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Tag: messaging

  • Emoticons Do NOT Elicit Emotion From Prospects

    Emoticons Do NOT Elicit Emotion From Prospects

    I got several e-mails and text messages yesterday from other professionals and colleagues that contained one or more emoticons – you know, those little symbols of smiley faces or their derivatives made out of punctuation marks. These have become more popular with the advent of phone texting and Twitter, platforms of communication which limit the character count of a message. They are safe little familiar symbols that can be used in informal, personal communication to convey mood, or indicate that the preceding message isn’t serious. But one of the messages I received was acting in a different role, that of a selling communication piece, and I felt it was inappropriate to include this little symbol in this message. It reduced the seriousness of the document, as it was intended, but it also reduced the credibility of the sender, and diluted the sales message to the point that no serious prospect would consider buying services from this company – a net loss just for using a little symbol.

    That shows the power that written communication still has to hold, engage and persuade us in today’s high-speed communications environment. It also shows how much impact a few characters can have, be it negative or positive. Written communication is one of the elements that separates Man (big M) from other animals, and as such, I feel it’s owed a certain level of respect and that each of us should practice it’s usage and strive for the highest level of clarity and effectiveness in all of our written communication efforts, no matter how trivial or insignificant it’s intent. These little symbols work against that principal, and as such have no place in professional communications.

    Language is a very powerful tool, and written language has the additional advantages of thoughtfulness and permanence. You can take your time, craft effective phrases, get the word choice exactly correct to convey slight shades of meaning, and one you write it, either on paper or on a screen, you can review it again and again, in different contexts and under different circumstances, to help digest and grasp the intended meanings over time.

    Professionals, like the consultants here at Granite Partners, spend hours and hours honing their writing skills, crafting effective copy that evokes an emotional response from the reader, one that can persuade the reader to take action, either in advertising, or in direct mail, to make a purchase, to send back a coupon, to answer a survey, to buy an ad, and a host of other activities, without using one of these little symbols. We spend days devising questions to elicit a usable response in surveys, either to be spoken or read by the respondent, and don’t use any of those little symbols. We spend hours on the wording for a headline that elicits just the right emotional response, days on a piece of collateral material, fact checking, spell checking, organizing and editing to elicit just the correct reaction to the offer and call to action – without using any of those little symbols. So why are they even here?

    People use them as a short cut. They are lazy, or not properly motivated or sufficiently educated to use their own language properly, so the symbols make it easier to convey emotion with a limited vocabulary. It may seem curmudgeonly to professional readers,  but I feel that anyone who has graduated with a diploma from a public high school paid for by tax-payers in the country should be able to craft a sentence that is adequately robust so as to not need to add an emoticon at the end to convey meaning. Maybe a little test about a week before graduation for every senior, one that asks each one to write five paragraphs that will be sufficiently eloquent to persuade the principal that they should be allowed to graduate, without using the little symbols. I wonder what that would do to summer-school enrollment . . . ?

    More about the craft of language and other fascinating topics in your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

  • E-Mail Brilliance In Bite-Sized Chunks

    E-Mail Brilliance In Bite-Sized Chunks

    5 Elements of Effective E-mail Messaging

    1)      Carry the Brand – if you send an e-mail to a new or known constituency, no matter what’s in the body of the e-mail, if it doesn’t get opened it’s a waste of time, and if you don’t have your brand prominently displayed, your chances of an “open” are decreased by 70%. Security concerns are at such a level that if you don’t recognize the sender, it will NOT get opened. Make sure your “from” address is the one the recipient will recognize. If you’re sending through a third party e-mail service, which most will be for lists of any size, be sure they have created an outgoing box your audience will recognize.

    2)      Make the Subject Compelling – in the inbox or in preview, even on mobile devices, the subject may be the only thing your recipients will see. If you get it wrong, it’s irrelevant, looks promotional or like a scam or come-on, it won’t get opened. Give the receiver a reason to read further, make it relevant and within your brand characteristic list. Then it reflects accurately and well upon your effort.

    3)      Make it Personal – Modern e-mail technology allows for multiple personalization of e-mail messages – use it. Sending e-mail that looks like a static ad says to the recipient “you don’t know me”. You do know them a little so show that you not only know but have something you think they would find of value. Call them by their name, use their company name, pitch it to their gender, include a neighborhood fact – all this comes from just the address block on a mailing list! Make the technology work for you.

    4)      Get it Up Front – Structure the message like a press release – put the most relevant information in the first few sentences, front load the offer, use a coherent and attention getting headline and subhead. Pique the reader’s interest, get him to read further, and draw them in with relevancy. Most people, if they open your message at all, will only read the top 10% of the message before deleting. You only have a few seconds to get your point across, so make it short and sweet.

    5)      Make it Easy to Respond – One of e-mail’s main advantages are the links to web content you can include. Whether it’s to drive web traffic, drive donation, registration for events, make it a simple single click to get them the relevant information you wish to convey. Multiple links should be part of the body of the message, as well as at the bottom where the response mechanism is likely to land. Converted links are fine so that the message makes sense even when printed, and avoids long URL addresses that interrupt the flow of the message. Provide links in multiple formats, both full length and blind as part of the call to action, so that if it gets printed and passed along on paper, you can at least type the URL into the browser and reach the response page. Devise a specific landing page, so that the link takes them to the specific response you want, and they don’t get lost among multiple pages of your site.

     

    List Hygiene – Essential elements for high deliverability

    Keeping your e-mail list clean and functioning has many advantages, both reputational and economic.  There are many parallels between snail-mail mailing lists and electronic mailing lists. The ISPs function in the Post Office role, and they have their rules of conduct just like their paper corollary.

    Several rules will help you keep the list clean and effective, now and into the future.

    1)      Respect Your Recipients – when bouncebacks and requests to unsubscribe should be respected and acted upon immediately. All “Unsubscribes” should be scrubbed prior to the next mailing. Bouncebacks should be examined to determine the reason and a decision made whether to repeat them or drop them immediately. Remove any duplicates – they may not you’re your message once, they sure don’t need it twice.

    2)      Respect the System – ISPs are duty bound by their customers and enrollees to police their bandwidth and protect their customers. Repeatedly mailing to bad addresses will alert the ISPs and your mail may be considered SPAM. Set up feedback loops with the ISPs to have them alert you to requests to stop mail and other dead ends in your list. Take your bounceback that are bad links and use them as the seed of a suppression list for future mailings.

    3)      Check it on the way in and the way back – use data checkers in your data entry screens to keep out obvious errors and fat-finger mistakes – simple things like seeing the “!” in place of the “@” can raise your deliverability. Check the bouncebacks for simple errors and correct them immediately, especially errors in the domain name, which can be done with a find/replace algorithm.

    4)      Take out the obvious offenders –  remove all addresses that have the word “SPAM” in them, and distribution addresses – sales@domain.com or info@domain.org – those folks didn’t give you permission to reach their entire sales department, and will view your mail as spam and report it to the ISPs as such. SPAM addresses are likely traps added by the ISP and will land you in trouble quickly.

    5)      Routinely Revive your Opt-in – once you have permission via opt-in from a recipient to send something to them, don’t count on them remembering that they granted it. For regular e-mailers, those with periodicals and times messages, refresh your opt-in message and take the opportunity to show any value-adds that make it worth it to grant permission.

    If your lists are large, some mechanical assistance might be in order. LeadSpend recently introduced a new email validation service that correctly verifies over 97% of all email addresses. Check it out here http://www.leadspend.com/validation . Companies like FreshAddress and others can do some of the hygiene for you and keep your reputation clean with the ISPs.

    Mechanical Considerations

     

    1)      Make sure your HTML and other formats are readable by ALL formats of e-mail reader, including Outlook and others. If using a service they will likely ask for three versions of the e-mail, one for each of the two major formats and a plain text version.

    2)      Don’t count on an image to tell the story, use text as well. Some mail programs are programmed to strip out the images, or deny your message entry as a result of containing the image, so the recipient never sees them. Some very strict firewalls will deny any e-mail with any images in them at all.

    3)      Give your audience a chance to unsubscribe – always. If your content is relevant, they won’t take advantage of it, and if it’s not, you won’t waste money on sending to them in the future.

    4)      Provide a phone number – some people still aren’t comfortable spending via the web, but will gladly give out their credit card number over the phone, thinking its safer.

    5)      Make sure the links and phone numbers are current and functional – enough said.

    6)      Test color – some colors read strangely on different monitors and different graphics cards.

    7)      Keep fancy backgrounds and images sizes to a minimum and still maintain quality – if the e-mail is a huge file it might get filtered out of many firewalls based on size.

    8)      Make the headline tell the tale – some readers don’t get past the top three inches of the screen.

    9)      Format for mobile – most don’t do that yet, and you’ll gain an advantage over them if yours is readable on a Blackberry or iPhone.

    10)   Learn from your mistakes and READ your  metrics report from the ISPs and your service provider – there is a lot of valuable information that can be gleaned from open rates, dwell times and other stats, ready to be used when you design the next campaign for this same audience.

    If you found this information valuable and would like more, be sure and pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • E-Mail: B-to-B Marketing’s Secret Weapon

    E-Mail: B-to-B Marketing’s Secret Weapon

    We use e-mail for a number of purposes, both for our own marketing efforts and on behalf of clients or as part of their plans for growth and retention. I’ve always thought it was a very flexible, very effective medium when used properly. Unfortunately, some among the marketing community have overused, abused and hijacked this wondrously inexpensive way of reaching out to customers, prospects and others in a personal, accountable way, and given it a bad rap, not to mention fatiguing the general public somewhat, and cutting open rates.

    A good copywriter, with a good list and reasonable data skills can make tremendous in-roads using e-mail in several ways.

    Outreach

    Creating a small community of purchasers or converting good warm leads into sales is what makes e-mail shine. It’s personal, it’s flexible, it can carry text, graphics, imagery, color palette, brand, everything you need to reach out to your audience, qualify the top responders, and keep providing them reasons to buy. It’s also fast, and fairly innocuous – if you receive one and it’s not for you, simply delete it – no waste, no environmental impact, no anger necessary. It’s also fast! You can get an e-mail campaign planned out, written, tested, set up, and sent out in a matter of a few hours at fastest, maybe a day or two if you have more elements to put together.

    Customer Relationship Building

    Now that you’ve created your own little “community” of customers, extending, building and broadening that relationship is a task that e-mail does very well, and most of it can be automated. Small shops, service-sellers and sole proprietors can keep in touch, spread the good word and keep customers up to date on changes, new offerings, schedule changes and availability changes, discounts, and a host of other semi-transactional communications with customers, keeping your brand top-of-mind, upselling, cross-selling, incentivising referrals and keeping your relationship alive and active, which directly contributes to the top-line, and moves the bottom line in a positive direction. What’s not to like? These types of activities used to take hundreds of hours a year, and the scope and frequency was limited. Now, not only can these messages be automated to be triggered in response to a contact, a purchase, a query, whatever, but they can also be tracked, quantified, monitored, measured, and the data can be sliced and diced any number of ways, letting you constantly test, tighten and improve your outreach and customer contact far above and beyond what used to be possible.

     

    Prospecting

    For those folks who’ve never heard of you, imagine their surprise when they hear from you not once, not twice, but weekly for a couple of months, each time refining and improving the relevance of the message until curiosity gets the better of them and they open and read your mail – score! Cost? No more than a phone call with a bad script, and more effective then you can imagine. According to Marketing Sherpa, 85% of CEOs have an expectation that e-mail will increase lead conversion/sales revenue, when only 65% of them put those goals as a high priority. In nearly every category, and there were 10 in total, e-mail beat expectation of CEO’s in terms of meeting business goals for which it was used. I can’t think of any other medium that can boast that kind of success rate and still stay under the radar!

    Used thoughtfully, correctly, and politely, e-mail can carry the day for marketers, both b-to-b and consumer, at a lower cost per customer acquisition than almost anything else other than social media, and is more accountable and more directed that even the most powerful platform out there. Let’s hope the mis-users have moved on to something else and e-mail can return to business of business as we move forward in the new economy. Now, if we could just find a better launch pad than Outlook . . .

    If you found this valuable, you can have more of this type of information delivered to your inbox weekly, simply subscribe to this blog above, and don’t forget to pick up your copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes”

     

  • Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing in Electronic Clothing . . .

    Digital Marketing is Direct Marketing in Electronic Clothing . . .

    With some prodding from Eric Mohr (http://www.linkedin.com/in/ebmdirectmarketingservicesllc )I gave some thought to the reputation of Direct Marketing in the digital age. I read and absorb hundreds of electronic messages every day in the marketing sphere, everything from blog posts to group discussion posts, to e-mails promoting upcoming webinars on marketing topics touting digital marketing techniques, ad nauseum . . .

    What that gives me, besides a huge headache from message overload, is a good scan overview of what’s up in the marketing space, who’s promoting what and what techniques marketers and consultants are using to help their clients succeed (usually). After all that reading, there was something in the back of my mind that bothered and irritated me about most of the promotions and webinar topics – and it finally dawned on me that they looked eerily similar to the promotions and conference topics I was seeing two decades ago pertaining to direct marketing techniques!

    Now, don’t get me wrong, I understand that the new digital marketing sphere isn’t a straight rehash of direct marketing – there are many differences in delivery, technology and targeting operations. What bothered me is the approach that new marketers took, the tone if you will, of the communications, which tends toward the downward focused and toward a certain smug word choice that hit me as an experienced marketer from a bad direction. The underlying meta-text in many of these messages tends toward something like “Gee, you haven’t figured out how to use e-mail effectively? We’ve known about it for a long time, here’s what we ‘experienced’ digital marketers have learned in the last two years”.

    Guess what, digital marketers, direct marketers who are experienced and have applied their experiences to the use of e-mail, video marketing, targeting and social media, have had it figured out for nearly half a century! There still needs to be a good headline(read: Subject line), the offer has to be compelling to drive response (read:traffic), you can still break up the copy sentence length to help improve readability (read: chunking), you still need to send the message to the ‘right’ people on the ‘right’ list (read: geo-tracking for local promotion, keywords and webtracking for global campaigns), and most importantly, you still have to have good data, and use it appropriately, to reach out to the audience, engage their attention, and prompt a response (read: drive click-thru).

    Clearly, good DM skills, like copy writing, offer formulation, list selection and data mining still have a place in the success of digital marketing, regardless of what the new label for them is. So, why have the large consumer companies tended to gravitate toward the “new digital marketing” agencies to set up e-mail campaigns, social media programs and the like, if those skills reside in abundance at their usual DM agency? Because, like everyone else, hanging the “modern” or “digital” moniker on something makes it the new, shiny, spiffy cutting-edge ‘thing’, that everybody feels is the magic bullet that will solve their marketing problems. What the digital folks have going for them is the carefully crafted perception that digital marketing is “cheaper” or even “free” compared to all that paper, printing, postage, nixies, BRE accounts, etc., and in some respects that’s true. But I don’t know anyone who selects a major agency or marketing firm based on whether they use the cheapest methods. They select them based on creativity, skills, and innovation of approach, passion and inspired thinking. So how did the less experienced (by their own admission and by historical fact) agencies end up capturing this business that the old, experienced guys are perfectly well suited to capture?

    Two reasons, I think.

    1) The old guys failed to adapt, like saber-toothed cats. When digital was developing, these more experienced marketers often doubled down on their traditional skills, beefed up their relationships with traditional clients and grew them, rather than branch out and create digital divisions or think tanks to investigate and develop talent and expertise in those areas.

    2) The younger guys were deeply steeped in computer skills and culture, and saw the opportunities computers represented based on a comfort with the new paradigm in a very hands-on way. It’s a short step from sending e-mail instead of printing and mailing business letters to bulk e-mail and social media promotion, when you already spend a majority of time behind a terminal out of knowledge and curiosity. If a computer is your greatest tool in life, everything starts to look like a good digital adaptation.

    The downside is, much like the shift in the publishing world from printed books and magazines (done by professionals) to desktop publishing in the late 80s early 90s – having the tools doesn’t impart the underlying skills and abilities to make the final product effective. Many a butt-ugly company newsletter was produced by unskilled administrative help, involving many unusual fonts, bad design, poor use of things like bold and italics, bad rules and underlining, and a host of ills that the pros learned to avoid in their formal training. But they could do it cheaper, get it out in ‘good enough’ form and move on to something else.

    Same is true here – the digital guys understand the delivery mechanisms and constraints being used today much better, avoiding spam filters, enhanced delivery, subject lines that conform and pass through firewalls, embedded imagery and the like – but that doesn’t make them copywriters, or graphic designers, or impart understanding of consumer purchasing behavior or emotional engagement – ever talked to a computer geek at a party – not the height of emotional involvement in the conversation, was it?

    We’ve got the tools on the digital side that traditional direct marketing could only dream of even ten years ago – the ability to track audiences down to the individual level based on behavior, not just transactional history – a huge boon to experienced marketers! Now if we can just get the two camps together, to use those tools effectively based on years of tried and true techniques of engagement, not just delivery, marketing can rise to the level of a pure science and really drive revenue and loyalty like never before – something to put on your Christmas list for this year, gang . . .

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  • Get Top Results When You Crank Up the “Direct” in Your Direct Mail

    Get Top Results When You Crank Up the “Direct” in Your Direct Mail

    By its very nature, direct mail promotions are designed to be one-to-one communication vehicles. As marketers, we are all aware of this in the back of our minds, but in practice, sometimes the “direct” portion drops off the map, and we end up producing unplaced promotional brand ads in an envelope. If you want o see the best returns possible from your direct mail program, make sure the “Direct” angle gets full attention.

    There are several ways to rev up the “you” in your programs. The most effective one starts with the concept of the mailing itself. As you envision the final mailing, conceptualize your offer, the list, the copy platform, the thematic graphics and other elements, get a good fix on your target audience for this particular mailing.

    The “It” Person

    Now take this to the next level, and picture in your mind a specific individual who fits the descriptors and parameters of your typical customer in your target market. Ask some key questions about your mailing with regard to this person: 1) Would this mailing appeal to this person? 2) Is the offer suitable for them and their needs? 3) Would this copy and these graphics attract their attention and resonate with them in an emotional way? 4) Is there enough reason for them to respond, to pay, to write a check and send it in?

    If the answer to any of those questions is no for that mythical person in your head, then adjust, correct, edit and revamp until the answer is yes to all of them.

    Copy is King

    Many of these personal elements start with the copy. Often, the offer is what it is, and either can only be changed minimally to match the audience or is inviolate based on the time and resources available. If you’re in that box, then the solution is to start with the copy.

    The word “You” is extremely powerful – indeed, you can’t write a true direct mail piece without it. If your copy speaks directly to that person in your mind, you are by fiat having that one-to-one conversation, and must use “You” to address that person directly, in first person voice. In today’s highly digital climate, the use of a person’s name in the copy is almost passé, but you would be surprised how little it actually gets used, aside from personalized laser letters. For postcards, fixed multi-page packages, and other formats, digital technology allows for the use of the recipient’s name and other information in repeated appropriate fashion, to juice up your message and really push the audience’s emotional buttons. This will drive your point home almost as powerfully as the word FREE in the offer, and will draw in the reader and involve them in your description and your message.

    Good copy for direct mail should tell a story. Listing benefits, describing features has its place, but the meat of the piece is a message directly specifically at the reader like there is no one else around, and it’s just the two of you having a short conversation. The story should be illustrative, persuasive, cohesive, and have a point. No matter how long it is, (and there are endless debates about copy length – see Hershel Gordon Lewis for details on both sides) you should make a point, explain why your point is the best, make your point again, and get out after asking for the order.

    Let the Data Be Your Guide

    To be able to write persuasive, effective copy, to concoct an effective working offer, you have to really know the audience. You can get to know the audience, but to do that, some research is in order. Carefully select your list to be as homogeneous as possible, to select as many similarities as you can to define the audience as finely as you can. That list if selects is the basis for your research. In order to get to know those people (and a market never bought anything, people buy products), you have to have an actual conversation with a few of them, to pick up the subtleties, the similarities and the things that really push their buttons emotionally that get them going, that get them excited.

    To help visualize the audience better, pretend to have a conversation with someone representative of the target group, and ask yourself these questions:

    1) How does this person speak, what word choices do they make?

    2) How do they synthesize the information you are presenting? Do they parrot it back to you verbatim, or do they absorb, summarize and paraphrase your concepts?

    3) Do they pick up and use any jargon you use related to the product?

    4) Does the product seem to be something they need, or just want?

    5) Do they seem to understand the product you are offering or are they just being polite?

    These ideas should give you plenty of ammunition with which to shoot down your current work and start from scratch, to really personalize your direct mail and make them truly “Direct” to the audience. Apply these techniques to your last project, recreate it with the new approach, and A/B test it against your control – you will be surprised at the results.

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  • More Isn’t Always Better . . .

    More Isn’t Always Better . . .

    How many of you receive more than 200 e-mail messages per day? How many of you receive more than 50 text messages per day? How many of you read more than 200 entries on social media platforms per day? Add to that radio and TV messages, Internet pop-ups, banner ads, product packages, direct mail promotions and other “input” and you have a perfect recipe for sensory overload. Studies have shown that while most people think they can multi-task well, nearly all of them showed reduced focus and performance standards on tests that required them to concentrate on as many as three tasks at once. The tasks got completed eventually, but not always with the level of quality required, and in approximately the same amount of elapsed time as would have passed if they had done each task individually in serial fashion. So where’s the gain?

    With that many messages coming into our consciousness, none of them receive the attention they deserve, to the point where we actually spend as much energy prioritizing them as we do comprehending them and acting upon them.

    Too many choices, too much information, not enough filtering or discrimination between input sources leads to inaction, dilutes the impact of each message, and slows progress and productivity. As marketers, we need to constantly be aware of the environment in which our customers and prospects function. Bombarding them with messages doesn’t necessarily lead to action, but does lead to saturation, and that saturation point is far more quickly reached today than it was even two years ago.

    That’s actually good news for intelligent marketers. It means that spending more money on higher insertion frequency, broader media buys, longer ad schedules, and higher print and circulation runs won’t get the desired results, and that knowledge allows us to focus on greater message positioning, greater relevance, tighter targeting, higher impact, and better value in our communications. Less is more, and better is less.

    Make it perfect, make it relevant, make it resonate, make it accessible on many platforms and through many channels to allow for preference, but don’t bombard or carpet-bomb in order to achieve penetration – the shields are up and it won’t work!

    Spend the savings in increased production value, higher creativity, better thought processes, higher levels of innovation, originality and transparency – it will pay off ten-fold in the long run.

    If you think this makes sense, or would like more information on this topic or others, Pick up a copy of “The Marketing Doctor’s Survival Notes” – a great addition to your professional library.

     

  • E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    E-Mail Makes A Comeback!

    There was a time, not too long ago, where marketing pundits and other “experts” were saying that E-mail had run it’s course as a marketing media vehicle, that it was stale, that it’s open rate was too low, that the spam filters and firewalls had made it nearly impossible to get good results with e-mail marketing.

    Now those same pundits (of whom I was not one) are having to eat their words as major marketers are singing the praises of a well-crafted, simple e-mail to your hottest, most worked on lists. As usual, it’s the message, not the medium that counts, and a well-crafted effective anything will always beat the schlocky, hacky, abusive e-mail campaigns that desensitized audiences and killed response rates based on misuse and abuse of the medium and therefore the audience.

    As always, it comes down to personal approaches, real, workmanlike copy, free of typos, grammatical redundancy, slang and other silliness that kill credibility. E-mail is still mail, and it’s still sent to a single address, which means there’s a person on the other end. Simply write with that person in mind, on a one-to-one basis, and suddenly watch open rates soar, response rates double or triple, and sales shoot skyward.

    Never mind all the gimmicks, bells and whistles. I know of one marketer that sends out plain text stuff that nets him phenomenal response rates – not a photo to be seen, not even a logo, just good effective copy, real headlines that resonate with the audience – his secret? He writes to his Grandmother in his mind – if the offer is clear enough for her to understand, if the copy clean enough that she won’t cringe (Grandma was a Jr. High English teacher), if the intent clear enough and the benefits plain enough for her to like it, he’s got a winner. Yes, he primarily markets to an older audience – but these days unless you work for Disney, who doesn’t? Not a bad acid test – can your latest missive pass it?

    Keep it simple and keep it direct – speak to a specific person – if you personalize, be sure to get their name and gender correct, otherwise don’t bother. Nothing will kill response quicker than the feeling that you didn’t even care enough to send the right message – it’s like reading someone else’s mail, and it creeps people out.

    Keep the file small, keep the message simple – huge files still give viewers trouble, big images still get caught in spam filters and firewall screeners. The trend in design these days is to make the whole e-mail an image or series of images – and my browser is set to make me actually request these image files in order to view them – why make me work to see your information? It would have to be a heck of a headline to make me click three more times and wait for them to load, when I can simply hit “delete”.

    A well-researched list is still the key to success with E-mail. Most rented lists under perform, as e-mail addresses change more frequently than physical addresses. A self-selected list is best – based on a web login, or a previous response, or an inquiry, something you can verify and be sure is “opt-in” work very well – permission marketing is still king!

    Frequency is something you can debate all day, but suffice to say if you irritate your audience, your response will drop, and often less is more. I’d rather hear from you 4 times a year with relevant info than 8 or 12 times with fluff and nonsense. Save it for the good stuff, if you’re going to go to all the trouble to put together the mechanics of an e-mail, it might as well be a good one . . .

    Send me a copy of the worst e-mail you’ve received recently, and I’ll send it back to you with an analysis – FREE.

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