MarketingSherpa Blog

If I had to vote for any of the three candidates based solely on their email marketing prowess, the winner would be … Hillary. (Yes, I was surprised.) Here’s why and what lessons we could all consider applying to our own email programs:

Opt-in splash pages:
Marketers of America, you should check out the three candidates’ splash pages for inspiration right away. I’ve hotlinked to screenshots of all three below for your easy reference. Very, very few non-political sites are aggressive enough in asking for email signup from fans and supporters. If you are hiding your email checkbox in a sidebar or checkout process, you’re losing invaluable names.

In these recessionary times, that’s appalling. More new opt-ins from your site this week equals more revenues this year. (I know; I’m issuing a memo about this to Sherpa’s own in-house marketing team immediately.) Although a splash page dedicated to nothing but email sign-up may be overkill for your brand, not to mention annoying visitors, you certainly can make email sign-up more prominent.

The presidential opt-in winner: Hillary. Her design is clean and cheerful; it includes a branding tagline and asks for your zip code and name, so that she could personalize future messages. Barack’s is a close second, although the warm-fuzzy family snapshot seems too close to old-fashioned political imagery for his brand’s comfort. What’s he going to do next — kiss a baby?

I don’t know what John McCain’s email team is thinking. His depressing black and grey splash page doesn’t have any tagline or brand message — just “McCain” plus a giant red Donate button. Um, that’s sort of like asking for a kiss before the date begins. Lower down, there’s an email sign-up, but only email is asked for. No name, no zip code. So, I guess he’s not planning to personalize messages in any way.

Welcomes:
Actually, I don’t know what John McCain is planning to do with my email because, as of yet, I have not received a single thing from his campaign. Yes, I checked my spam folder just in case — nada, not even an automated welcome message.

Neither Barack nor Hillary sent me an automated Welcome; but, they did send me other emails within 24 hours that worked just as well.

Visitor Query Replies:
In addition to opting in for email at their splash pages, I used all three candidates’ website forms to ask them about their stance on Kosovo’s declared independence. In each case, I identified myself as an American blogger who writes about Serbia (which, if you’ve read my past blogs, you know is true.)

Again, John McCain’s campaign did not deign to reply. However, both Barack and Hillary’s campaigns sent notes back within 24 hours. Kosovo is clearly not a big issue in the US (aside from my own household), so neither had an answer to my question. Instead, both sent a form letter that said they were too busy to reply to specific questions right now, but here were some handy links for other info and donations.

Lesson – When was the last time you tested your own site’s Contact Us forms with a query using an at-home email address to see how quickly anyone responded — or whether they answered at all? Sadly, John McCain’s MIA response is pretty normal. Also, have you added a checkbox or other query to your contact forms asking if the respondent blogs? This might help you grow your database of fan bloggers plus triage site queries, so that bloggers get faster response than less-possibly-influential people do.

Newsletters:
I’ve only gotten one news email from Barack in my two weeks of waiting on candidates. Sadly, from a design standpoint, it uses worst practices. The typeface is tiny and grey instead of black, plus the width of text is far wider than 60 characters per line. This means it’s hard to read for anyone who is under 14 or over 40 years old. I see this mistake in a lot of B-to-B newsletters. Check out your typeface — is it readable?

Special Offers:
I don’t know which is worse, getting absolutely nothing from John McCain or having my in-box pounded by Barack’s team. Come on, guys — I liked the idea behind your ‘Dinner with Barack’ invite the first time I got it, but no voter wants to be inundated with the same offer three times in four days! So, you changed out the creative; it’s still too much. Plus, again, please tell your designer that text lines wider than 60-65 characters are unreadable.

Hillary’s campaign definitely won this round with their one-time invitation “from” Chelsea to be her mom’s personal guest at the upcoming Elton John NYC concert. The sweeps idea is the same as Barack’s dinner — if you donate now, your name will be tossed into a hat, and a handful of lucky donors will win.

In this age of celebrity, more brands should be running similar email campaigns, offering personal meetings with stars to sweeps winners. (I think this could even work for B-to-B brands where you have an exec who’s a bit of a star in your niche market.) If you’re considering it, my favorite individual email creative is the video message in Barack’s fourth message. See the link to a sample below.

Samples & Links Related to this Blog:

Samples of emails received and splash pages from candidates:
http://www.marketingsherpa.com/cs/prescandidate/study.html

Candidate Landing Pages:
http://www.barackobama.com/
http://www.hillaryclinton.com/splash/
http://www.johnmccain.com/landing/?sid=gorganic

The “should all content be free?” bandwagon has come around again, this time kick started by a Wired magazine cover article based on a forthcoming book by editor Chris Anderson.

The timing is kinda weird. Back when this idea was initially red-hot, the economy was, too. That way, happily bedazzled advertisers would foot the bill for all that content. The last time the economy and ad revenues were tanking in 2001-2002, however, paid content was all the rage. Otherwise, much more of the Web would have gone out of business….

If you are wondering what the reality is beneath the hype, here’s what I’ve learned from Sherpa Case Studies and personal experience leading a partly free/partly paid content company all these years:

#1. Ad-based content nearly inevitably gets crappy.

Media companies have been fighting this battle for eons. Their primary customers are the advertisers. Advertisers frequently want some type of control over the content they sponsor and, even when advertisers don’t push for changes, media companies pro-actively water down content for fear of offending sponsors. (It’s middle-management syndrome; you never risk anything that might upset the CEO even when the CEO, if asked, might approve more radical things than you imagine.)

Big trade shows have a similar problem – exhibitors nearly always push for speaking gigs and, if booth sales exceed ticket revenues, show programmers cave in. Which is why you hear so many sales pitches from show podiums instead of useful content.

Although they’re not reacting directly to advertiser pressure, content sites supported by Google AdSense revenues now often change the way they write headlines and even the types of stories and content they post to get more search traffic and then clicks on more expensive keywords. They’re serving the ‘bots more than they serve their readers.

So, free or partly free content winds up being less valuable to the consumer. Luckily, this truth helps the little-known-but-booming, *multi-billion* dollar subscription industry. More than 1,000 Web sites, including the massive Ancestry.com, non-profit ConsumerReports.org and tiny but influential eRobertParker.com, make most or all of their revenues through quality content dedicated to serving their subscribers’ needs instead of advertisers’. (If you’d like to learn more about the subscription industry, see link below.)

#2. Remove Registration Barriers to “Free” Content Online

Countless marketers have told me: “Our prospects understand that giving their contact information is the price they should pay for free access to our wonderful content.” Yeah, well, not always.

Actually, more often, the marketer is paying a price for that registration barrier. You are paying 90% or more for your possible audience, viral pass-alongs, marketplace education, and brand growth in exchange for the contact information of 10% or less of the prospects who are interested in your content. Oh, and of those 10% who do hand over that “price” for your content, roughly 50% will cheat you in some way with a false name, phone number or email address.

You’re also paying for those “leads” with 100% off your possible search engine spider visits to that content (spiders don’t fill out registration forms) and any resulting SEO traffic the related search rankings could have given your content.

Example: Consultant and professional speaker David Meerman Scott offers a ‘New Rules of PR’ eBook as a direct PDF download at his site without requiring registration of any kind. As a result, the eBook has been downloaded more than 250,000 times, making it one of the most read business white papers in history. The ultimate impact on David’s business has been very cash-flow positive.

#3. If you’re offering free content as a promotional exercise, don’t just do it virtually

Easy come, easy go. People don’t take things they get for free as seriously as they take things they pay for; it’s more disposable content. People also don’t remember online content or PDF content (anything they’ve only seen on a PC screen, perhaps fleetingly, for very long.

To be remembered, your content has to re-engage the consumer multiple times and, preferably, engage more physical senses than virtual content can alone. Consider offering your free content users the chance to get a hard copy (printed copy of a catalog or white paper, or a DVD of a video) of your “free” content. You may be surprised at how many prospects leap at the chance and at how well they ultimately convert into becoming paid customers for your real product or services.

Plus, offering people a mailed copy gives you a much better excuse for soliciting name and address. If your prospect wants the electronic version only, then they can get it without registering. But if they want the convenience and value of a printed version, they will certainly fill out a form for you and maybe even pay a couple of bucks for shipping and handling.

#4. “New” Can Beat “Free”

Since the 1930s, advertising copywriters have known a rule: “Free” is one of the most powerful words in advertising. But the word “New” can often work better for you. Why? “New” is nearly as powerful a response generator and it has the added benefit of not attracting that freebie-seeking demographic who’ll never pay for anything. Tire kickers don’t do anyone’s business any good – only qualified prospects do.
The word “Exclusive” can sometimes work as well as “New” too. So, your options are not totally limited.

So, those are my lessons. Hope they help you. Please write in and let me know what your free content lessons are too. We’re all in this “revolution” together!

Useful Related Links to this Blog:

Wired Magazine Free Article
http://www.wired.com/techbiz/it/magazine/16-03/ff_free

Selling Subscriptions to Internet Content Summit – a MarketingSherpa closed-door event now in its 8th year, held every may in NYC for top executives at Subscription Web sites and software businesses. For agenda and dates:
http://www.sherpastore.com/SellingSubscriptions2008.html?1150

David Meerman Scott’s The New Rules of PR ebook download page
http://www.davidmeermanscott.com/products_ebooks.htm

I’ve been surfing through Sherpa Case Studies and interviews from the 2001-02 era. It was, we thought at the time, the Big Downturn. It was dark, stormy, scary. Several marketers lost their jobs.

Now, of course, we’re in a new recession sooner than expected (aren’t these things supposed to occur only every 15-20 years?)

So, what worked last time that we can use to beat the odds this time around?

My favorite tactic is opt-in checkbox barters (also known as co-registration barters). I’m pretty sure Peter Cobb, head of marketing over at eBags, invented this idea. If he didn’t, he was near to the first. Then, loads of other marketers, including USA Today and even us at MarketingSherpa, jumped on the bandwagon.

It was very simple but effective:

You run a free email opt-in promo at your site. Peter ran a sweeps promo to win a trip plus eBags luggage; other marketers have offered anything from newsletters to discount coupons to ebooks.

The promo entry form included a checkbox to opt in for email promos from eBags. Then, Peter partnered with other noncompetitive marketers who targeted his same marketplace of heavy travelers. It was a true partnership — nobody paid anybody anything. They just agreed to barter opt-in checkboxes.

Peter would add another checkbox under his own on his promo; the second checkbox would offer emails from his partner. Then, his partner would stick a “get emailed sales offers from eBags” checkbox on their own site’s email registration forms.

Sometimes, they would even borrow the sweeps promo from Peter and just run that on their site, collecting names for both brands. (It made things easy when the Web department was too backed up to create a new promo.)

The most important factor to make this type of barter work is to be ready on your end with a well-crafted “Welcome” email message to send to all the new names pronto – hopefully within seconds or minutes of their signup, even if it took place on a different site than your own. The quicker you can acknowledge and begin to interact with them, the more valuable that name will be for you.

Even if you don’t know any of the marketers at a possible partner personally, you’d be surprised how friendly and open many can be to these sorts of partnerships. I’ve called plenty of complete strangers in my time, saying “I’m the marketer from X Brand, and I was wondering if you’d ever possibly consider a marketing barter that could get us both more email names.”

Partnership cold calling is absolutely terrifying the first few times you do it, but quite easy after a while. Some people will turn you down, some will become your new best friends. LinkedIn and the MarketingSherpa Facebook Group are great places to begin looking for the right people to connect with.

The key is, no money changes hands. You are both trying to help each other with a co-promotion — it’s a win, win.

If you’ve done a marketing barter of any type that worked out well for you, let me know. I’m definitely going to be covering this topic more in future columns and would love to hotlink to you!

This is a huge pet peeve of mine. If you are a copywriter writing a dollars off offer, do not omit the cents.

Tacking on cents makes the savings seem bigger. Take a look:
(a) Save $100
(b) Save $100.00

Which would you go for?

Obviously, when you’re talking about what something will cost, generally you should do the reverse and omit the cents. (Unless the price is so low that the retailer in question needs those cents to turn a reasonable profit, in which case test it.)

Adding cents to savings may seem like nitpicking — but it’s those little nitpicky copy tweaks that can sometimes make the difference between an OK response rate and a great response rate.

Got any copywriting pet peeves of your own that you wish marketers would stop doing? Post them below and help me educate the world. 🙂

OK, so you’re working on a landing page, and you’ve got a lot of information to get across but you know people online just don’t read paragraph text. They skim, they scan, they skip around.

That’s why after a quick line or two of intro, you dive straight to bullet-point list.

But that only lasts 3-5 lines. And you can’t follow a bullet-point list with another bullet-point list. You have to go to paragraph format again, which won’t be read nearly as much. In fact, according to eyetracking tests, the way most people read paragraphs online is a bit like this (“word” means they read it; “blah” means it’s unnoticed.)

WORD WORD WORD word blah blah
WORD Word blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
blah blah blah blah blah blah blah word

How can you get more words read? Enter the ellipsis.

The art of getting a paragraph — or a long sentence — read is all about catching the eye. An ellipsis gives you five glorious letter-free spaces in the middle of the paragraph to grab the eye with. An example:

Acme’s widget helps you make more money … lower your costs … impress your boss … and keep your career going strong.

Can you see how using a series of ellipses is a bit like using a bullet point list?

You can make a series of points in a row and catch the eye for each of them. Depending on the situation, you can use this trick several times in one piece of copy. I’ve actually seen direct mail letters and long-copy landing pages where ellipses are scattered with a liberal hand throughout, keeping that eye entertained.

Got a copywriting tip of your own? Share it with Sherpa readers by posting a comment below…

For marketing-lead companies, a recession can be seen as a golden opportunity. Your competitors are slashing their budgets, pulling back on brand marketing in particular.

At the same time, ad costs are dropping. Media companies, used to the fat of good times, slash prices and extend special offers (i.e., get three ezine ads tossed free in with every 12x drive-time radio spot) to keep their bookings stable.

It’s the perfect time to build market share at lower cost. When the economy comes out of its funk, your bigger slice of the market pie grows more profitable daily.

If your CEO doesn’t see a recession as an advertising-buying bonanza, try explaining it to him or her with a stock market metaphor. To succeed on Wall Street, you buy as much of blue-chip stocks as you can when their prices are unusually low. Then, when prices invariably rise again someday, you’re suddenly wealthy.

2008 could be your brand’s year to “buy low” for future wealth. How can you know if this will work for you? Four qualifiers:

– If you work for a public company — or one that’s focused solely on revenues for this particular quarter, future thinking be damned — then this strategy is not for you.

– If your lead generation or direct sales are driven heavily by search PPC advertising, expanding your other brand marketing in a recession can help raise PPC results by up to 40%. People recognize your brand, so they are more likely to click on your ad and more likely to convert. Your branding investment pays off both now and in the future.

– If you are in a highly competitive field, jostling with dozens or even hundreds of competitors, a recession can be a golden opportunity to rise to the top of the pack. Prospects can probably only remember and consider three to five brands in your niche. If you advertise heavily now when it’s getting cheaper every day, you may wind up being one of those three to five brands who automatically make everyone’s shortlist for years to come.

– If you are a new brand or start-up, a recession can provide unusually fertile marketing ground. While the major brands cut back on their ad presence to ride the storm out, you can make a bigger launch impression on the marketplace than you would in good times when too many brands are fighting for prospect’s attention. Have you ever wondered how so many brands, such as Apple’s iPod, Wikipedia, Sirius Satellite Radio and, yes, MarketingSherpa, could be successful when they launched during bad recessions or depressions?

Success, as with every marketing tactic, starts with initial measurements. You need to know three things about your brand … and be able to measure them on an ongoing basis to prove your worth to the CEO and management:

#1. Market share
What’s your slice of the pie? Where do you stand in relation to other brands in terms of accounts or sales within the market? What’s the total market size currently? How about the projected market size for three years? If your marketing efforts can win a percentage point of share, how much will that be worth to the bottom line?

You may want to break this out by market segment. Data is available from industry associations, industry analysts and researchers, and via surveys conducted by media. Start with a baseline measurement now and update quarterly if possible, annually at least.

#2. Brand perception
How well known is your brand name now? Do prospects recognize it? Do they think of it as being “The best”? Do your PPC ads do better with your brand name in the copy or URL or better with it removed?

Data is available via third party surveys — talk to your marketing partners (perhaps other brands who target the same segments for complimentary products) to see if they’ll run a survey for you if you run a survey for them. Media and research firms will also run surveys if you ask (and pay.) Consider measuring every quarter or six months, depending on how heavy your branding investment is and how much your management team need to see “pay off” via results data.

#3. Media costs
In a recession, media rate cards may not change much officially, but there’s often a lot more room for negotiation. Start your research by gathering the rate cards, or estimated costs, for all relevant media buys for your segments now including list rental, print ads, exhibit booths, radio, TV, white paper syndication, etc. Your goal is to establish a baseline.

Then as you negotiate media buys through the next year, report on real-life costs per impression versus official or old costs. This way you can show the management team that you are getting more for your money from the same marketing dollar.

In the end, even if your brand’s overall sales and/or profits are not growing as quickly as they used to, the marketing department can look like heroes because they are increasing market share and brand value — setting up the company to be a huge winner in better times to come — all while saving money.

You can be a recession rock star.

Display advertisers gave a shrug of the shoulders at last week’s news that ad clicks weren’t a great measure of success, as illustrated by a study conducted by comScore, Tacoda and Starcom. The study examined the population of people who clicked on Web ads in July 2007 (only about 32% of the total Internet population) and teased out a group they justifiably call ‘Heavy Clickers.’

These Heavy Clickers make up a mere 6% of the online audience but account for 50% of all clicks on ads. Demographically, heavy clickers skew strongly toward the 25-to-44 age range and have a lower income profile than the average. But that doesn’t stop them from spending more online than most. This is probably related to their extraordinary consumption of the Web — they’re online five times more and they view eight times as many pages as the people who didn’t click on an ad.

When their website preferences are mixed with their consumption patterns, heavy clickers appear to treat their whole online experience as a leisure activity, happily wandering around, clicking on shiny things, playing games, gambling and generally acting unemployed. In fact, they’re about 35% more likely to go to an employment site, so that may well be the case for some.

Taking a view that this leisure pattern was connected to their click behavior, the study designers looked for a place where a different demographic would be in a leisurely mindset to see whether their click behavior would start to look more like the heavy clickers.

To do this, they looked at social networking sites — where visitors spend a great deal of time poking around acting leisurely — and found some correlation between clicking and the leisurely mindset. These heavy clickers skewed younger than the rest of their cohorts, but their household income was consistent, so one wonders if this was simply a view into the early development stage of a heavy clicker.

The last of their released findings focused on how brand metrics are affected by click rate. In other words, would a site’s aided brand awareness correlate with the clickthrough rates of their ads?

So, what does all this mean for marketers?
– First off, clickers follow the 80/20 rule.
– It helps prove that search traffic is largely driven by advertising.
– In a study from the Advertising.com, we see a correlation between clicks and weekends and conversions on weekdays, so that supports the leisurely mindset connection to clicks.
– Were rich media ads removed from the study?
– Where do these clicks happen?
– Clicks have little to do with branding.
– If you’re not capping frequency, you’re going to get a skew.

I’m not going to name brand names, but you guys should know who you are. You are Western brands being marketed overseas. And you ought to be auditing your media buys far more carefully.

In Nepal, a country where black hair is so universal as to make any other color seem freakish, I saw repeated shampoo commercials from Western brands prominently featuring blondes. After a few weeks there, even I was staring at the screen with the natives thinking, “Wow, that’s a weird hair color,” instead of, “What great shampoo that must be.”

Then, this month on my way back to the States for Sherpa’s Email Summit on Feb 24-26 in Miami, I stopped off in Croatia for a visit with my in-laws.

Croatia used to be part of the former Yugoslavia, and there is at least one black woman living here. I know this because I saw her on the evening news last night. She was being interviewed as an oddity — as in, “Wow, there’s an actual black person living here, and, golly, she even speaks pretty good Croatian!” As a result I had to endure a lot of ribbing about the lousy quality of my own Croatian speaking skills. …

But, what struck me the most was that on Croatian TV, I’ve routinely seen American-produced ads marketing cosmetics specifically for black women. Surely they’re not all targeting this lone consumer?

Thing is, there’s loads and loads of opportunity for Western products in the global market. I’ve spent much of the last year meeting members of the eager new middle classes in Asia and formerly communist Europe. They’ve just gotten credit cards; they’re buying their first new cars; they’re investing for the first time on local stock markets; and they like to show off their flashy cell phones with snazzy, new ringtones. B-to-B markets are also booming — especially for advice on how to run a business.

Business may be lousy at home, but if you market fast food (especially Mexican), fancy driving gloves and other show-off-able driving accessories, ASP-based business software or cheap, modern-styled furnishings for tiny condos, the Eastern European and Asian worlds could be your oyster.

Just stop blowing your budget on ill-targeted media buys.

Whether we’re entering an official recession or just an economic lull, it’s clear that most US marketers are in for at least a slightly rough ride for the next 24 months. That’s OK, when the going gets tough, it gets my blood up. I hope you are the same way!

Over the next few weeks I’ll discuss tactics you can use to ride out the storm. First up: establish two current customer benchmarks.

During a recession happy, loyal customers are incredibly important. During good times, you can market your heart out to land new accounts. Pluck that new fruit. In bad times, the branches raise themselves up. Landing new customers is harder – more expensive — just at the time when your CEO holds that “How can we cut marketing costs?” discussion with your department.

Your company’s profitability for the next two years nearly certainly rests in the hands of people who are current customers. They are more likely to buy than anyone else. The cost of selling to them is likely to be lower than to anyone else. They are also far more likely to refer prospects who are likely to become new accounts than any other media you can market through.

If you have not already established benchmarks, measuring your current customer base, now is the time to do so. At the very least, you’ll have data to benchmark your own performance against in future months when hoards of new clients may not come knocking at the gate. You can say your marketing has helped current profitable accounts stay alive longer, refer more prospects, buy more products or services.

Measurement can be as complex as you like it, but the basics are:

-> Step #1. Segment your customer base
Chances are certain customer segments perform far differently than others. You may chose to segment by your most and least profitable accounts. Or by accounts in certain countries, or by industry, or by total units sold, or by lifetime. You may want to study multiple types of segments at the same time. The key is, it must be a segment you readily identify and sort your database — or spreadsheet — by on an ongoing basis. It must also be a segment you think you could affect with a campaign of some type if you want to make an impact on that one segment.

-> Step #2. Lifetime length and value
Next, for each segment, you’ll want to measure median account lifetime length and value — in terms of profitability as well as overall sales. (Median is always better than average which can skew too easily.) These are the benchmarks you’ll continue to re-assess over the next 24 months to see if anything has changed. They are also values you can use to decide which segments to continue marketing aggressively in for new accounts and which to cut back on for the time being.

-> Step #3. Satisfaction and likelihood to refer and/or continue
Finally, ask customers directly to rate their account satisfaction, if they are likely to continue being customers, if not can you change anything that would make then stay on, and if they would be likey to refer you.

I strongly suggest that you don’t ask customers directly unless your brand has a very high reputation for trust and honesty. Most customers do not want to tell you bad news directly. They’ll lie with blandness or they’ll say, “Sorry but my budget was cut,” instead of telling you they really resigned the account. However, they are often willing to tell a third-party researcher the cold hard truth in vivid detail. So, hire a third party.

Now you know what product or service changes must be made to save current accounts, and who you can count on for the long haul. You will almost certainly be surprised by some of your top customer’s answers.

By the way … never ever allow anyone to contact accounts without getting buy-in from the sales department or accounts services department beforehand. And warn customer service to boot. Now is not the time to ruffle internal feathers!

As a young copywriter, I used to pop bullet points into the middle of long direct mail letters to break up the prose on the page, catch and re-engage the eye.

These days — especially in email and online — bullet points are the most-read copy on the page. Bullet points are doing the heavy lifting, and ours eyes skip over prose nearly entirely. I’ve learned two rules from years of eyetracking tests, search marketing, landing page construction and email copywriting that you may find useful. 

Bullet point success is all about putting your most powerful copy where the human eye is most likely to see it as it scans the page (or screen.)  You’re not controlling the eye so much as you are letting the eye’s known habits control where you place copy. Two ways to do this:

#1. Reorganize your list

Copywriters write numbered or bulleted lists in order of importance. The first is usually the most important and the last is the least important. The problem is that the eye doesn’t see importance that way. The eye sees the top two bullets. Then it often skips down to the very last bullet. And then it skips merrily on its way to someplace else on the page. Middle bullets are often ignored completely.

So, organize your bullet lists like this:
o Most important point
o Second most important point
o Less important point
o Less important point
o Third most important point

#2. Put the keywords first

When people scan lists they are not reading prose, so you cannot write a list as if it were prose. You also can’t (heaven forbid) start each bullet with the exact same word or even words starting with the first same letter of the alphabet, unless you want the rest of the bullet content to be ignored or all swim together into an unidentified blur.

Here are the words that the eye tends to read on a bulleted list (I put the words it doesn’t read as “blah blah blah”)

o Word word word word blah
o Word word word blah blah
o Word blah blah blah blah
o Blah blah blah blah blah
o Word word blah blah blah

If you put your best words — especially ones that look physically different from each other by starting with different first letters (again, catch attention by breaking patterns) — in the spots I marked as “Word,” your copy is immediately more powerful.

In practical terms, I usually find it’s easiest to write a bullet point list as I would normally do it, to get it out on paper for my own working needs.  Then I re-craft and edit it, moving words, positions and tweaking verbiage until I get it right for the reading eye.

Got any copywriting tips that work for you that you would like to share with Sherpa readers? Comment below!