VerticalResponse Email Marketing Blog for Small Business

Does Your Email Have Personality? Inject It with Some!

There is so much clutter in the adsphere these days, sometimes it takes some ingenuity to get heard. You not only want people opening and reading your email marketing campaigns, you even want them to look forward to it. One way to do this is to give your email some personality. 

I've been watching some TV commercials lately and I've noticed that even some of the biggest, most seemingly boring companies are starting to have personality. 

Intel - This microchip company has a couple of great commercials going on now. One of my favorites is one where the co-inventor of the USB is treated like a rock star by the Intel employees. He sashays into the uber cool lunchroom to cool rock star music, and Intel employees are fawning all over him. He signs a few autographs and gets his coffee. Then at the end they humanize the company even more by having employees sing the 5-note jingle. Impressive.

Travelers Insurance - This ho-hum insurance company has such a great commercial that I cannot turn the channel when it's on. A cute dog is worried about his "prized possession" (his bone) and runs around trying to find the perfect hiding place for it. He hides it in the laundry basket, gets worried and retrieves it. He hides it behind a pillow, gets worried, then retrieves it. He buries it in the yard, worries about it all night and digs it up. He takes it to a bank and puts it in a safe deposit box, worries about it and retrieves it. The final answer, insure it with Travelers and the red umbrella appears over the bone next to the dog. Brilliant, memorable and cute!

What can you do to inject a bit of personality into your advertising and email marketing campaigns? 

Restaurants - Write about funny stories of your owners and your patrons. Include some pictures. Have a 'submit your favorite recipe' contest and publish the winners.

Retailers - Make up a funny promotion. Declare your own holiday or celebrate another country's.

Consultants - Send an email about something going on in your industry and poke fun at it.

Wineries - Take it from Travelers Insurance, dogs work and more often than not a winery has one. Why not do a story about a day in the life of the winery dog or a story from the dog's point of view?

Ad Agencies - Why not point out the most ridiculous, best or worst ads of the week. You can always find something funny to talk about with an ad.

If you think about it, almost every day something interesting, funny or completely bizarre happens in your business. This can be content for your marketing messages. What are you doing to inject some personality into your next email marketing campaign?

Writing Email Marketing Copy That Sells

Writing your email marketing campaigns can make anyone want to pull their hair out, especially if you're trying to sell a product/service, or ask for a donation, either as part of your newsletter or the sole purpose of your email. You want to make sure you hit all of the highlights and make sure people SEE your offer.

I've put together some ideas you can think about and put to work when writing copy that sells in your campaigns.

Benefits - I've written about this before, but I can't stress how important it is for you to answer your recipient's question, "What's it going to do for me?" "How is it going to make my life easier?" They don't necessarily care about all of the nifty features you'll offer without getting to the heart of why they need it first. Many businesses get caught up in focusing on themselves rather than their recipients. Recipients should always be the focus of the copy.

Use Subheads - Getting the attention of your readers using subheads is always a great idea. It breaks up your thoughts and gets to the heart of what you're selling quickly while letting them do the skimming.

Write in Small Chunks - You need to get to your point fast in small succinct paragraphs. When was the last time you read an entire press release in an email? It's difficult to do, no one has the time, they need you to tell your story briefly. If they want more detailed information, link off to a page where they can find it.

Use Bullets - Bullets break up points or benefits so that your readers can get your information quickly by scanning. This is a very popular copywriting tactic for email and the web in general.

Get Customer Testimonials - Nothing sells your product better than your customers, but getting the testimonial right is essential. "I love this product!" is not good enough. You need to get to the heart of why they love your product or your cause. "I love this product because it saved me $500 in fees per year!" tells a much better story. Make sure you put your customer's real name and city or company they come from. It adds credibility to the quote.

Get the Subject Line Right - Make sure you think about the subject line first, it's the most important item in your email. In just 40-50 characters get across what they'll get for opening your email.

Write Like You Speak - If you're talking to a prospect or customer you don't speak in long boring sentences. You are probably concise and conversational. So should your email marketing copy be.

Ask For The Order - I've spent a lot of time on calls-to-action lately and it's because they're important. Your call-to-action is your "Buy Now" link or your "Call 1-800.." copy. It's essentially what you want your recipients to do. You should definitely display your call-to-action above the fold so that your recipients don't have to scroll down to find your offer links. Don't be afraid to get in your recipient's face either. If that's what you told them you'd be sending them, they expect it and probably want it. Use expiration dates and bold colors, and make sure to link from everywhere you can in your email to get your recipients to act now!

I hope you find this helpful, if you've got any great copywriting tactics to get more sales, comment!

How to Get Visitors In the Door & Phones Ringing - A Great Call-to-Action

If you build will they come? Not automatically. If your phone isn't ringing or people aren't coming to your store or site, then maybe you need to have a closer look at your call-to-action. What is a call-to-action you might ask? In simple terms it's what you want people who get your emails, visit your site or see your ads, to do.

Your call-to-action can be as simple as a "buy now" graphic on a web page or in an email, or a "Visit our website to get your 20% discount at www ..." in a direct mail piece, or "Call 800...for your free...". Any way you display it, it needs to drive people to act, and act now!

Here are things you might want to use with your own calls-to-action for your marketing campaigns.

Deadlines - Giving a deadline for your offer to expire will undoubtedly move your readers to do something sooner rather than later especially if it's truly a great offer. Make sure you outline what they'll be saving or getting by ordering before the deadline and remind them up to the last day that they can tap this offer.

While Supplies Last - If you've got inventory that will go away, promoting that this offer will end with the end of the supply is a great idea. You may even want to set "limits" on the number of products that can be purchased.

The Bobble Head - If you've got a free gift to give to your customers if they buy now, then promote it! The baseball parks get FULL when they give away gifts to the first 1000 people that come to the stadium. It gets people to the stadium early and gets them buying things.

Free Consultation/Free Trial - Why not offer a number of hours of your services free to get newbies in the door. If free doesn't rock your boat, then offer a deeply discounted rate for them to feel comfortable. Once they see the value, they're sure to come back for more.

Not Available in Stores - Wineries do a great job at offering their wines direct-only. And they focus their messaging on that fact that you can only get the wines from the winery. Some have such limited production that they have people on waiting lists to get on the winery list.

Risk-FREE - If your recipients won't have to pay or put down a credit card and they can walk away with no questions asked, then make sure this is largely displayed. 

Free Accessories with Purchase - Under the deadline, why not try promoting an accessory with the product you're offering. The accessory could even turn into another purchase down the road. For instance, if you sell face cream, you might want to add in a free sample of eye cream. If you sell jewelry, you might want to add a bit of jewelry cleaner.

One more thing, the presentation of your call-to-action is important. You'll often find bursts and buttons in red, orange and yellow because those are colors that command attention, yet used too much can be distracting.

Make sure you have your call-to-action in more than one place. If it's on your website, don't only display it at the end of the page, make sure you include your call-to-action within your text as well as graphics. As always, test a variety of placements and see what works for your business.

Recorded Webinar: Direct Marketing that Gets Results

My friend, John Jantsch at Duct Tape Marketing, asked me to be on a panel for a free webinar,  Direct Marketing that Gets Results that aired this morning. We discussed ways to generate leads using direct marketing tactics such as email marketing, direct mail and direct response advertising.

The panel was hosted by John and I was joined by two amazing people Brian Clark of copyblogger and Anita Campbell from Small Biz Trends.

You can view the recorded webinar here or just have it playing in the background since there's not a lot to really watch.

After you register with BrightTalk you can also get access to two other webinars by John, Creating Marketing Materials that Educate and The “Truth” About Small Business Branding.

5 Ways to "Use What You Have" In Your Next Email Campaign

We posted about "new" reasons to send an email marketing campaign, but you've probably already got a ton of content for your email campaigns at your disposal that you may not be thinking of. Need just one more article for your newsletter or do you need a starting point for launching your first email campaign? Here are five things you can write about today!

1. Highlight One Of Your Customers

You should always be asking your customers how you're doing. You can do this using surveys. When you get some great feedback, make sure you reach out to that customer and ask them if they would be ok with you promoting them on your site and in your email campaigns. Nothing sells your product better than your customers, not even you.

One of our customers Infopia does a great job highlighting a "Success Spotlight" of how one of their customers is using their products.

2. Your Awards & Reviews

Were you given an award, reviewed or published somewhere? Your customers want to know that you're doing well. They want to know that businesses they patron are A-List players and will continue to grow so make sure you let them know.

Another customer Hand in Hand, does a great job highlighting that they won Best of the Bay, Best of CitySearch and Best Jeweler in San Francisco. They worked hard for it, now they're telling the world! People want to do business with the best.

3. Give a "How To..." or a "5 Easy Steps To..."

You are an expert at what you do and I'm sure that you have knowledge others want to learn about. So create a weekly topic that you can speak to that your customers will benefit from. Make your steps short and sweet and give them only a taste in your email campaign since you'll likely want to send them to your site for the rest.

4. Email Pictures About Your Event

If you hosted or attended an event and you posted pictures of your customers to YouTube, Picasa or Flickr, why not send an email about it! Highlight a few pictures in your email and write about the exciting event. Talk about great conversations that you had. It might get more people out to your event the next time you either have one or attend one.

5. Any Holiday Will Do!

Capitalize on any holiday you can! VR customer PetCamp emails about March Madness and April Fool's day and weaves the holiday message into their emails. They'll even create a promotion around the holiday. I challenge you, any holiday can be paired with any product or service. Hey, I've seen our customers selling Botox for Valentine's Day!

Got anything laying around that you might not think to talk about? Let's hear about it!

5 Reasons to Send Your Next Email Campaign

Sometimes we all sit down in front of the computer monitor getting ready to create an email marketing campaign and we're stuck. We don't know where to begin but we know we need to, because every time we write about something interesting, we end up reminding our customers why they liked us in the first place. I've written about writer's block before, but I thought more ideas would be great to get those creative juices flowing.

1. Create Your Own Stimulus Package.

I talked to the owner of Perry's Restaurant here in San Francisco who is giving away half price bottles of wine on his slow days, any bottle. He said it's working great for him. Now he's getting people in the door on what used to be slow nights and they're staying longer.

In a cursory check around the net, I've seen stimulus packages for tires, lingerie, jewelry, consultants, maternity wear and more. What are you waiting for?

2. Declare Your Own Holiday

• Nurseries - Plant a Tree Week - Give Back to the Environment.
• Spa/Hotel - Family Celebration Week - Offer activities around families from food to fun.
• Brew Pubs - A local brew pub here 21st Amendment declares the month of February Strong Beer Month where they offer hearty beers. They do it in the Winter month of February and they hype it in their pub, on their site and in their email newsletter. The place gets packed. They also had their own parade where they marched through the city on the day that prohibition was repealed and had a hundred people follow them down the street. That stunt created some real buzz and was picked up in the local media. It made a great story for their next email campaign.

3. Create a White Paper, Guide or Industry Report

White papers and guides can be great for B2B companies looking to promote their services to an industry. Create a guide of or white paper of a real world problem and how it's solved by your solutions. Since you are an expert at what you do put on paper and tell the world about it. Ok, maybe not the world but at least your email recipients.

4. Create an "Ask The Expert" Column

You can have a feature in your campaign where you probe your recipients to "Ask the Expert", CNN Money does a good job of this on their site. Then you can use that answer in your next email campaign, but always be soliciting more questions so you'll have content in the future. You can also come up with a question you get asked a lot about your industry, products or services, and make up a fake person who is asking the question. These can be useful especially if you will proactively answer some customer questions they may have down the road.

5. Create Your Own Customer Award

Do you have long time customers you'd like to reward? Why not have your own company awards. It can be as simple as sending them an email campaign, thanking them for their business. You'll want to define the criteria for your award, create a name for it and an image that they can proudly place on their site. It can be a great buzz-generator and who knows, your customers might tell 10 friends that they got your award which could turn into 10 new customers for you!

Got any other ideas for why you should send an email campaign? Bring it on!

How Not To Write a Subject Line

I was recently on an "email marketing resources" site and found some horrifying information that was being given on how to write a great subject line. We all know that one of THE most important parts of an email campaign is the subject line and everyone is trying to come up with the perfect one, but this resource for email marketing is wrong, wrong, wrong!

Here are four subject lines that this website uses, but that you should never use in your campaigns. Not only do they break best practices, but in some cases they break the law. The CAN SPAM ruling states that for any commercial email, you must have your subject line relate to the content of the email. 

Subject Line #1 - Hi, My name is Paul

This is a game to trick the recipient into opening an email. It may raise curiosity, however, when the recipient opens the email they're going to feel tricked and unsubscribe.

Subject Line #2 - I need your help, please?

There’s something about wanting to help another human being, however there is also something about lying to your recipient to get your email opened. Don't do it.

Subject Line #3 - Bob, I haven’t received your shipping address yet.

What! My shipping address? What do you need my shipping address for? This particular subject line is really scary because it seems like the sender is trying to get more information from the recipient. Also, it's scary because it's personalized to the recipient so they may actually give it. This could also be seen as a form of phishing.

Subject Line #4 - Bob, Please accept my sincerest apology.

Unless you're actually apologizing for something sincere, don't use this subject line.

All of these examples of subject lines are unscrupulous especially because they don't relate at all to the copy. Avoid being seen as a spammer, and avoid being non compliant with the FTC CAN SPAM rulings.

Writing Holiday Copy That Sells

It's going to be tough to get noticed in the sea of emails that your customers are going to be getting this holiday season. Couple that with a plunging economy and you've got yourself a bit of an uphill battle. So what are some of the tricks of the copywriting trade for your upcoming email marketing campaigns that you can use to get noticed?

Sprinkle Your Message with The Holidays - First of all make your messages a bit more festive. Be careful: some of your recipients might take offense to you wishing them a "Merry Christmas" when they celebrate Hanukkah, but the reality is that most won't. To get around offending anyone my advice is to be a bit more generic in your well wishing unless of course you do know the exact makeup of your list. Sticking to "happy holidays" or "season's greetings" is probably your best generic bet while still conveying good wishes.

Include some nice holiday images in your email to make it even more festive. Images of nicely wrapped gifts, candles, pinecones, snow scenes, a wreath, snowflakes and candy canes are nice additions. If you'd like to call out all holidays then you can use images like Santa, Kwanzaa candles, a Hanukkah menorah, and a Christmas tree. Now that's festive!

Holiday Offers - Now it's time for the fun stuff. What is going to really get the attention of your recipient? In this economy you can bet that your recipients are really going to be looking for deals now more than ever so make sure you give them what they want!

• Top 10 Under $20, Under $30, Under $40 - This is a real time saver for your recipient in a busy holiday season. Many people know what they want to spend and want to know what the hot products are this season. Giving them quick lists will get you noticed.
• Free shipping - This is a great offer especially for comparison shoppers. Even if you are slightly priced higher than a competitor, more often than not people will choose you if you're willing to ship free.
• 10% off for early bird shoppers - Why not start the season off early and send an early bird email to your customers in late October? Make sure you include an expiration date and stick to it, then you'll train people for your next early bird offer.
• Free gift with purchase - For those comparison shoppers who see your offer vs. your competitor's, if you're giving more value you'll likely get the sale. Why not even combine this with free shipping? You'll be a real hit.
• Buy one get one free - Call it the "Holiday Recession Sale" and offer two for the price of one.

VerticalResponse just published a whitepaper with even more ideas for offers, subject lines and more. So download it free today.

Subject Line Copy - This is Not Spam!

One of our Marketing Programs Managers Jess came into my office to ask if I'd received an email from one of our Partner companies. She was waiting for the email so that I could transfer "ownership" of the program over to her. I'd have to log-in from an email I got and do it myself.

"I don't recall getting an email in my inbox, let me check," I told her. I looked and didn't find it. "Wait, let me check my Junk Folder," I said. I looked for about 1 minute and there it was. Pretty important email for my junk folder I thought. Why did it go there?

 

Names have been removed to protect the innocent.

Were their hearts in the right place? You bet. But probably NOT a good idea to include the word "SPAM" in the subject line.

Just a friendly recommendation to all.

Crate & Barrel is Missing the Boat - Content Can Be King!

Sounds harsh huh? I don't think harsh enough actually. Look, I like the ole' C&B (especially the all new CB2) but I think they could be doing a better job. How?

I got the new Crate & Barrel catalog in the mail the other day. Cool! I like dreaming about outdoor living (cuz it is NOT happening here in chilly San Francisco!). They've got some really great pictures of a picnic scene with sandwiches and wine, then a great dining set with dishes on the table, then a nice weber grill with some skewers on a tray, and even a nice shot of some peppers frying on a grill pan. I even clicked on Summer Quenchers because I was sure that  headline would surely bring some quenching recipes. Nope.

What really got me going this fine morning was that there is a complete absence of any recipes that might go well with grilling, with any of their pots and pans, an absence of how really delicious summer food looks set up on a table and really the lack people in any shot.

C&B, Williams Sonoma is cleaning your clock. I hopped over to the WS site and they've got a whole section on Recipes. In the Recipe tab I search on "Roaster" because I wanted to know what I could Roast and I was presented with 74 recipes! Then I clicked around and even found Video Recipes on how to use a Weber and make Coffee Rubbed Prime Rib. I'm sold. I might even need that Weber Grill and some utensils too!

My point? In this situation content can sell the product. C&B has all the essentials to be able to do this but they don't pull it across the finish line.

Other situations that might lend themselves to content driven emails, websites and communications? What is your story around your product?

Wineries - Wines offer another great case for pairing varietals with food recipes, but you also might think about featuring the story of the winery or the passion of your winemaker.

Jewelry - Offer the story of the stones you use in your pieces or a story about how you began making jewelry.

Cars - Mini Cooper does a nice job offering up the History of the Mini as well as a community for the Mini owners and games like Word of the Day, fun Motoring Citations where you can write up your friends.

Retail - Due Maternity has celebrity fashion pages, blogs, a great marketing tool "Look Who's Prego" and nifty tools like Create Your Own Calendar, Countdown Clock and Wish List, all designed to sell more product.

Home Depot does a great job with content around selling their products, especially for the "Do-it-Yourself-ers".

Fitness Centers/Equipment - Write about an exercise of the month with a piece of gym equipment that you sell or your center offers.

Bars/Restaurants - Offer up your "secret" recipe for a popular drink or dish. Don't worry, no one can do it better than you, but they'll sure have fun trying!

Non Profit Organizations - You all have stories to tell about your cause. VR customers Street Schools and Children Today do a great job at this.

You can use content either very simply (a recipe) or more difficult (a game) but any way you do it it can help you sell more. Hey, I'd keep the C&B catalog around more if it had some good content in it and who knows maybe even buy a Roaster!

Are you using content to drive more sales? Tell us how!