You know that subscribers and email marketing can be important to your business. Email marketing can be a great way to increase sales. But if your email newsletters push the wrong buttons in your readers, not only will you miss the sale but you risk being labeled a spammer.
So today I want to share some thoughts on email marketing not from the perspective of a business writer, but from the perspective of a subscriber who receives several poorly constructed email marketing messages every day.
Here are three surefire ways to piss me off in my inbox and guarantee I won’t give you a dime.
- Your email copy is just a bunch of one-liners. Getting to the point is fine. But this is a common spam setup (each sentence as its own paragraph in a poor attempt to make things “pop”), so visually I associate you with spammers and delete the email without reading.
- You use hyped up headlines making big promises. No one signs up to your email newsletter for the sales pitch. They want real information. Give them that first to hook them, and then pitch your product or service as a solution. It needs to be more subtle than slamming me in the face with promises you very likely won’t ever live up to (you’re not the “best,” “greatest,” or “#1″ anything, except in your own mind — don’t tell me; convince me).
- Your tone is too personal. When at first you act like you know me, and then I realize you don’t, you tick me off and I leave. It’s one thing to try to connect. But don’t try to act like you’re a pal unless you know me personally. You might get away with it once by making me wonder “how do I know him?” But after that, you become a broken record oozing your best bud tone. I recognize it quickly, and you will be blocked. This might be completely fine if you’re targeting your Average Joe. But if you target a business audience, getting too personal won’t cut it. You aren’t setting yourself apart from the other marketers. You sound just like the rest of them.
As always, know your target market and focus on benefits to them. We don’t care about your company. We don’t care about your product. We might care about something entertaining or educational you have to say. And we’ll definitely care if what you’re offering helps us solve a problem. Remember. It’s not about you. It’s about “me.”
