Daniel Levis’ latest ‘Total Package’ article is titled “Do You Make These Common E-mail Marketing Mistakes?”. [Copywriting Article]

Daniel Levis’ latest ‘Total Package’ article:

Do You Make These Common E-mail Marketing Mistakes?

Dear Web Business-Builder,

Over the years I’ve had the good fortune to have worked with quite a few different businesses on improving their e-mail results.

And in my own business, I’ve sent out thousands of broadcasts and sequential messages.

So I’ve been able to test the impact of a variety of different things on response.

And today, I’m going to share with you a few e-mail less-than-best-practices that almost always get in the way of increased sales and profits.

Sometimes correcting just one or two of these little sales and readership killers can yield a nice bump in the number of dollars flowing into your account.

Nice work when you can get it. So pitter patter let’s get at her …

From Line mistakes — Often, I see marketers putting their company name … or a trade name that describes their product … or the name of their publication … in the “from line” of all of their promotional e-mails.

Now think about this for a minute. Why is e-mail such an effective marketing medium in the first place? What’s one of its primary strengths? That’s right, it’s personal.

Mixed in with the commercial e-mails, there are a fair few from friends and acquaintances. Chances are your prospect started sending and receiving e-mail in the first place for personal reasons.

Ergo, one of the best ways to avoid instant deletion is to put the name of a company figurehead in the “from line.” This is in fact much more than a way to get e-mail opened.

It is fundamental to communicating in a way that engenders liking and relationship and trust. Anything that smacks of cold, corporate speak and overt “branding” usually sends response rates tumbling.

Another common “from line” mistake is inconsistency of figurehead. Once you’ve established a figurehead, stick with it. If you must switch figureheads, or add a figurehead, realize it will take substantial effort to pass the baton from the known to the unknown. Use repeated introductions, or have the prospect actually opt in to receive the new figurehead’s communication.

As a rule of thumb, the “from line” is sacrosanct. It establishes you as an insider in your prospect’s in-box. Changing it makes you a stranger all over again.

Subject Line Mistakes — While predictability and familiarity are the hallmarks of a successful “from line”, the opposite is true of the subject line.

Yet the desire to sneak a company name … or a trade name that describes their product … or the name of their publication … seems to spill over to the subject line for many of the marketers I’ve worked with. And I discourage this strenuously.

Think of your subject line as a headline. When writing a headline, you know — or should know — that superfluous words lower response.

Here’s a little experiment for you: Go to your swipe file of winning headlines right now and see if you can remove a single word from any of the headlines and still have them make sense. Chances are you can’t. While you’re there, take note of how many waste words on branding. Superfluous words and branding don’t help when it comes to getting people to read your copy.

And it’s the same with an e-mail subject line. Yet how often do you see marketers trying to do “branding” in the subject line? Like this:

Dog Training Daily: House Training – 6 Tips for Quick House Training

You see it a lot! Every single e-mail has the name of the publication in the subject line.

These attempts at branding contribute nothing to the message conveyed in the subject line. And our testing shows they lower response. Removing them and simply saying, “6 Tips for Quick House Training” is almost guaranteed to give an instant lift.

Even worse, I’ve seen some marketers putting the date in the subject line along with their branding, like this:

Dog Training Daily – February 4, 2009: House Training – 6 Tips for Quick House Training

How dumb is that?

Branding and other routine recurring details have no place in the subject line. Branding should be taking place in the “from line.”

With the subject line, novelty is your friend. Keep them guessing to keep them opening. Zig when your competitors zag. Zag when they zig. Predictability in the subject line kills readership and sales. End of story.

Another common mistake — even for marketers who realize that a subject line is like a mini-headline — is a lack of brevity. The longer the subject line is, the more effort required to read it. If your message requires more than a single fixation of the eye to comprehend, you’re at an immediate disadvantage.

If it’s really long, your prospects may even have to take some action other than simply looking at it to read it. Those using Microsoft Outlook to read your mail may have to hover over the subject line or resize the field just to read it. Can you say, “kiss of death?”

Bottom line: Short subject lines get opened. Long ones get ignored.

Try to keep your subject lines 30 characters or less. More than 40 characters is definitely too long. Keep them as short as you can. In a pinch, drop the personalization tag. Another trick — Use brackets to separate a compound thought into two separate fixations, like this: Quick House Training … (6 Huge Tips)

Formatting Mistakes — Should you use HTML or plain text? In a word, “both.” Allow me to explain …

I am a big believer in the personal look. In almost every test we’ve done it yields a better result. So I prefer a very plain appearance over a lot of fancy graphics and tables. That’s not to say HTML doesn’t have its place.

With plain text, you won’t get open rate statistics. You can track click through, but if your e-mail bombs you won’t know if the bottleneck is in the subject line or in the body copy. When you send HTML you get this important information.

For this reason, my preference is to use HTML — but with very little formatting, so the e-mail looks like plain text. A little bolding and highlighting are OK, as long as the e-mail retains that personal look. I rarely run plain text unless I’ve tested click through and open rates first with an HTML version of the e-mail.

The best practice is to use MIME format, which distributes your e-mails in both HTML and plain text.

Just like with any piece of copy you’re writing, anything you can do to make reading easier is likely to improve click through. Keep your paragraphs narrow (30 to 50 characters per line) and shallow (4 or 5 lines max). And if you can get a link into the first few lines of copy, it will probably increase your click through rate.

Another thing to avoid is long ugly looking tracking links. They look like affiliate links and if they’re really long they can get wrapped across two lines rendering them un-clickable. Be sure and include the http:// in any URLs as well because some of the large e-mail service providers won’t present them as “live” without the full prefix.

Selling in a Vacuum — Another huge factor that impacts the responsiveness of a list is the conditioned expectation created by previous e-mails.  Your e-mail arrives in their in-box, and they anticipate what’s inside, based on past experience.

That means each e-mail you send impacts the open rate, readership, and click through rate of subsequent e-mails. You are not selling in a vacuum.

If people obtain satisfaction from reading your e-mails they’ll keep opening them and reading them. For this to happen, each touch needs to be as relevant, useful, unique, and enjoyable as you can make it.

Here are four little rules for you to follow:

  1. Don’t expose your list to things they didn’t sign on for. If they signed on for dog training they’re not going to be responsive to the latest network marketing scheme.
  2. Do provide a healthy dose of useful, problem solving information right inside your e-mails … not necessarily on every single e-mail, but often. Bribe them to engage in the sales process. Give before you get.
  3. Don’t jump on every affiliate bandwagon that comes along. If you want to promote a popular launch, at least find a unique angle. How many e-mails with “Google gave him $1.2 million” in the subject line did you open this week?  How likely are you to open the next one from the marketers who are sending them to you?
  4. Don’t be boring. Keep your e-mails interesting and entertaining. Promote things you’re personally passionate about.

Following these four little rules takes a little creativity and discipline, but in the long run your list will reward you in spades … with robust open rates, readership, click through, and sales.

Until next time, Good Selling!

Daniel Levis

Editor, The Web Marketing Advisor

THE TOTAL PACKAGE

Daniel Levis is a top marketing consultant & direct response copywriter based in Toronto, Canada and publisher of the world famous copywriting anthology Masters of Copywriting featuring the selling wisdom of 44 of the “Top Money” marketing minds of all time, including Clayton Makepeace, Dan Kennedy, Joe Sugarman, John Carlton, Joe Vitale, Michel Fortin, Richard Armstrong and dozens more! For a FREE excerpt visit http://www.SellingtoHumanNature.com.

He is also one of the leading Web conversion experts operating online today, and originator of the 5R System (TM), a strategic process for engineering enhanced Internet profits. For a free overview of Daniel’s system, click here.

Attribution Statement: This article was first published in The Total Package. To sign-up to receive your own FREE subscription to The Total Package and claim four FREE money making e-books go to www.makepeacetotalpackage.com.

The Total Package

*IMNewsWatch would like to thank Clayton Makepeace for granting permission to reprint this article.

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