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.
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 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.
There’s nothing quite like opening Twitter to do a bit of boring marketing and finding something like this in your feed:
Samuel Pepys’ diary is amazing: salacious, intimate, packed with war and whoring, farts and fires, booze and bitchy gossip. And now it’s on Twitter. Possibly the best thing on Twitter. Possibly just the best thing. Ever.
The Dutch have burnt the British ships at Sheerness, the King’s mistress has threatened to dash her baby’s brains out in Parliament unless the King acknowledges he is the child’s father, and Samuel Pepys has lured a girl called Peg up to his room, but he can’t get it on with her because some other bloke is hanging about. It’s confessional blogging at its finest, given glorious immediacy by being live on Twitter.
Really readable, entertaining diarists have historically been few and far between – James Boswell, Chips Channon and Alan Clark spring to mind, but not many more. That’s going to change. The ability to record daily events in a manner that others find entertaining is no longer an unusual hobby, but an essential social skill. Around a quarter of the people in Britain keep some sort of online diary, whether it’s a blog, a Twitter feed, a Facebook account, or regular boring emails to a huge list of friends about how the family are and what they did on their holidays. We are a generation of diarists, and the digital natives who grew up with the social web write very, very good ones.
A single illuminating quotation is often the best tool a social historian has for bringing an era to life. Age of Austerity, David Kynaston’s brilliant depiction of post-war Britain, is structured around evocative moments from ordinary people’s diaries: “Oh for a little extra butter”, “Jolly good, as a whole”, Christ, it’s bleeding cold”.
The David Kynaston who looks back on our era won’t have to dig so deep. Future historians will portray life in the early 21st century not as 900 pages of elegant descriptive writing, and diligently researched quotes, but by building feeds of the finest, funniest and most typical of our contemporaries, and releasing them day by day.
In my last job, we had a search engine specialist who would send me lists of keywords to include in titles and URLs of web pages I was writing. I’d put them on Post-It notes, and stick them to my computer, and the computers of bloggers I edited, as a clear reminder of what we needed to shoehorn into our copy.
I don’t know what the Post-It notes in the Daily Mail office look like, but here is a little taste (bolded in the link) of their keyword strategy:
The ability to conjure a perfect headline out of mundane events has always been one of the most entertaining and impressive feats of good tabloid journalism.
But there is surely a difference between the art of catching the eye of the passer-by with some bold block capitals and a daft pun, and building a keyword strategy around people who might be typing into google ‘rape porn pupils aged 11′
Can we really say there is a moral element to something as mundane and analytics-focussed as a keyword strategy? Well, it’s not hard to imagine how the Daily Mail might spin the story if they discovered that a rival paper was chasing the kind of readers who might stumble across this:
