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3 Tips For Writing More Effective E-Mail Marketing Messages

by Bob Bly

Today I want to share with you the 3 most important things I've learned about writing winning e-mail marketing campaigns.

The first is: when your e-mail copy makes reference to what's going on in the news the same week—or even better, the same day—you distribute it, your response rates soar.

Financial publishers were probably the first to discover this: e-mail messages that reflect what's going on in the market on the day they are distributed—for instance, "gold hits $1,700 per ounce,,,should you buy more?"—pull much better than generic promotional e-mails or those with evergreen content.

The idea of including news in your copy is not new. But e-mail marketing makes it easier to more precisely coordinate and time your e-mail messages with current events and developments.

Of course, it is easier to tie in with news and current events for some products than others. A company that sells aluminium siding to homeowners might find it more difficult to link their e-mail copy to Obama's latest speech than a company promoting oil and gas stocks.

My second tip for writing winning e-mail messages: giving away content in the e-mail itself is, contrary to what you might expect, a way to strengthen copy and results.

I say "contrary to what you might expect" because, you might reason, "If I give the information away in the e-mail, the reader's curiosity is satisfied, and he does not have to click through to find the answers he is looking for."

The trick is to give "partial content" as a sample of the kind of help your product, service ir firm offers.

Ideally, this could be something as quick as a simple how-to tip embedded in the e-mail copy. Then, you promise many more useful tips and advice when the reader clicks through.

This works for two reasons. First, people are trained on the Internet to expect free content, so this technique fulfills their expectation.

Second, including actual content in your e-mail marketing—and not just teasing the reader with promises to provide valuable content when they respond—demonstrates your expertise and knowledge right then and there in the e-mail.

The reader is quickly convinced you know what you are talking about, and therefore, may be a resource he wants to know better.

My third tip for writing winning e-mail messages: open rates and click-through rates both increase when your e-mail marketing messages match—in look, content, tone and style—the other e-mails prospects get from you or the list owner on a regular basis.

For instance, if your e-mail is going to an opt-in list of subscribers to a text e-newsletter, your response willbe better if you send a text e-mail rather than an HTML.

If people on your list are used to extremely short e-mail messages, a long-copy e-mail blast probably won't work as well as a short teaser e-mail linked to a landing page where they can read the rest of the message.

Take a look at past e-mail promotions to the list that worked as well as issues of e-newsletters these readers receive.

If they all content graphs or technical information or pictures of pets or news or a pithy how-to tip or survey results, then your e-mail probably should, too.

Reason: people on a given list are 'trained' to accept e-mails with similar look and feel to the ones they get regularly.

When your e-mail matches their expectations, they believe it's something they read regularly and open it.

When your e-mail looks wildly different, they view it as spam and delete.

Bob Bly is the author of "World's Best Copywriting Secrets" and has written copy for more than 100 companies including IBM, Boardroom, Medical Economics and AT&T. He is the author of more than 75 books and a columnist for Target Marketing, Early To Rise and The Writer. McGraw-Hill calls him "America's top copywriter".

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