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:
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
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.
