Creating Emails for Maximum Results – Adam Frankin – EMSA 09
I recently revealed my “secret formula for email marketing success” during a presentation at EMSA – the Email Marketing Summit Australia.
Here’s a 5 minute snippet where I outline 6 common mistakes & I share the biggest ‘oops’ I’ve ever made!
All of you know the six most common mistakes people, including me, make. I’ll teach you how to write, find and engage in emails. I’ll teach you, most importantly, how social media can really maximise the results in email campaigns.
We do make some mistakes, don’t we? I’ve certainly made a lot and it could be prevented, so your life is mainly to serve as a warning to others. For the sake of email marketing, I’ll be the guy in the yellow jersey today, because I have seen all of the mistakes and I’ve made most of them.
Mistake Number One – Do Not Reply Address
I’m sure you got emails from an email address like this – [no-reply]. What is your first impression when you receive an email from something like that? Now picture this, you’re going on a first date and imagine if you wear earmuffs to that first date. What sort of impression are you going to make with the person you’re on the date with? That’s exactly the same impression that you make with people when you send an email from these addresses because you’re basically saying to them, “I want you to listen to me, but I’m not prepared to listen to you”. Definitely avoid that.
Mistake Number Two – Fibbing
Every time that you do something that they don’t expect you to do or don’t want or every time that you don’t deliver something that you’ve promised, your nose grows a little bit longer and that trust is eroded with your database. The more that trust is eroded, the more likely they will be to unsubscribe or delete the emails that you’ve delivered, but were not actually opened.
Mistake Number Three – Writing Copy
It’s beginning the fundamental rule that readers are most interested in what’s in it for me. If you forget the readers are after what’s in it for me, that’s when you can come undone. A simple example of me copy is, “I recently went to a fund raiser and I raised a thousand dollars for charity”. The way to convert it to you copy is – “your support in the recent fund was truly appreciated, you helped raise a thousand dollars”. It’s only a subtle difference but it makes all the difference when you are engaging with your ears.
Mistake number four – Sending in JPEG
When you send something that’s entirely a JPEG and you haven’t gone to the effort of putting it into HTML. All that effort that you’ve created with the content and putting all those wonderful ideas in a newsletter can be wasted when you just send it in a JPEG.
Mistake Number Five – Broken Emails
This is a result of not actually testing your emails properly. Hotmail’s a really bad culprit for this. It will somehow manage to break every single email that you send. You’ve got to test it, particularly with Hotmail. If you are producing your newsletter with a template each time, it’s important to make sure that you actually put in the promised subject lines and put in the actual copy. It’s amazing how many times I’ve actually received emails where it’s still got that dummy content in there.
Mistake Number Six – Neglected Subject Line
According to Vision 6’s metrics report, only roughly 20% of people have emails. That leaves 80% who don’t read them. Those 80% of people do actually receive an email in their inbox but they don’t actually open it. As we know from Twitter, there’s a lot of message that you can communicate in a short number of characters. It’s really important to keep in mind what you’re going to communicate on your subject line.
Here’s an example of how the Bluewire Media newsletter-head has evolved over the last four and a half years. Bluewire Media is a web design company that originally started in Brisbane and went down to Sydney as well. Picture this – it’s the end of our first year of business and we’ve been building up our database. All that we need is this first email campaign. I have written all the content, proofread it about twenty times and I finally mustered up the courage to send on, which is quite nerve-wracking for me. I finally hit send and relaxed. I sat down and waited for the email to come into my inbox, except when I read this it said, “Dear Adam”. Then it dropped – I’ve sent “Dear Adam” to the entire database! That was okay for the three people from the database called Adam, but not so cool for the rest. Of course you feel like a bit of a goose when this happens and I had to send another email to the entire database saying, “I know stuffed up, I made a big mistake but this is what I meant to send”. It’s really easy to do, so do test it.
Stay tuned for the full presentation on DVD.
Email Marketing Sydney: If you’d like help creating fun & engaging emails call Bluewire Media on 1300 258 394.
