Six Traits to Writing Great Email.
1. Make it personal. Make it feel like it’s only written only to them, not a thousand people. Everyone needs to feel like the email is just written to them. So pretend that you are writing that email to one person. Even though it is going to be mailed out bulk to thousands and thousands of people.
2. Make it active. Most people write passively. Passive writing is government writing, it’s corporation writing, it’s writing with no identity. Passive writing is something like ‘the door was closed’; well you don’t know who closed the door. Active writing would be something like ‘Jane slammed the door closed in a fit of anger’; well that’s pretty vivid. That’s active writing.
3. Make it emotional. Tap into their emotions. This can be very powerful because people are motivated by their feelings. Love, anger, greed, and all kinds of things motivate them. But, emotion is what you want people to feel when they read your email. You want people to feel something. When they feel something, they will go and take action, which is important.
4. Make it sensual. Activate the senses in the person that’s reading it. Most people will talk about hearing or seeing, but we also have feeling senses. We also have a smell sense. Try to touch on all the senses because when people read it, It wants to come alive in their mind.
5. Make it commanding. This is very important. Most people in marketing both online and offline marketing forget to ask the reader to do anything. You have to have a call to action. You must have a directive, a request, a command for them to follow.
6. Make it curious. It makes them wonder about something in the email. This should be an important element in all of your work. Say “I have something fantastic to tell you, I tell you later” and don’t tell them what it is.
Is it Email Marketing or Spam?
Is it Email Marketing or Spam?
Are you a heavy email marketer or just thinking about using email to market to prospects and customers? There are few issues to consider.
The main one is your email actually making it to the inbox or is it killed before it has a chance to reach its goal.
In order for the mail to get through and to increase your success as an email mar-keter and not get tagged as a “Spammer”, There are 10 barriers your email must pass through to reach its goal.
Barrier 1: Is it Highly Relevant?
The content of the email needs to relevant to your subscriber. That is why they subscribed to you in the first place. As their inbox gets more crowded with SPAM, they begin to block more and more of it. The age of email blasting is over. You need to capture data on your subscribers via surveys or during sign-up. This way over time you will be able to send more relevant content, which lessens the chance that your subscribers will interpret your email as SPAM. Every email should include some-thing of value to the recipient. Not just being hammered with offer after offer.
Barrier 2: Not Getting placed in Your Subscriber’s Address Book or Safe Senders List
You built a relationship with ISPs and have put things in place so that your emails make it to the Inbox. Great, Unfortunately, this work is often in vein because of the final barrier. The e-mail client (Outlook, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo, etc.), has built-in filtering and can kill on your email as it reaches it goal. To survive this final barrier, it’s important to get your email recipi-ents to add your email address or sending domain to their address book or ‘safe senders’ list.
Barrier 3: Setting the Frequency and Content Expectations
A definition of Spam is “email from a company that I have done business with that comes too often”. Did you promise valuable, informational content, but only send product pitches? Did you promise a monthly newsletter, but send weekly promotions? Nothing can kill an email faster than subscriber dis-satisfaction. If continued the emails that do not meet subscriber expectations in terms of content or frequency become treated as spam.
Barrier 4: Using ‘Spammy’ Words and Phrases
ISP’s systematically scan email subject lines and body content (also called content filtering).
So avoid overly promotional words and phrases, multiple exclamation points, all capital letters and other text often used by spammers. The use of content checkers to test emails against popular spam filters is a good investment.
Barrier 5: Segmentation and Personalization
Segmentation and personalization are likely the most underutilized keys to email marketing suc-cess. Your emails are competing for attention with an ever-increasing number of messages in your sub-scribers’ inboxes. The emails that work best have personalized subject lines, offers, articles, products showcased with follow-up emails based on the recipient activity. It is crucial that you begin with this process, even if it is simply personalizing the content of the subject line or sending modified emails to several different seg-ments of your list.
Barrier 6: Not Optimizing the Beginning of the Relationship
Special attention needs to be focused on the beginning of the email relationship. It’ been proven that most significant de-cline in email performance comes two months after recipients opt in. Engage your new subscribers im-mediately with an organized program that includes a welcome message sent out upon confirmation, followed by the current newsletter or promotion. You need to manage subscribers’ expec-tations from the start by explaining the email program’s value, frequency, type of content and privacy policies.
Barrier 7: Not Getting and Confirming Permission
Receiving permission from your subscribers is the heart of a successful email-marketing program. Capturing an opt-in and confirming it with a follow-up email is the only way to ensure you add recipients that want your email. The practice of confirming an opt-in is called “double opt-in” and is the way the entire email industry is going.
Barrier 8: Not Focusing on what Matters Most.
How many e-mail were sent? How many got delivered? The open rate? The click rate? How much did you make per email? Think long and hard about what really matters – then focus on that to improve results!
Barrier 9: Not Promptly Removing Unsubscribers and Responding to Complaints
As an email marketer, you are responsible for promptly handling unsubscribes when requested. If your email system doesn’t handle unsubscribe requests automatically. You need to set in place a system to ensure speedy removal. Your subscribers need to be able to update their preferences and email address. You need to have resources in place to manage email replies. Which is a valid ‘from’ address.
Barrier 10: Not Testing
An email strategy that worked for you six months ago might not work today. You need to test variables continuously including format, design, copy style, calls to ac-tion, subject lines, personalization, segmentation, content, days/times to send, etc. Start with simple A/B split tests, and repeat the test at least a few times to verify results.