how to create effective marketing emails

\\Thanks to the advent of email, anyone can afford a direct mail marketing campaign. Whether you’re taking your message straight to your consumer audience, or pitching editors, producers and show hosts in hopes of getting publicity, email marketing requires only an Internet connection and email addresses.

But simple plus affordable doesn’t always equal easy!

If you’ve been sending out emails and getting few responses, you could be sabotaging yourself without even knowing it. From what you put in the subject line to how you compose your messages, you may be unwittingly planting booby traps that set off spam alarms or cause recipients to punch delete before they’ve read a word.

Some marketing professionals believe one of those booby traps is the length of your email. They say if it’s too long no one will read it. Okay, I can already hear the dissenters, but I’m going to say it – I don’t agree. At least, not in every situation. It really depends on the message and its purpose.

When you’re pitching the media, sure, it’s best to be concise. A long narrative that saves the meat of your pitch until the end won’t help you no matter how beautifully written or entertaining it is.

But if you’re sharing valuable, useful information, whether it’s directed to the media or potential customers, your message can be longer. In that case I allow the length to be dictated by the content although I try to keep it less than 800 words.

Your recipients won’t get to your message, though, if you don’t give careful thought to your subject line. Certain words or symbols in the subject line can cause junk mail filters to immediately redirect your email to the junk mailbox. And what you say in the subject line might entice your recipient to open it – or to delete it.

Here are a few tips to consider when writing subject lines:

• Avoid words and symbols commonly used by spammers. Instead of the word “free,” consider a synonym like “zero cost” or “complimentary.” Avoid “% off,” words that are all UPPER CASE, and “act now.” Don’t use dollar signs, exclamation points, or rows of punctuation, like ???? and periods …..

• Avoid symbols in general. Sometimes the problem with symbols is not that they look like spam but they don’t look like anything recognizable at all, because not all email software translates them correctly.

• Limit subject lines to five to eight words. You want the recipient to be able to see the whole subject line as he’s scrolling through his emails, so be succinct. A rule of thumb is no more than eight words or about 40 characters.

• Make the recipient want to open the email. Some ways to do that are: 1) Convey a benefit, such as “get valuable tips on …” If you do that, be sure to deliver what you promise! 2) If you’re going to ask a question, make sure it’s one that the reader will likely answer with a “yes.”

Now that you’ve gotten your recipients to open your email, here are a couple tricks to keep them reading:

• Break up the text with bullets and white space. A dense block of gray text can be a turn-off. Make your text inviting by pulling out your main points and presenting them as bullet items. (As you can see, I like this technique!) Shorter paragraphs allow for more white space.

• Use a headline and a subhead, if you need it. They quickly convey information in just a few, large words. Clever is okay, but don’t make your reader struggle to understand the meaning.

• Run your email through a spam checker. You can find these free on the Internet. An example is this one by Contactology, which allows you to paste your email into a form and then tells you what parts of your message are considered “spam-y.” It will also rate your message on a scale from 0 (bad) to 100 (excellent). This PR Insider scored a perfect 100!

Email can be an effective way to communicate with a lot of people, but it should be just one piece of your marketing plan. You can’t rely on email alone – not everyone uses it, and it’s not the best medium for every type of communication.

You’ll need to use other strategies in order to build a constantly growing list of email addresses but, if you make your content helpful and informative, that may not be too hard to do.

Marsha Friedman