I’m leaving email marketing and the charity sector tomorrow, and going to work in B2B social media for Regus. Here are a few of the things I have learnt about writing copy for charity emails:
The ONLY bits that matter in terms of conversion are
1. subject line
2. first sentence
3. link copy
4. call to action
Write these bits FIRST. The rest of the email should proceed from them. These are also the bits which will have the largest impact in tests.
READ IT OUT LOUD – if it doesn’t sound like a real person speaking, start again.
Cut, cut and cut again. If the meaning remains the same, you’ve almost certainly made it more elegant by cutting.
You are allowed to begin sentences with ‘And’ or ‘But’.
Abbreviate “not” to “ ‘t “ (eg “do not” becomes don’t). Do not abbreviate “have” to “ ‘ve”. Abbreviating “is” to “ ‘s “ is a judgement call. And read out loud to check – abbreviating makes it friendlier and more natural, but can reduce impact.
There should always be some version of the Call-to-Action above the fold.
Avoid sentences with multiple clauses and sub-clauses – it’s what we learned to do at university, but it’s awful copywriting. Full stop. New sentence. Every. Single. Time.
Steer clear of adverbs. They’re uneccessary. It is stronger to say ‘I believe’ than ‘I passionately believe’. ‘Your Country Needs You’ is stronger than ‘Your Country Really Needs You’.
We deal in facts, not opinions. Avoid ‘could’, ‘would’, ‘ought’ and ‘should’. Never begin a sentence ‘we think’, or ‘we believe’. People ARE going hungry because of biofuels. It IS a scandal. It MUST be stopped. Not ‘We believe that the evidence shows that biofuels may be causing hunger. We think this a scandal – it’s one which we think should be stopped.’
The message must be about the recipient, not the sender. Always talk about ‘you’, never ‘we’. ‘You can stop the biofuels scandal’, not ‘We need you to stop the biofuels scandal’.
Email content is a less-than-zero sum game. Talk about three different things, and you won’t get three times as much engagement. You won’t even get the same amount of engagement, split three ways. You’ll get less in total. One message ALWAYS trumps two.
That doesn’t mean you can never communicate more than one thing: put the simplest, most appealing message in the email. The landing page can include more in-depth messaging, secondary actions and links to the really detailed policy stuff. That way the content aimed at the more engaged only gets seen by them, and the content designed to persuade people to click through stands out more strongly. If it’s an action, and there’s stuff that only the most engaged supporters will be interested in (shares, reports, campaign guides), why not save that for the thank-you page?
Most of your readers won’t see the images – so write good alt-text (especially for call-to-action images) and don’t rely on pictures to convey your main point.
You have 3 seconds to convince someone to engage with your email. That’s all. If they read the first sentence, and they don’t know what you’re trying to tell them, they WILL delete.
Never, ever write a boring or cryptic subject line. Questions, or teasing ambiguity, can be very effective. But if you don’t mention the basic subject matter, it will get ignored by your most important audience: the people who actually care about that subject.
About a third of your readers will have their email set up so they only see the first 21 characters of the subject line. Frontload the best bit.
Read ‘On Writing’ by Stephen King. It’s absolutely gripping, and contains some great copywriting tips. Other good places to look include:
At our New Year’s eve dinner, my wife’s cousin Izzy was taking photo after photo with her new camera. They were awful photos: she had no sense of composition, no consideration of the effects candlelight would have on her subjects, and no mastery of the camera settings that would help overcome them.
Why does this new ability to learn and share affect us as copywriters and web editors?
When I wrote my first marketing copy in 2002, I was writing for an audience who had never written anything themselves – or at any rate never anything for public consumption. I had stats to tell me what was working; I had colleagues to point out how I could improve; I went on courses. I was a professional writer, my audience weren’t even amateurs.
In 2012, Facebook will gain its billionth user. A sixth of the population of the world will be writing stuff for people to consume. And because of that mechanism of Likes and Shares, people get feedback on what they’ve written: they will be learning, something that was previously reserved only for people who wrote for a public audience (copywriters, marketers, novelists, academics and a handful of others).
Of course, not everyone who writes on Facebook becomes a better writer, but a lot of people will:
While it is impossible to make a competent writer out of a bad writer, and while it is equally impossible to make a great writer out of a good one, it is possible, with lots of hard work, dedication, and timely help, to make a good writer out of a merely competent one.
Stephen King, On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft
That hard work, dedication and timely help is now available to anyone who posts their thoughts on a blog or social network. As a result, the barrier between the professional copywriter and the gifted amateur has shrunk to almost nothing. And where once upon a time, gifted amateurs were rare, because they had to struggle to find time for their thankless hobby, today they are everywhere, blogging, tweeting, commenting and debating.
The power to self-publish is creating a generation of educated readers. And because they are the readers most likely to share your work, they are the audience you have to appeal to.
What’s the difference between content created for amateurs, and content created for experts? Compare and contrast this Dixons advertisement from the days when it ruled the high street:
With the modern, web-only version of the brand:
The first advert is all exclamations: ‘Amazing! Free! Deal of the Year!’ The second is entirely style: it’s designed to appeal to a reader who understands and appreciates good writing. A slogan like ‘The last place you want to go’ would have been anathema to mass-market copywriters not so many years ago: flashy, self-referential advertising that impresses people in the industry, but doesn’t sell anything. Now, however, we know that our readers will get the joke.
It’s a tough time to be a copywriter, but a really exciting one. We can no longer get away with lazily flashing a special offer at people. For our new, educated audience, we need to write real content with real flair.
When a big commercial brand partners with a charity at the fundraising end, the exchange is simple. The big brand burnishes its image, the charity makes some cash.
In a networked world, things get more complicated. Here are a couple of examples:
1) Vodafone and the happiest phone call
Here’s the most effective fundraising thank-you video ever created:
Authenticity is what makes this so remarkable – the audience get a genuine share in their moment of triumph at saving a baby’s life.
I have no idea how the plug for Vodafone happened to feature at the 1min 20 secs mark – it looks completely unplanned – but as a piece of feelgood exposure for a mobile phone company it’s a phenomenal success.
That authenticity, that sense of worth, goes beyond anything a conventional advert could hope to achieve. It is the gold standard in charity partnerships, and even though it may only be seen by a tiny audience, for Vodafone it’s certainly worth the price of a few free phone calls.
2) Pepsi, bringers of light
This is a quite breathtaking fundraising video for an innovative Phillipino charity. It went thoroughly viral a few months ago, notching up 1.5 million views.
The story of this video is a curious one: the charity had a great media hit from Reuters and the BBC in July:
Someone from Pepsi obviously saw this, and got a bit miffed that the bringing of light was being linked – by that incredibly distinctive red bottle-top – to Coca-Cola. So it’s been remade with higher production values, a picturesque main character, and a hero dressed in blue: the Pepsi bottle-top.
As a shot in the Cola wars, it’s an entertaining piece, and it’s great news that this charity will have got so much exposure from teaming up with Pepsi’s marketing gurus.
But what is interesting about both of these is that they take the charity partnership away from the supporters and out into the field. As charity communications narrow the gap between the donor and the mission, it’s no longer enough for a company CEO to stand awkwardly on a stage at a fundraising event, handing out a giant cheque with a company logo on it. Sponsoring of fundraising events is just too distant from those deep emotional connections that digital media is creating between charity supporters and the people and animals they help.
The creation of that Child’s I Foundation fundraising video depended on staff being happy to film every moment of their work. For Vodafone, it depended on their inserting their services, inescapably, into that work, so their brand was visible at these key moments.
Pepsi’s video was a response to the incredible ubiquity of Coca Cola, who were inserted into a charity’s work by the fame of their bottles, and, ironically, by the amount of plastic waste they leave in the slums of the Phillipines.
In a digitally networked world, charity communications are becoming a constant stream of near-live media from the field: videos, podcasts, blogs, Tweets, project reports. Companies need to find ways to insert themselves inextricably into that stream. The charity that can offer innovative ways for big brands to do this will find itself riding out the recession very comfortably indeed.
EDIT: Thanks to @jon_bedford for showing me the Child’s I Foundation video
It’s our habit when talking about new media to think in terms of what went before. Your Kindle is a just like a book. Or maybe a shelf containing all your books. Or an amazing shop containing every book that’s ever been written. Or it’s a publishing house, taking on the complete task of printing, distributing and marketing books. We make the same kind of comparisons with the App Store, iTunes, Netflix and many others.
When Amazon decides to suddenly remove Nineteen Eighty-Four from our Kindles, Apple sucks a vaguely subversive App out of our iPhones, or Twitter claims exclusive ownership of any photo we upload, we don’t know how to feel about it. Is it a publisher legitimately choosing not to put out something they don’t like? Or is it a thief coming in and removing something that belongs to us from our shelves? Is it no more disturbing than a shop deciding what it will and won’t sell? Or is it like a totalitarian regime, censoring material it doesn’t like?
Unlike any shop, shelf, publisher or book, the latest update to iTunes has 16,849 words of terms and conditions – over 50 pages of them. Of the hundreds of millions of users who have downloaded it, I would guess that a few dozen, mostly Apple’s lawyers, have actually read them. The Kindle’s are on a similar scale, and, while Facebook’s and Twitter’s are shorter, they change every few weeks.
Somewhere, buried in all that legal language, there may be some explanation of what we are collectively signing up to (if we had any sense, we’d at least run a quick search for important keywords like ‘soul’, ‘firstborn child’, ‘full moon’ and ‘sacrifice’). I love all this free software, and I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but the sheer scale of these T & Cs does make me think that someone, somewhere is going to get very badly screwed. I hope it’s not me.
“Let us say that making a lolcat is the stupidest possible creative act….Yet anyone seeing a lolcat gets a second message: You can play this game too… The stupidest possible creative act is still a creative act.” Clay Shirky, Cognitive Surplus
I’ve been wondering for a while what it is about the iPad that bugs me so much. Clay Shirky’s Cognitive Surplus has finally shown me what is wrong with it: it’s incredibly difficult to make a lolcat on an iPad. Cognitive Surplus is a book about the joy of the ‘Publish’ button, the story how the internet has given hundreds of millions of people both the opportunity and the incentive to become creative. It’s the story of the coming victory of active, sharing media over passive, solitary ones.
Courtesy of *right-click* *save image as* (and Helge.at)
But the iPad transforms the web into a passive medium –you can consume video, pictures, sounds and words on it, but it’s extremely difficult to create anything. Even sending a Tweet on an iPad takes three times as long as it does on a Blackberry. Compared to a laptop or a netbook, it’s agonisingly slow to use.
There are two things that an iPad is amazing at:
1) Looking at stuff. It is absolutely the best device in its weight class for watching Youtube videos, or flicking through photos.
2) Symbolising its owner’s wealth and importance.
For anything else, it’s full of barriers: there’s no right-click, which means no ‘view source’, no ‘image info’, no ‘save target as’, none of those essential tools for a blogger to get the stuff they need; there’s no really accurate pointer, which means copy-paste takes nine times longer than it should; even typing is a chore. Worse still, in exchange for the hermetically sealed world of gimmicky junk in the App Store, you’ve closed down the infinite possibilities of the open source world. No GIMP, no WinAmp, no OpenOffice, let alone Drupal, Apache or PHP. Instead of Googling your kitten, copy-pasting it into GIMP, clicking the text tool, and writing a few rofltastic words, you have an endless fiddle with Apps, fat fingers and the iPad’s broken file management system. And if you can’t make a lolcat, the ‘stupidest possible creative act’, you can’t do anything.
Apple market themselves as enabling creativity, and perhaps once that was true. Apple gave non-technical people tools that were once available only to geeks, breaking down barriers in editing films and photos, and producing music. But The iPad is a sad pacifier, as destructive to creativity as the television. If you truly embody the values Apple claims to promote – artistic, sociable, inspiring – you need to bin your glowing rectangular status symbol.
Because if they did an ‘I am a netbook, I am an iPad’ advert, the netbook would be Che Guevara, constantly on the move, stirring up a revolution, while the iPad would be a morbidly obese child, endlessly hitting a single button in order to watch yet another 3-second Youtube clip.
Social has been the glamorous end of digital marketing for the last 5 years, while email is a bit of an ugly stepchild – always there, but everyone would rather avoid talking about it.
Social networking hanging out with crowdsourcing and location - email (right) trying to be friends
To some extent, this is because email marketing involves such an intense, single-minded and boring focus on deliverability. Unless social moves in the same direction soon, its practitioners are going to find themselves in all kinds of trouble.
Email marketing circa 2002, Facebook marketing circa 2011
Every email marketer above a certain age will, early on in their career, have ruined someone’s business. We were flying blind: we didn’t know about spam filters; we didn’t understand whitelisting; we ended up getting our employers’ email addresses blacklisted so severely that even internal emails were disappearing into Junk Mail folders.
Now the legion of self-proclaimed ‘social media experts’ are making the same mistake.
Your Edgerank decides whether your updates appear in someone’s Facebook Top News feed. It’s calculated on how often that friend (or one of their friends), interacts with you. Every time they, or their friends, looks at your page, clicks your links, likes or comments on your status, your Edgerank will rise. This means it’s self-sustaining. Maintain a good relationship with someone, and your updates will stay in their feed – making it easier for you to strengthen that relationship further, as well as improving your Edgerank with their friends.
But if you slip out of someone’s Top News feed, then you’re gone for good, unless one of their friends remains keen. Slip all the way out of a network’s feeds, and there’s no way for you to get back in. You can have a million friends, but unless they happen to switch their news feed from ‘Top News’ to ‘Most Recent’ (and no-one ever does) none of them will see your updates. Ever.
Just like incompetent emailers, inept Facebookers don’t just fail to provide value-for-money: they do irrevocable harm.
In the early days, the Internet was for reading and writing. Images took forever to load, and the nature of HTML meant accuracy was a necessity for putting anything online. As a result, the words on the web were often rather well written. Even the flame wars were in properly punctuated sentences.
Things changed: ecommerce brought people online to shop; YouTube gave the goggle-eyed TV-viewing masses to Google; finally, social networks made it easy for everyone to spew their most trivial thoughts into the cloud. Over time, search engine optimisation and the exigencies of linkbait culture have driven ‘style’ to the digital margins, a minor consideration against the all-important secret sauce of killer content and a great keyword-packed headline.
Here, then, are a few choice delicacies for anyone out there who still loves the baroque, the discursive and the prolix. Make yourself comfortable (and don’t click these links if your lunchbreak ends in 5 minutes):
Dangerous Minds, by Malcolm Gladwell
From the New Yorker, the spiritual home of long-form journalism, a perfect twisty-turny Malcolm Gladwell analysis
The Women’s Crusade, by Sheryl WuDunn
Is there any major UK newspaper or website that would publish and promote a 7-page argument for the role women’s rights play in international development?
The Great American Bubble Machine, by Matt Taibbi
“[Goldman Sachs is] a great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.” Wow. Just wow.
Beware of Greeks Bearing Bonds, by Michael Lewis
The Liar’s Poker author has written an absolutely jaw-dropping dissection of the Greek financial crisis.
Know any great content that takes more than 10 minutes to read? Give me a few links in the comments below:
Putting a web address on your print campaigns no longer works.
A couple of weeks ago, we put a shortcut URL on a letter we were sending to a few supporters about a project in Uganda: “www.actionaid.org.uk/giriki” is what we printed at the bottom of the page. We included the ‘www’ because we knew that this group weren’t particularly digitally savvy, and would understand it better if they had the World Wide Web prefix. 40% of them typed it into their address bar, and ended up in the right place.
But 60% of them did this:
And because we’d used a 301 redirect to a newly published page for SEO reasons too boring to explain, they ended up with a search that had the wrong page as the top result.
People no longer know what the address bar is for
For anyone who came to the internet after about 2006, the Google widget in your browser is what you use to navigate the web. The address bar is just a weird set of letters and punctuation that changes every time you hit a link.
Those late adopters now represent a huge proportion of Internet users: last month alone, Google saw 226,000,000 searches for ‘gmail’. And this is what Google predicts if you put ‘www.’ into a search:
If you want your audience to go from print or display advertising to your website, you need to tell them what to search for on Google, not what to type in the address bar.
And Google’s grip on the web gets a little bit tighter…
I’ve just had a very quick stroll along the ‘March for an alternative’ demonstration in London. It was a genial, meaningful and often rather beautiful event.
As usual, it’s going to be in the news tomorrow as a terrifying riot. Does it matter that the media report only the extremes, given that those 300,000 marchers are sending 200 Tweets a minute showing the other side of things? I’m afraid it does. The people watching the news are not, mostly, following the marchers on Twitter, so they’ll never get that true picture unless they can actually be bothered to plough through thousands of messages from people they’ve never met.
Still, the existence of social media is making a small difference to the way the news is reported. For all the far left’s paranoia, there has never been a media agenda to present all protesters as thugs. It’s just that ‘Revolutionaries destroy Ritz… you’re going to be next’ will sell a lot more papers than ’300,000 nice people all agree with each other and go for a nice walk to show it.’
But the journalists are following these events on Twitter and Facebook – and that has two effects. Firstly it generates alternative good stories they might never have found before: that was how ‘kettling’ made the news. Secondly, broadsheet and TV journalists are reluctant to lie when they might get found out – however much a little lying might help the story along. The Twitter feed for #26march tells the full story of the day in a million mundane haikus and 100,000 grainy photos.
The truth is out there now. And while it’s too boring for most of us to trawl through, it does at least make it a little harder for journalists to present it without balance.
I’ve just had a very quick stroll along the ‘March for an alternative’ demonstration in London. It was a genial, meaningful and often rather beautiful event. As usual, it’s going to bein the news as a terrifying riot.
Does it matter less than it used to that the media report only the extremes, given that those 300,000 marchers are sending 200 Tweets a minute showing the other side of things? The people watching the4 news are not, mostly, following the marchers on Twitter, so maybe they’ll never learn the truth.
But the existence of social media is making a small difference to the way the news is reported. For all the far left’s paranoia, there has never been a media agenda to present all protesters as thugs… it’s just that ‘Revolutionaries destroy Ritz… you’re going to be next’ will sell a lot more papers than ’300,000 nice people all agree with each other and go for a nice walk to show it’.
But the journalists are following these events on Twitter and Facebook – and that generates alternative stories they moight never have found before. That was how kettling became famous, and it is why it is now made very clear in reports that the violence comes from a minority. The aggregate of all those Tweets, Fli9ckr uploads and blog posts tells a very different story to the one you’ll find if yuour job is to rush from trouble-spot to troublespot looking for the most extreme event you can.
Which is more true, the advertise4mtns or the news? ???? reckoned it was the advertiseme4nts. The news was loaded up with mass murderers, wars, crisis and doom; the advertisements mostly featured normal people being quietrly made happy by accumulating stuff that helped them deal with everyday problems. So it’s the adverts that tell the real truth and the news is just sensationalism.
Except that now there is a third route to the truth… social media – it’s neither as glossily fake as the adverts, nor as sensationalist as the news. The Twitter feed for #26march tells rthe full story of the day in a million mundane haikus and a 100,000 grainy photos.
The truth is out there now. And while it’s too boring for most of us to trawl through, it does at least make it a littlet harder for journalists to lie.
I have noticed a DISTURBING TREND on the social web. Some people, some SO-CALLED friends of mine, some CLEVER, INFLUENTIAL people, seem to think that we no longer need capital letters. This is more than that tedious dotcom boom thing of ‘let’s put our logo in lower case to make it seem more ‘Internet’.’ This is a TERRIFYING attempt to remove one of our language’s most delightful nuances.
Great comedy is about many things. But for me, mostly, it is all about SHOUTING. So before the CAPS LOCK NAZIS come to LOCK UP my favourite key, here is the BEST SHOUTING ON THE INTERNET:
Youtube:
The BEARS are who we THOUGHT they were…
Oh, I’m sorry, what I said was HOW WOULD YOU LIKE TO…
LEEEERROOOY Jenkins…
On Twitter:
Hard to explain @CaitlinMoran‘s appeal in one selected Tweet , but follow her and you’ll rapidly start to appreciate the power of the CAPS LOCK:
On Facebook:
There are many good jokes on Cage Against the Machine but the CONSTANT SHOUTING remains the best one.
