Email Marketing Tips. Part 2 – How to write an effective email.

This article is the second in a series of short articles each dealing with a certain aspect of email marketing and meant to help you, dear reader, to improve your email marketing campaigns. The second article in the series lists tips relating to the most common activity of email marketing – writing emails.

I hope you find the pointers given here interesting and useful. You are encouraged to contact me with tips based on your own successful experiences – I will add them to the list…

Pointers and Tips, Do’s and Don’ts, Hints and Suggestions,
for writing effective marketing materials for email campaigns

1. DON’T – Send for the sake of sending
   
   My mom always said:
   “If you haven’t got anything smart to say it’s best if you shut up”. 
   My mom is always right.From an email marketing perspective there is something profound in this adage. Email blasts should only be sent out to your list when they have a point:
   You have some new meaningful content to share with your list members, content they are likely to want to receive.

   Sending out email simply for the sake of reminding people you exist is usually a pretty bad call. Repeat the practice often and you should expect people to sign out from your list in droves…not a pretty sight.

   DO – Keep people up to date

   Let your list members know about new and worthwhile content you have to share with them. “Worthwhile content” could be any of the following:

   1. News from your organization and industry.
   2. Press and media coverage of your organization and its members or activities.
   3. New products or services from your company.
   4. Articles with fresh editorial content, commentary, or hints relating to your fields of expertise and operation.
   5. Events your organization is organizing, participating in, or sponsoring.
   6. Special or seasonal offers for your list members.
2. DON’T – Nobody enjoys being misledAvoid at all costs creating misleading subject lines for your postings. Not only is this type of deception unethical, in many places it is downright illegal. Using misleading titles will hurt your reputation as a trustworthy email sender and cause massive sign outs from your email marketing lists.
   
   DO – Stay on topic

   After evaluating which of the above mentioned message-worthy content is the prompt for your email, make sure that your content is closely associated to your chosen subject matter.

3. DON’T – Yap about yourselfNobody likes a braggart.
   Avoid the words “Me”, “We”, “Us”.
   
   DO – Talk about them

   People like hearing about themselves.
   Use the word “You” often.

4. DON’T – Be a bore
   
   Avoid sending emails that are composed entirely of blurbs extolling at great length the numerous virtues of your organization and its products or services. Most of the time we all find these company / product / organization descriptions boring to tears.
   
   DO – Be entertaining
   
   We all enjoy reading “human interest” stories.
   Focus your writing around story-telling that puts people at the center.
   Instead of giving endless feature descriptions or lists of your organizations virtues, try demonstrating the same benefits through stories about the positive experiences people have had with your products, services and organization.

1. DON’T –  No really, don’t be a bore!
   
   A dry description of even the most exciting activity, product, or event will still make for a dull and boring read – the kind that will largely be ignored by your readership. On the other extreme, too many superlatives cause readers to doubt the subject matter as being nothing but hot air and fluff. DO – Keep it interesting.
   
   Even the driest most tedious subject matter can be transformed into an engaging and exciting read by a talented writer, this is often the secret of the success behind great non-fiction writing. As a rule, write about people and experiences and keep your audience involved emotionally – A story that touches our emotions is one that we will follow to the end.

2. DON’T  – Give away all the goods in your email.Although this is a technical issue it is very important nonetheless. You should avoid using your email blast in order to tell full stories. The eye fatigue that your reader’s will experience during the course of reading your message from a screen dictates that you should avoid sending out emails that are longer than 250-400 words long.

   DO – Use your email as a lead to your site.
   
   A good email blast or newsletter will include several (2 to 4) story headers followed by short lead paragraphs introducing the items that the email newsletter covers.

   The purpose of including multiple leads in a single email is not only to relieve accumulated eye fatigue but also to allow for different tastes. We don’t all find the same stories interesting. By including a few leads you are multiplying the chance that your email will interest your readership.

   Moreover it is in your best interest to have your readers click on a link in your email so that they start viewing your site. Once a reader is on your web-site it is much easier to cause them to perform the action you are hoping for, whether this is the purchase of one of your items, signing up to an event or even just filling in a form.
      

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I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

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Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

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Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

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What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

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Readerimpact Glossary

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Why you need to send email via an ESP for your email marketing to be effective

Email marketing has an extremely high ROI compared to most other forms of advertising. A seven-to-one return on investment is considered standard for an advertising campaign. Email based advertising beats the seven-to-one ratio with a stunning forty-five-to-one, this according to data published by the DMA (Direct Marketers Association). In a study they published that examined email marketing’s returns in the past three years, the conclusion was that Email marketing campaigns have been generating an average ROI of over 45$ for every dollar spent.This stunning ROI has led many businesses to take a stab at doing some in-house email marketing using a wide range of unsuitable tools with outcomes that range from limited success to catastrophic failure.

Email marketing the amateur way
is playing “Email Russian roulette”

Many SMBs and NPOs are currently using their Outlook, Gmail, Yahoo, etc, accounts for sending out their email campaigns.

Besides being an unwieldy method for sending out massive amounts of email this practice is akin to playing Russian roulette with your email box.

Why?

Because when you send out large amounts of email to groups of people inevitably some of these people will either purposefully, or inadvertently, mark your email as spam. When this happens enough times at the very least your email address will be blacklisted.
In more severe cases your domain may be blacklisted. This will effectively prevent you, and everyone else sharing your domain, to use email. In today’s world, where email is a primary form of communication for many people and businesses, this situation will have a devastating effect on both your reputation and your business.

Using an ESP is an excellent email reputation insurance policy

The entry level email marketing packages offered by most ESPs are very low-cost to run and maintain, and fit the needs of most SMBs perfectly. When weighed against the potential damage that blacklisting can cause your business it is well worth your cost to use an ESP just as a form of email “insurance policy”. The low monthly fee that most services charge is money well spent when weighed against the catastrophic damage that getting blacklisted can cause you.

Monitor your email campaign’s effectiveness

One of the most fundamental rules of marketing is “Information = Power”. The more you know about your market and clientele the more power is at your disposal to market to them effectively. The Internet as a whole and email in particular allow you to know more about your clientele then was ever possible before. When you use an ESP to deliver your email marketing campaigns you will have data at your fingertips that you were never aware of before. Most mass email service providers can tell you what are the opening rates for your email campaigns, how many times your message was forwarded by the recipients, what links were clicked within the email and how many times and for what reason your email bounced. When collected and monitored over time this data will help you generate ever more effective messages and tip the ROI scales more and more in your favor.

Email list building and management for effect

The best way to capitalize on the high ROI’s that email marketing generates is to effectively build and manage your email mailing list. Most ESPs include powerful list creation and management tools that allow you to effectively segment your email list into sets and subsets according to demographic information and response rates.

The better you manage your list, the more exact your segmentation, and the more you focus your messages specifically to each segment, the higher your ROI will be for each of your email marketing campaigns.

Making sure that what you see is what they get

The lack of any binding standard for email has unpleasant implications for most amateur email marketing campaigns. Although they look fine on the sender’s machine they will appear messy and jumbled at the recipients end. This is especially true if the email has many image components. Many email clients (gmail, yahoo, msn and the like) have “images off” as their default setting. The implication is that if the email is composed mostly of graphics then the recipient will be entirely unaware of its contents. Most ESPs help you avoid the pitfalls of creating garbled or illegible messages by offering you customizable templates that will render reasonably well on most email clients. Furthermore ESPs often allow you to create and send a plain text version of your email to send to recipients that are unable or unwilling to accept heavy graphic HTML emails. With more and more people reading their email on the move, from their PDAs and their cell-phones, rather then from their computers, text-only emails are becoming an ever more important component in the email marketing toolbox.

ESPs are to email what the postman is to mail

Finally, using ESPs is a good choice because email is their job.
A good ESP maintains relationships with all major email clients and monitors its listing status on a daily basis. For email clients that provide the service, the ESP will ensure it is “white-listed” with the email client, to ensure that mail sent via from its servers gets through. A Good ESP will guarantee that your message is getting out and is being received by your audience. And getting your message to the right audience on time is what effective advertising is all about…

Found this useful?

Why not read these articles as well

Email ethics and legality

The ethics of email marketing are founded on a simple single understanding. People’s in-boxes are as much part of their private domain as are their bedrooms.

---

I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

---

Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

---

Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

---

What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

Your reader’s poor response may have nothing to do with your email.

---

Readerimpact Glossary

A glossary of terms relating to email and online marketing

Email Marketing Tips. Part 1 – Building and maintaining an effective email address list

This article is the first in a series of short articles each dealing with a certain aspect of email marketing and meant to help you, dear reader, to improve your email marketing campaigns. I chose to begin the series with a few tips relating to the most fundamental prerequisite for any email marketing campaign – the email address list.I hope you find these tips interesting and useful and you are more than welcome to contact me with ideas of your own that you think we should be adding here.

A word of caution before we start:
Never buy an email list

Purchasing emails is unethical to say the least and in many cases it is illegal as well. Beyond these two very good reasons why you should avoid engaging in this practice, there is another reason you should take into your consideration:
It is doubtful at best that a person who signed up for a newsletter related to some other product, service, or organization, will respond positively to being solicited by you.
It is far more likely that your solicitation will be at best ignored, and at worst flagged as spam…

A good list grows organically

1. Build you list yourself and start as close to home as possible.
   You already have dozens, hundreds or even perhaps thousands of clients and contacts. These people may well have donated to your cause or purchased from you in the past. It is safe to assume that unless you mistreated them, they remember you fondly and will be happy to receive emails, offers and news from you. They are also very likely to do business with you again…
2. Start collecting email addresses from visitors to your website and locations.
   Whether your organization has a physical location, or is entirely online, you should be collecting your visitors email addresses and getting their permission to send offers and news.
   A wise man once said: “The best time to plant a tree was twenty years ago, the second best time to plant a tree is NOW”.
3. Guarantee privacy and promise benefits.
   People today are bombarded by so much spam that they are often reluctant to hand out their email address. Signing people up to your list is much easier when you guarantee that their privacy will be respected and their email will never be passed on to any third party. Most importantly assure people that by signing up they will gain access to special content, benefits, and offers that are available only to members of your subscription list.

Gratitude goes a long way

1. Give people something in return.
   We all love getting gifts. Beyond promising people future benefits for signing up to your list give them some immediate token of your gratitude that they can benefit from directly after signing up to your list. It doesn’t really matter how significant your giveaway is as long as it’s something that is delivered immediately following the sign up.
2. Easy does it.
   All too often I encounter sign up forms that are so complicated and invasive that I give up on completing them midway. Your sign up process should be as easy, hassle free, and simple as possible. In most cases all you need from people initially is their email and perhaps their name.
3. Develop relationships over time.
   Once you start an email relationship with people, and that relationship becomes positive and meaningful, it is much easier to ask them to divulge more information about themselves than it is at the initial contact, especially if you promise them some special benefit as a token of your gratitude for their cooperation.

What’s the secret of success? A well organized list!

1. The better your information the greater your success.
   We all enjoy feeling important and special. We appreciate people who remember details about us. With many premium email marketing platforms available today it is simple to create subsets and filters of demographically similar members within your email list. Segmentation allows you more accurate targeting for your messages.
2. Keep it personal.
   We all like people that really care about us.
   The more you know about the members of your list, and the more trouble you take in making it obvious that you are aware of who they are individually, the better the responses you will get to your solicitations, requests, and offers.
3. A small and responsive email list is better than a large and indifferent one
   Managing email lists and member data is a time consuming effort.
   Concentrate your efforts on identifying, segmenting and managing lists composed primarily of those members that are responsive to your messages. By following this guideline you stand to gain twice: 1^st you will be saving precious time by limiting the efforts you are wasting on vast numbers of useless contacts and 2^nd you will have more time available to dedicate to building meaningful and productive relationships with your responsive contacts.

If you found this useful…

you might want to check out these articles as well

Email ethics and legality

The ethics of email marketing are founded on a simple single understanding. People’s in-boxes are as much part of their private domain as are their bedrooms.

---

I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

---

Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

---

Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

---

What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

Your reader’s poor response may have nothing to do with your email.

---

Five reasons to send your email marketing through an ESP

Why you need to send using an ESP for your email marketing to be effective.

---

Readerimpact Glossary

A glossary of terms relating to email and online marketing

Ethics and legality of Email Marketing

The ethics of email marketing are founded on a simple single understanding:

People’s in-boxes are as much part of their private domain as are their bedrooms.

We all need to understand that sending spam to someone’s in-box is akin to barging uninvited into their bedroom.

The Golden Rule of ancient philosophy, quoted here from the works of Pittacus, and understood to be the basis of all human rights, applies to email marketing as well:
“Do not to your neighbor what you would take ill from him“.

If you do not enjoy receiving spam why on earth do you think anyone else does?

If you do not enjoy looking at commercial offers that are entirely irrelevant to you why do feel that forcing others to do so is a good idea?

Do you need Fake Vitamins? Phony watches? Dodgy loans?

No?

Neither do I…

How much does Spam cost?

In a utopian world the two ideas I mentioned before would be enough to prevent spam from ever becoming a problem.
Sadly, as the following figures prove, the world is far from being Utopian. Spam counts for more than 80% of all the email traffic on the face of the planet. The UN published a recent report stating that spam is responsible for causing a 25 billion $ dent in the global economy every year (no mistake – Spam costs us all 25 billion dollars a year).

Laws come to regulate situations where ethics and personal morals have failed to restrain improper, hurtful or dangerous behaviors. Laws are also often created in situations where technological and scientific advances create new sets of circumstances that require regulation in time frames that do not allow for the natural evolution of new ethics.

The Internet, cyberspace and email in particular, fall into both these categories. We have all indeed witnessed extensive unethical and illegal use of every new field presented to us by the IT sector. It therefore should come as no surprise that most governments in the cyber-savvy regions of the globe have indeed created rules and laws to regulate the usage of the new medium. In general, and also specifically to regulate how the medium may be used for advertising.

The American Anti-Spam law

The United States government published the CAN SPAM act (Controlling the assault of non-solicited Pornography and Marketing Act) in January of 2004.

Although it has often been maligned and criticized, a basic understanding of the principles of the American law remains a good starting point for anyone who wishes to engage in email marketing the legal way.

So what does the CAN SPAM act actually say?

Here’s a basic list of the laws main provisions:

• CAN SPAM forbids false and/or misleading header information
  The “From,” “To,” and routing information in your emails, including the originating domain name and email address, must be accurate and identify you correctly.
• CAN SPAM forbids the use of deceptive subject lines
  The subject line of your email mustn’t be misleading regarding the contents of your message.
• CAN SPAM demands that your email give recipients a method to opt-out
  You must provide an email address, or other Internet-based point of contact, that allows recipients to elect to no longer get email messages from you. You are required by law to honor all such requests.
• CAN SPAM states that it is illegal to sell email addresses
  Its illegal for you to sell or give away the email addresses of the people who chose to no longer get your email unless you transfer the addresses so another entity can comply with the law.
• CAN SPAM requires that commercial email be identified as an advertisement and include the sender’s postal address
  Your email must contain a clear notice informing the recipient that your message is an advertisement and that the he or she can choose to no longer receive commercial emails from you. Your message must also include a valid physical postal address for you and/or your business.

Remember the golden rule…

The American CAN SPAM act and similar laws in other countries came into being because we all neglected to obey the golden rule: “Spam not thy neighbor as thou wouldst not have him spam thyself“.

It is a good idea to test all your email marketing, and indeed all your marketing efforts according to this simple maxim. When your marketing efforts meet the simple requirement made by this maxim you will find that, not only are they far more effective, but also that you and your business are perceived as ethical, honest and pleasant to deal with.

In most businesses I’m familiar with a good reputation is often worth a hefty chunk of change…

Please note that the above is nothing more than my uneducated personal opinion. I am not a trained legal professional, and this post is not to be viewed as legal, or any other form of advice, in any way. Should you elect to follow any course of action suggested in the above text you do so at your own responsibility and under no circumstances will any claims of this writers responsibility for the outcome of your actions be acknowledged.

Found this useful?

Why not read these articles as well

Five reasons to send your email marketing through an ESP

Why you need to send using an ESP for your email marketing to be effective.

---

I’m new to email marketing campaigns and advertising – What Impact can I expect?

Email Marketing is being used by businesses and organizations to increase their profits and enhance their image.

---

Email from Non Profits and Charities have high Impact

The credibility and authority of an organization makes readers more receptive to their email efforts.

---

Business Email: Send for Impact

In the Email Game, the finish line is not the inbox. You must reach the reader’s mind.

---

What factors are distracting your readers from your Email Campaigns’ messages?

Your reader’s poor response may have nothing to do with your email.

---

Readerimpact Glossary

A glossary of terms