Posted: January 23rd, 2012 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Content, Copy, email-marketing, strategy | 16 Comments »
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:
Posted: June 18th, 2011 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Content, email-marketing, Facebook, strategy | 1 Comment »
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.
Posted: October 28th, 2010 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Content, email-marketing, Media, Twitter | 4 Comments »
It’s obvi
ous that choice is the enemy of decisiveness. It’s less well known that choice is the enemy of happiness.
The jam experiment is a popular example among web design gurus. Conducted in 2000, it demonstrated that when offered a choice of 24 jams, people bought fewer than when offered a choice of 6. That’s why, for example, Apple hardly give you any choice at all – paralysed by the amount of research it takes to choose the best possible Android or RIM handset, customers fall back on spending £200 extra on something that offers you 2 options – ‘black iPhone’, or ‘white iPhone (coming soon)’.
One of the first things you learn in web page design is that if you give people too many options, they become crippled with indecision and go and look at a video of a kitten on youtube instead.
That isn’t the interesting bit.
The interesting bit comes after people have bought their jam.
It turns out that the people who had more choice thought their jam tasted worse. Even if they chose precisely the same jar of jam as the shopper with fewer choices, they reported enjoying it less. The fear that we’ve bought the wrong kind of jam is enough to tell our tastebuds that we don’t really like what we’re spreading on 0ur toast.
That means a number of things. It explains why Dell users are insecure, Apple users are smug, and people who are total suckers for marketing, and couldn’t make an informed decision if their bank balances depended on it often seem to be the happiest in the world. Until Cockney Dave comes round to break their knees for the compound interest they owe on their Roomba’s.
It means that if Apple offered customers more chances to customise their ridiculous jabscreens, they would actually take less pleasure in them.
And for those of us who work in web design, it means that offering too many options doesn’t just have an impact on conversions. It also means that when your customers have finished shopping, they’ll be less happy with whatever they’ve bought from you.
(And in case you’re wondering, this post was typed on a Dell computer, and Tweeted from an Android Phone).
Posted: October 11th, 2010 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Copy, email-marketing | No Comments »
If you forget to put the attachment on your message in gmail, this is what happens:
It helps you not to make a COMPLETE TIT out of yourself ABOUT 4 TIMES A DAY (in my case) by warning you not send that message with no attachment.
Wow. I just want to look at that again:
Ooh yeah. One more time
Rapture.
Posted: October 3rd, 2010 | Author: Sam Bueno de Mesquita | Filed under: Content, email-marketing | No Comments »
“Speak to your customers,” we are told, “as if they were your friends. Tell them stories, engage them, make them understand that you are real.”
One charity has taken this advice a little too much to heart in this fabulous little email, that begins with a threat
“There were some disappointments this time round (which are detailed later in this email)”
And then descends into the kind of idiocy we expect to see in comment threads on Have Your Say, rather than in serious emails by campaigning organisations.
It’s the lack or self-awareness that makes it such a pleasure – they really can’t see why big charities wouldn’t want to associate their names with a tiny organisation that uses its email address list to have a public sulk. I would guess that the “3 key campaigning organisations” who they are “not attacking”, just “sharing our disappointment” about are Greenpeace, Oxfam and Friends of the Earth .
Anyway, their email has gone viral in the charity world, and so on one measure, it will have been a big success. They can certainly expect a few hundred extra subscribers, waiting to see what they might do next.
