MarketingSherpa Blog

How long should your email newsletter article copy be if you are trying to get readers to click to your site for the whole thing? The answer is: probably longer than you think.

I used to think I could just send out an enticing headline and folks would click. Then I tested the same headline plus one terse line of explanation. Then a reader emailed me saying, “Anne could you give me more details so I know if a particular story is worth my clicking to?” So I started to write longer and longer. Now some summaries in our weekly summaries letter (SherpaWeekly) are up to three short paragraphs long.

The other thing I learned over time is NOT to do the old first-hundred-words-of-the-article routine with an elipsis (…) as the summary. Yes, it’s easier than writing an all-new summary, but it’s not nearly as effective. You need to tell you reader exactly what they’ll get when they click through, and why it’s important to them. Here’s a live example:

Version #1. First words of actual story using ellipsis tactic:

When Singapore Airlines decided to invest in a major advertising campaign to celebrate its new route from Singapore to Chicago last summer, the airline bought a multi-channel media package from AOL/Time Warner including TV ads on CNN, print ads in Fortune, Time’s Asian edition, and other related offline media…

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1965

Version #2. Summary of story written explicitly for newsletter clicks:

This Case Study is a must-read for all business-to-consumer marketers trying to build an opt-in email database. Interactive ad agency execs, who are trying to convince clients to invest online, will also thoroughly appreciate how an online campaign, that was a “little add-on” to a big traditional media buy, ended up making a giant impact on the client-side.

Our favorite bit is when the agency involved predicted how successful the campaign would be. They were waaay off

http://www.marketingsherpa.com/sample.cfm?contentID=1965

Most of you have probably heard the “bad” news released by Jupiter today that “almost three quarters of online adults (70 percent) cannot understand why anyone would pay for content online.” Am I remotely alarmed by this? No.

Partly it’s because the “expert” analysts’ forecasts don’t always turn out to be true, especially where the Net is concerned.
Partly it’s because I’ve been in this business of selling subscriptions since the mid-80s and I know if you poll people and ask “Will you pay for a subscription?” they will usually say “No.” But if you offer them something that can help them get a better job, beat their competitors, or have a gorgeous garden easily ….they will often enough say “Yes!”

It’s about the offer, and the way the offer is expressed. I’ve tested the same subscription offer to the same list, only expressed using slightly different language, and gotten very different results. Now you’re telling me one Jupiter poll, written by someone who assuredly is not a subscription marketing copywriter, reveals the answer? Yeah. Makes for a few news headlines. Doesn’t affect subscription sellers’ jobs a bit.

Gene Ely, publisher of MediaLifeMagazine (an e-only daily for media buyers) just launched a separate paid newsletter, and he reports, “I’ve been running Media Life for almost three years, and we sent out email news alerts every day (10,000 of them), yet I continued to think email marketing was the dumbest idea in creation. All that changed when we set about to promote our new Media Economy Newletter. We put a flash page up blocking the home page. It did little after the first day. Next I sent an email to our readers. Amazing. Subs started rolling in from all sorts of places, fast and heavy. They do work.”

Oh my, Oh my, Oh my! Three readers have written in (including the redoubtable Mr. Jean Bim) to say, “Did you notice – Blogger named you a “Blog of Note” this week.” To which I can only respond (a) No that’s not a paid endorsement and (b) Oh goody!

Surfed over to About.com tonight to thank their Marketing Guide Michael Hinshaw for sending us some traffic by linking to MarketingSherpa (if you don’t occasionally surf your traffic logs to see where traffic is coming from and then personally thank the biggest contributors, I suggest you start – it’s an integral part of any links campaign), when up popped the Sprinks box showing paid links.

Just like Overture and Google paid listings, you get a very, very little amount of copy space in a paid links campaign. Here is a sample of one that came up, with the line breaks just as I saw it on the screen:

DigitalArrow – Targeted Email Marketing

Cost-effective Opt in email marketing solutions. We have access to over 50 million

subscribers. Let us help you target your ideal customers!

URL: http://www.digiarrow.com/ (Cost to Advertiser: $0.83)

When you look at this sample, what sticks out to your eye??? The right half of the body copy. Now, I think the marketers for both these companies did a fine job in presenting their case clearly and concisely while hitting important keywords. However, neither of them wrote their copy thinking about where the eye looks. That dangling-out-in-the-white-space bit will certainly be much more read than the marvelous beginning bit they started with. The dangling bit is where the powerhouse words should have gone.

Even though every art director on earth hates me for saying this, that’s why you need to reserve the rights to make copy changes once you see your copy as it appears on the screen or printed page. Once it’s laid out and you see where eyes go, you may need to change it (I do about 50% of the time).

In cases like sponsored text links and text-email newsletter sponsorships, you’ll need to do the lay-out yourself as you’re writing the copy. Don’t just start typing away in Word. Instead set your typeface and boundaries to match the final layout, and then write. That way you’ll write it as it appears to the eye. Which will make your copy much more powerful.

Tip: For a text-email sponsorship running 60 charactors across, set your right hand margin at 5 1/2 inches and your font at Courier 10 point. Even better, download a copy of the newsletter your ad will run in and type over a current ad to see how yours looks.

There was a time when being the first person to nab their first name at a famous email provider was cool — after all would you rather be Tom@aol.com, or Tom687@aol.com? But now the first Tom is feeling the pain. If you email him, here’s the reply you’ll get:

‘Was your eMail really for me? Tom@aol.com’ receives several hundred eMails per day that are not intended for myself but were addressed incorrectly. As a result I can only accept eMail from known eMail addresses – your eMail address is not YET known to my Mail Filter….”

Which brings me to the subject of handling autoreplies from email subscribers. It’s a grey, grey, grey area that many ezine publishers are debating these days. When opt-in subscribers switch email addresses, leaving an autoreply message behind saying something like “I’m no longer at this email address — please send mail to me at this new email instead” should you switch their account over? We don’t do it here at ContentBiz – but it’s painful to see those hard-won opt-ins slip away. I may create a special one-time message to be sent to the new addresses asking them to resubscribe.

In the paid B2B content world this is even tougher, because who owns the rights to the paid Web subscription? Generally it’s the company with either paid directly or reimbursed the staffer for the subscription. With corporate budgets tight these days, many staffers pay out of pocket for subscriptions. It’s stuff like this that makes your customer service costs per average subscriber begin to rise.

Why don’t Web site and email newsletter subscription marketers ever offer a premium (free gift) with order?

One or two of them must do, but in all my trollings across the Web, I’ve never seen one that I can recall. It drives me crazy because subscription premium offers are proven to be so incredibly effective offline. Why not at least test them on?
After all people don’t want to buy a subscription (trust me, almost nobody wants to buy a “subscription”) they want to buy a solution to a problem they are having right now at this moment or they want some fun instant gratification. A premium offers that –
– that special report on how to improve sales now, or that free Tupperware
(tm) with the Ginsu Knife.

So when my friend Kim MacPherson, President Inbox Interactive, [http://www.inboxinteractive.com] called me this morning to chat, I asked her about this. She said she’d never noticed an online subscription premium offer either, but added, “I think they definitely need to do this.”

Kim’s company does email marketing campaigns for USA Today to sell print subscriptions to the paper and it’s print newsletter, Baseball Weekly. Her campaigns almost invariably focus on premium offers. She told me, “If you’re targeting baseball fans, for instance, there has to be some kind of perk, some kind of carrot to get them to respond.” For example, a gift subscription offer emailed in December featuring a free ballparks calendar with order sold thousands. She notes, “These were all paid subscriptions, there were no bill-mes.”

I’ll do a Case Study on USA Today’s online circulation marketing later in the year, and you can check DMNews for a story they’re running in a week or two. In the meantime, here are three creative samples of email campaigns featuring premiums that worked to sell USA Today print subscriptions:

1. American flag offer http://inbox0.com/clients/usatoday/flagoffer/flagoffer.htm

2. Road atlas offer with regular subscription http://inbox0.com/clients/usatoday/atlaspromo/atlaspromo.htm
3. Road atlas offer with gift subscription http://www.inbox0.com/clients/usatoday/thoughtfulgift/thoughtfulgift.htm

Integrating online/offline marketing is hot, hot, hot. According to Gavin Twigger, Creative Director RappDigital Dallas, you can raise your classic direct (postal) mail response rates by 40% if you include an online component – such as a Web site folks can go to for information.

Which brings me to my award for seriously cool marketing Web site of this week — Printbuyers Online. Created by Suzanne Carnes Morgan, who’s been buying print for more than a dozen years, it’s got loads of very hands-on articles and resources to help you pick paper, learn about printing technology, and find the right suppliers. As Suzanne says, most print buyers fall into the job and often receive little training, so her free site is designed to help. Bravo!

Thanks to Link Consultant-to-the-Stars Eric Ward for telling me about this very cool site MakeaShorterLink.com. Everybody with a publishing site will love this one because it enables you to — yup — make shorter links. As you know, many content management systems (such as Vignette) create links to pages that are, well, butt ugly and hideously long. Which means you can’t use those links in your email newsletter because if you do a text- newsletter the link will break after about 60 characters in most people’s email. Also, if you do an HTML newsletter the link won’t work in Hotmail which shows a blank screen for longer links.

(BTW: the whole Hotmail thing is very confusing because a link can work in one person’s inbox, but not another’s. My tech editor Alexis Gutzman will be writing up a report on this and how to get around it fairly soon.)

Why Techies Shouldn’t Be Allowed to Write Copy (Part 1143). This morning I got email from a company I’ve never heard of called dbTrigger. The rich-text email was really nicely done. It captured enough of the challenges I face in a day and promised me relief. It even motivated me to click on the Online Tour button. This is where the techies took over. A nicely done flash demo began with the words: “This is your login screen, it contains your user name, password, and ODBC profiles.” ODBC profile? It would be interesting to see the numbers on how many people closed their browsers at that point. The email used the expression “business applications,” but the demo said “ODBC profiles.” Too bad. Looks like a useful product. The folks who wrote the email should hope that people call the sales number at the bottom instead of taking the tour.