Perversely, I enjoy getting spam. It’s a valuable exercise in how not to do email marketing!   

The subject line of one of today’s spam messages asks if I have “Enough passion for these hotter nights?”  It’s snowing in Woodingdean right now and hotter nights are a distant dream. Wrong hemisphere, chaps.

In the context of spam it doesn’t matter much. The whole campaign is crap anyway, coming from the ‘if you throw enough poo at the wall some of it will stick’ school of marketing. But it would harm your business’s reputation if you sent a summer-led offer to hot prospects in the southern hemisphere in the middle of their winter. And your campaign would probably flop.

If you’re planning an international email marketing campaign, examine your offer and the way it’s presented logically before pressing the button. Think about things like:

• the seasons – If you’re basing your offer or creative treatment on how hot or cold it is, make sure you get your hemispheres right!
• messaging – Something that’s fine in the UK might offend people in other countries
• colloquialisms – We’re a nation of punners. But puns, wryness, colloquialisms and irony don’t translate well
• culture – Here’s an example. North Americans praise each other all the time, whereas we’re more circumspect. They blow their own trumpets louder than we do, too. Just look at a few US B2B websites and you’ll see what I mean. We speak the same language… but we’re very different people
• imagery –  make sure your imagery doesn’t alienate, but resonates with people in your target countries
• Zeitgeist – What’s affecting consumers and businesses in your target countries right now? Does your marketing message address, reflect or tap into the population’s concerns and enthusiasms?

My top seven international email marketing tips

1. segment your data by country
2. research each country’s market thoroughly
3. alter your creative treatment for each country, informed by your research
4. act on empirical response and conversion information…
5. … but remember the fewer people you email, the less reliable your statistics
6. always test new creative treatments and offers against a control segment to gauge relative performance accurately
7. be aware of confirmation bias, where we ignore evidence that doesn’t match our opinions and convictions. We kid ourselves with ease. But the numbers never lie

(Thanks to http://www.sxc.hu/profile/silviadg for the gorgeous royalty-free image)

Research says it’s well worth using a specific landing page for each email marketing campaign. So what are landing pages all about?

A landing page is a single web page designed to boost sales. 

You send out an offer by direct mail, an email campaign or whatever. But instead of expecting responders to go to your index page and find their way from there, you send them direct to a page full of compelling, offer-specific content… specifically designed to drive sales conversion.

Useful tips for creating a campaign-specific landing page: 

• repeat your offer up front confidently and firmly, even if you’ve already made the deal clear in the first step of your campaign
• integrate the page by using the same subject line as the first step of your campaign for instant familiarity
• include compelling sales-related product information, buyer testimonials, product reviews, images etc to drive and maximise conversion
• but keep it elegantly simple, making your points as succinctly and strongly as possible
• end with a powerful call to action
• reduce form filling and admin to a bare minimum to make the buying process fast and easy (you can always collect more details later once your buyer has taken the plunge)

When someone hits your landing page you’re half way there. They’re a hot prospect. You’ve already hooked them with the first part of your two step campaign. Your landing page should reel them in.

Help… it’s a spam tsunami!

Getting your email marketing campaign seen amongst all the rubbish is a challenge. The more spam in a person’s inbox, the less likely they are to notice the stuff they’ve actually subscribed to.

Even the most tolerant, diligent and observant of us eventually succumbs to spam blindness. So how do you grab the attention of the spam-weary?

Luckily it isn’t rocket science. The secret lies with your subject line. It needs to spark interest. And it also needs to make it obvious – at a glance – that the message is from you.

People sign up for updates because they know your stuff’s relevant to them. Effective email headers aren’t about being clever with words. Yes, they’re about selling. But they’re more about recognition. In a busy world, it helps if you make it easy for time-poor people to spot your communications. 

So you’ve written a sensible and informative subject line. Next? Apply consistency. Use the same header each time, or variations on a theme. This’ll help build and strengthen recognition. It also acts as simple but effective small-scale brand building.

Some examples

Say your site sells chocolate cakes.

• Your April email campaign might be headed: Chocoholica April – Feed your passion for white chocolate!
• And May might be: Chocoholica May – Test drive the world’s finest brownie!

Here are eight of the best copywriting-related tips, straight from the freelance copywriter’s mouth:

1. Segment your target audience - Your target audience might logically split into segments, each of which will respond to a different take on your sales message. Get it right and you’ll save money, save time and enjoy better response rates.

For example Chocolate. People of all ages love chocolate but the adult chocolate experience is very different to a child’s. Chocolate is often sold to adults on the basis of sensuality, luxury and indulgence. While a child’s chocolate experience is all about fun, happy times and treats. You can imagine how spectacularly wrong your campaign would go if you offered chocolate to kids using a sensual message and semi-sexual imagery!

2. Create strong, inspiring titles, headers and sub-heads – If your email title isn’t attractive enough, people will press delete without opening it. When emailing existing customers, make it clear in the title that you already have a relationship with them. Always make your offer crystal clear in you title, for example: ‘Brilliant customer offer from the Good Taste Curtain Company’.

Once your snappy title has encouraged people to open your email, reinforce the message and sock ‘em with an irresistible header. Then use strong subheads throughout the body copy to help you emphasise your points in readable bite-sized chunks.

3. Grab attention with an up-front call to action – Obviously people start reading from the top of an email. So place a short, succinct call to action at the top of your email
as well as using it to round off the message. This saves readers having to scroll down to the bottom to find out what you want them to do. Every little helps. 

4. Focus: don’t get lost in space!  – Put your message across using short, clear statements. Just like with direct mail, people tend to skim read emails. They only digest the blindingly obvious points. So use simple things like lists and bullets to help keep your message under control. Email is no different from direct mail in that people won’t bother to wade through piles of irrelevant stuff to find your message. Make sure you focus on things that are of direct interest to your market. For example, you might find your
company’s history fascinating but your customers don’t care. They just want to buy your stuff fast and easily.

5. Don’t exaggerate. And no fibbing! – People aren’t daft so don’t make rash, unrealistic or inaccurate promises. It might work well as a one-off but if you fib, you won’t get repeat business from the people you’ve misled. Nor will they recommend you to their friends. Set realistic expectations and readers will be more likely to believe you.

‘KY Control Pants will make your bum look tiny even if it’s the size of a fully grown bull elephant’ might work once but complaints from the vast-bottomed, angry and disappointed
will soon start to flood in and response will plummet.

6. Hammer home the key points - There’s not much room in an email for repetition. But repeating your key points for emphasis will help hammer the message home. Keep it simple: repeat your best key point – the one you’ve used in your header or title – in the body copy as well as in your final call to action.

7. Be friendly, human and approachable – Don’t write in business language. Email is a highly personal medium. To engage with readers, write the way you speak
(provided you’re sufficiently literate!). It’ll help you create a closer bond with people and gain their trust.

8. Keep it short - very, very short!  

Email marketing is no more or less than direct mail online. The same principles apply when creating the content and you have the same amount of time (eff all!) to catch recipients’ attention before they press delete.

One of the biggest challenges, as always with direct response work, is to identify your target market and figure out how to reach them cost effectively.

I get a good few emailed offers for cialis, super cialis, viagra, penis extension stuff and replica watches every day. So – personally as well as from a marketing professional’s perspective – I’d like to slap the folk who blast this rubbish out, giving email marketing a bad name. Effective targeting’s the only way to go… or is it?!

Cheap e-lists abound. I can buy a million email addresses for $99 to hit willy nilly with my book offer. Wow! But the data  will be completely random and I’d bet my last quid that it it’s neither opted in nor verified.

Another choice: I can buy a minimum of 10,000 verified current email addresses from a list of people who’ve ‘expressed an interest in’ or ‘clicked through’ similar campaigns’ for £180 per 1000.

Or I can buy as little as 1000 current email addresses from a named opted-in list for just £95.

OK, let’s do some numbers:

• I can buy a good quality targeted list of 1000 email addresses and test the concept for £95. To cover the cost of the data I’d need to sell 39 items: that’s a response rate of 3.9%
• I can buy a minimum of 10,000 supposedly decent quality records for £1800. To cover the cost I’d need to make 750 sales, a hefty 7.5% response
• I can buy a whopping 1 million absolutely untargeted, unverified records for about fifty quid. To cover the cost of the data I’d need to sell 21 items. That’s a response rate of… tadaaaaaaa… 0.002%!

Now there’s a thing.

I could test 1000 records from the best-targeted list for £95 with a 50/50 risk of not making the money back on sales. In this case, the total available records in the list doesn’t give me much room for roll-out so even a great response isn’t going to make me much more than a few quid. And a test of 1000 records isn’t going to give me statistically relevant
results so I’d learn nothing.

I could test 10,000 records from a slightly poorer quality list at a cost £1800 but that’s a crazy amount of money to spend on a test, especially with a break even response rate of 7.5%. Far too high.

Or I could join the spammers, irritating a million people for just £50 in the fairly sure hope of getting the 0.002% response I need to break even. Bugger me if this option isn’t the best as far as the numbers go. A list of a million gives rock solid statistically relevant results. And what’s more there are millions more of them where they came from, at a
stupidly low cost.

Talk about a moral dilemma!