8. Email Marketing

Recent years have seen a massive surge in the popularity of email as a medium to supplement or replace traditional mail in DM, to the point where few b2b campaigns (and an increasing number of b2c campaigns) are complete without an email component. There is a good number of reasons for this popularity, such as:

• Email delivery is around three or four orders of magnitude cheaper than post, plus it is virtually instantaneous.
• With email you can tell automatically when a message is opened or an address is defunct.
• It is much easier for customers to respond to email, either via a reply-to address or a link to a website.
• Emails can also easily be sent to other personal electronic devices, such as personal digital assistants or mobile phones.

Given these (and other) benefits, it is a shame that a number of less-than-scrupulous email marketers have spoilt the pitch for the rest of the industry by flooding inboxes around the world with unsolicited commercial email or ‘spam’. (The common name is thought to have been derived from a Monty Python sketch in which Spam, a meat product, was offered with everything on sale in a café.)

If you use a common email platform such as Microsoft Hotmail, you can end up getting several hundred spam emails a week. Even extreme low-grade spam (of which there is an awful lot) is often made to appear legitimate by the inclusion of an ‘unsubscribe’ opt-out link that promises to remove the user from the mailing list their address was found on.

Selecting this option is worse than doing nothing, however; it will either lead to a dead-end link or, more likely, alert the list user to the fact that your email is alive, so your address can be re-sold to other spammers.

Given that most people (and companies) pay for their email and internet connections and are wasting both money and time whenever they have to deal with spam, it is not surprising that unsolicited email is a major bane for both targets and the internet and DM industries in general. Legitimate email marketers usually work with lists where users have specifically stated they want to receive information; these are either built up in-house from an existing customer-base or shared between commercial partners with the express consent of the user.

Spam, though, is often difficult to tell from bona-fide opt-in communications (called ‘permission-based marketing’ in the industry), which means most email users soon get wary of anything that looks like a commercial message and filter it out.

There are other drawbacks to the medium that you need to be aware of, too:

• Even without spam, the number of email messages being sent around the world is growing to the point where a typical user is likely to get overwhelmed. It is said that a typical business user spends over two hours a day just dealing with email.
• Although most email platforms allow you to receive messages (called HTML emails) with formatting, images and other design elements, you cannot guarantee all your targets will see these as intended. So, design-wise, email marketing offers two options: either send out HTML emails and bear in mind that a proportion of your prospects may end up getting a messy mix of text and computer code, or stick to plain text with no formatting whatsoever.
• Unlike postal addresses, not everyone you may want to reach has got email and certain sectors of the population are not likely to have it for some time (although, from a marketing perspective, it may be possible to reach some of these with mobile text messaging instead).

Tips for direct email copywriting

Bearing in mind the above, you should:

• Write text that will have impact on its own, without formatting, unless you are reasonably certain that your targets can receive HTML email.
• Avoid anything in the subject line that may make the email look like spam. This includes multiple exclamation marks (or, indeed, any exclamation marks), nonspecific subjects (‘hey’; ‘I thought you might be interested in this’; and so on), all-caps and truncated or corrupted headings (‘HEY!!!!! I THOUGHT YOU MIGHT BExguqua’).

Things that will help make your emails more effective include:

• Coming from a reputable source (a category which hopefully includes your clients).
• Having a subject line that offers a clear and obvious reason for being read (‘Improve your customer retention by 10%’ rather than ‘News from Company X’, for example).
• Talking benefits right up front.
• Using a tone that is informal, but not necessarily chummy. Remember that emails are more personal than letters.
• Breaking up your copy into small chunks, to make it easier to read. Ideally, you should have no more than three lines together on screen and put a paragraph space in between every sentence. Break your paragraphs with one-line spaces.
• Using keyboard symbols, where necessary, to help with formatting. For example, if you need to put a line between paragraphs, use a series of dashes (———) or equals signs (= = = =).

Email newsletters

Email newsletters, often linked to a website, are a common and inexpensive form of corporate communication whose use ranges from traditional publishing through customer relationship management to internal communications.

The basic guidelines of email writing outlined above apply just as well to electronic newsletters, although there is more scope for bending the rules because you are usually talking to an audience that has specifically requested a regular communication from your client.

It will help to have some technical knowledge of web-based communications as, for example, being able to send HTML emails can make a big difference to the appearance and readability of your publication.

Electronic newsletters also have much in common with traditional publications (see Chapter 14), such as the need to create and adhere to a style guide.

If you are involved in this line of work, whether as an editor, producer or just an occasional contributor, it would be worthwhile subscribing to a few email newsletters yourself to get a feel for the medium.