Day 2 - MarketingSherpa Email Summit - Copywriting

From Richard at the Email Summit: Day 2 here in Miami and I’ve already entered every single possible prize drawing at all the booths.  I’m hoping to win big!  I’ve also discovered that the younger MarketingSherpa employees sometimes call each other "sherpas" as in, “you are such a sherpa!”  I think I’m going to start calling everyone at VerticalResponse “responders” to show I’m just as cool as the sherpa people.

The best presentation I’ve seen today was by Jeff Cram of ISITE design, and it was called the Rise of the Un-Newsletter.  He showed, by talking about his own company’s newsletter, how putting a lot of effort and creativity into a newsletter can have a huge impact on how customers, potential customers, and even your own employees see your company.

Before I talk about his presentation I have to mention that he’s from Boston and put on his first slide that he’s a fanatical Red Sox fan.  Is every former or current resident of Boston legally obligated to say this?  I’ve never seen a presentation held by a Boston resident in which the Red Sox were not mentioned at least once.  I’d love to see someone mix it up by saying they’re a Bruins fanatic or that they can’t get enough of Boston College Lacrosse.

Up until two years ago, ISITE put very little thought into their newsletters.  They tried to send them out once a month, but were closer to every six weeks and were still inconsistent with that.  They sent out a plain letter from their president which, based on Jeff’s short description, I’d call roughly as dry and boring as a Terms of Service agreement.  Their open rates were next to terrible, and Jeff’s own friend told him he could no longer bring himself to read the newsletter.

They fixed that problem, and here’s two of the key ways they did it:

They became more consistent with their delivery.  Instead of continuing to shoot for a monthly delivery and failing, they started delivering their newsletter every Full Moon.  As Jeff said, if subscribers “look up in the sky and see the full moon, they know the email is coming.”   This doesn’t mean you need to start delivering your newsletters on the Ides of March or sometime equally as quirky, but setting a standard time to deliver your company newsletters is a good idea.

They put more thought, effort and personality into their newsletter, and took it from a “Letter from the President” format to a true newsletter with lots of information that’s relevant to their subscribers, along with jokes and pop quizzes (which worked for their audience).  As Jeff put it, “Every email is a brand interaction.” When you send an email or newsletter out one of the main goals should be to reinforce and strengthen the image you want your company to project.  Again, this doesn’t mean you have to make your email flashy or funny.  It just means you should steer away from a cookie cutter newsletter.  If your website provides detailed, boring information to your users and they love that, then you should keep providing them what they love.

Off to some more sessions!  My next post will be on some testing and optimization sessions I attended earlier today.

Comments

[Jeff Cram]

Thanks for the great recap and kind words! That was a fun presentation to give. You're right -- it is legally required for anyone from New England to include the Red Sox in their PowerPoint.

See you next full moon!

www.isitedesign.com/insight

Cheers,

Jeff Cram
ISITE Design