Friday morning I was in Denver conducting a copywriting workshop with the copywriters, creative directors, Web site managers and content editors for a national company. I was brought in by the director of marketing to address the messaging in their email marketing specifically, but after reviewing their email examples, it seemed a broader approach was needed.

 

So the workshop consisted of reviewing what it means to talk to your customer, not at them, to write customer-centric copy that’s about the customer, not about you. The original plan was to critique one email promotion as a group, then have everyone rewrite four more on their own and compare notes. We ran short on time, so instead I put up a few of their emails on the screen and ripped them apart, nicely. I didn’t say anything that surprised or offended.

 

It seems the copywriters and creative’s hands are tied. They’re up against corporate, up against legal, up against people who don’t understand marketing or copywriting or—most importantly—email marketing. These poor folks end up going the safe route, using clichés like “don’t miss” and vague words like “great pricing” or “exceptional pricing.” They end up with meaningless email subject lines. They have to work around the images they’re assigned rather choose an image that fits the message.

 

Yuck.

 

What breaks my heart is that this company is perfectly positioned for messaging that’s emotional and empathetic. Their copywriters and creatives could kick ass if allowed to craft email marketing copy appropriate to the audience, and not to corporate’s preferences and tastes. Lesson here? Let your marketing team do their job! Trust them to know their stuff. They don’t question how the CFO handles the financials or how the CEO handles the board of directors. Why are they hindered?

 

But this company isn’t stuck, they see where they can improve. In the future, they’ll be segmenting their email marketing into targeted demographics, and they’ll be able to do more specific and therefore effective messaging, talking directly to the pain points and concerns of a particular market. I got the sense that their copywriters are chomping at the bit for that day to come!! Then all we discussed that day will come to fruition and their email marketing will work that much harder for them.

 

Despite their challenges and frustrations, running that workshop was a blast. I’m lucky. I love what I do, I love talking about copywriting and messaging, and I love being with people hungry to learn more and improve. And they all loved what I had to say. It sparked much-needed dialog among them, it got them inspired to strive harder for more compelling copy and to stand up to the powers that be that want to water down their copy. What more could this Seattle copywriter ask for?

Jeffrey Rohrs, VP of Marketing at ExactTarget, spoke at an ExactTarget conference in Seattle yesterday with a fabulous presentation called “Subscribers Rule!” He made many great points, above all, that email marketing is different from everything else we do as marketers. Again and again he emphasized that email is a long-term tactic, a marathon not a sprint. Amen to that. Search engine optimization and pay-per-click and blogging are going to get people to your site. Email marketing is how you nurture your relationship with them over time.

 

So how does all of this relate to my world as a Seattle copywriter, and yours as a marketer? The word that popped into my head as he spoke was “respect.” And one way we respect our email subscribers is by giving them the content they want. That doesn’t mean that we offer a newsletter, but bombard them with promos. That means we carefully and slowly build our in-house list, not buy a list and blast a bunch of strangers. It means our email subject lines are carefully crafted to help the customer know what our email offers.

 

It also means having something of real value to offer them in the first place. Which is why I continue to promote email newsletters as an “indirect” marketing tool. Even for small business email marketing, email newsletters make sense.

 

Jeffrey recommended we celebrate, love and protect our subscribers. Investing the time and energy into developing content that is truly useful to them, not us, is key. Think of a subscriber like a friend or a colleague: You’d want it to be a mutually beneficial relationship, right? You wouldn’t constantly be asking your friend or coworker for something, it would be give and take. Same with your subscribers.

 

Are you going to get an immediate payback on taking this long-term, carefully thought out approach to your email marketing program? Probably not. Are you going to cultivate stronger, deeper, longer term relationships with your customers? Probably yes.

 

Which will you choose?

 

This Seattle copywriter is always on the lookout for ways to be a smarter, better marketing writer. But spare me the tomes. I, like so many marketers (people!), have little time for self-improvement, despite the desire. That's why I like email newsletters and short guides. They're easy to read, digest and put into action.

Here's a short guide that I recently downloaded and can recommend: Top 10 Ways to Energize Your Sales and Marketing. In it, Steve MacDonald of StudioHDV has all the text broken into bite-size chunks, and a take away for every "way" he describes. Handy. And re-energizing. Reminders of what we should be doing, and new ideas too. Applicable to small business marketing and big business too!

Get yours at http://www.studiohdv.com/topten_l1.asp.

Okay, not really narrow minded. But narrow…

 

Yesterday at the PSAMA lunch in Seattle, Alan Brown from DNA talked about how you market as a challenger, as opposed to front runner. With great local examples from the MS Society, Boeing Employee Credit Union and Pemco Insurance, he again and again reiterated the importance in having a narrow focus. He didn’t call it that, “narrow” is my word. He pointed out the advantage of taking a position, even though positioning can mean sacrifice.

 

But positioning can get people to listen. If you narrow your marketing scope, your marketing message, your marketing method, you might be heard by fewer people, but you are more likely to be heard.

 

Then later on the phone, a mom friend wanted to talk about her husband’s business and the direction they want to take it. (Yes, I’m the queen of free marketing advice, I swear. The downside of being so nice: even your neighbors hit you up for advice!) So, great—no, brilliant—focus. I loved hearing about it. Then she went on to say “but we also want to offer this service and that service” and she talked about lumping it all under one umbrella with a generic term that no one would know the meaning of.

 

Ugh.

 

I did my best to persuade her otherwise, to go with the one targeted niche idea and market that one narrow business only. We’ll see if they listen. The idea of offering fewer services rather than more does seem to challenge people, whether they have a small business or a big one.

 

If you have a niche, put your resources there. If you can speak more narrowly to a smaller audience, do. Sure, you are sacrificing the “masses,” but guess what? The masses aren’t listening!

 

Last week MarketingSherpa had a great article on email design tips, but what I most enjoyed reading, as a copywriter, was the section on subject lines.

 

When you’re a freelance copywriter, you don’t always get to be as involved with email marketing as you want to be. For me, that means we don’t usually get to play a role in testing. The We Know Words team provides the copywriting then the client moves forward with the email marketing campaign without our involvement. That makes copywriting subject lines a real challenge. And since subject lines are key to getting people to open your email, it’s even more of a challenge.

 

The problem is, there’s no right answer on subject lines. I’ve seen one study that seemed to prove boring subject lines to work better than compelling ones. Yet as a copywriter that’s really hard to believe! Subject line length is another challenge. This MarketingSherpa article proves there’s no right answer, as different lengths have worked for different marketers. The only thing marketers can really do is test, test, test.

 

My takeaway from this? To encourage clients to test. Seriously, I’m going to be more proactive about it, to push them to do it, even though I’m not involved in it. I’m enjoying my current copywriting project, an email marketing campaign, because they were completely willing to test when I suggested it. So for each email I’m copywriting, I’m doing 2 to 3 different subject lines.

 

Now to remind them to do the testing and share the results with me. J

It’s often my job as copywriter to figure out what the benefits are; clients are too close to their products and services to see clearly.

 

This week I’ve been working on an email marketing campaign for a series of whitepapers. It’s much easier for me to play the role of customer and distill what the benefits of each whitepaper are. The existing messaging emphasizes the so-called features, what the whitepaper “is.” The outsider (i.e. copywriter or marketing writer) can much more easily figure out the benefits, what I call the “so you can” parts: “Read this whitepaper so you can…” What is the end result of downloading and reading a whitepaper? That’s what the customer wants to know, not the content of the whitepaper, but what she’ll be able to do if she reads it.

 

And it makes me laugh how often I walk into a situation where the marketing team is just scratching their heads, trying to come up with the real benefit, and I can sum it up right away. That’s because I have the outsider’s view.

 

Too many companies pay too little attention to their copy. They keep it in-house, they trust the marketing people to do the copywriting. They end up with me-too Web sites and ineffective marketing campaigns. Then they wonder why their marketing does such a poor job of generating leads! Hint: It’s probably talking at customers, not to them, because it’s too subjective.

 

Maybe that’s why I’m becoming such an advocate for blogging as a marketing tool? Blogging by its very nature is more focused (or should be) on information that’s useful to the customer. It can unintentionally sell just by being real and authentic and objective.

I really do love small businesses and small business owners, but they can make me crazy…

My best example right now is the small business owner who is pissed at me because they put up their new Web site and aren’t getting any hits. This is apparently my fault because my copywriting agency did the writing for the Web site. Never mind that their Web developer neglected to use the title tags and other meta tags we’d written. Never mind that it’s poorly coded and designed. Never mind that they chose not to do all of the pages we’d suggested for more content. Never mind that it only went up three weeks ago. Never mind that no sites link to it yet. Never mind that they have no content management strategy for updating the site. Never mind that I had explained all of this to him months ago when we first started on the project.

Just because someone is running and marketing a small business doesn’t excuse them from educating themselves about marketing. I’m not saying they should be an expert. (I joke that I don’t want to know about taxes, that’s why I have an accountant. But I still know what taxes get paid and when, I just don’t have to know the nitty gritty.) But they should know something.

Not all are like the client described above. I’ve worked with plenty of small business owners who took the initiative and learned enough to have a dialog about their marketing, whether it’s an email newsletter, web marketing, blogging or direct mail.

And thank goodness for those clients! Copywriters and marketers can’t do their jobs with clients who don’t know anything and aren’t willing to learn is the lesson I’m learning this week. Sadly, it’s usually the small business that falls into that category.

And for any small business owners who now feel compelled to know it bit more about web marketing and SEO based on this gripe, start here: http://www.google.com/support/webmasters/bin/answer.py?answer=35769.

This morning as I put on my copywriter hat and started on a project for a new client, I first reviewed their brand guidelines…and have been itching to blog about it ever since. In my opinion, your brand is more than your logo. Your brand--your marketing--is everything you say, do, wear. It’s how your employees act, how well your product delivers on your marketing promise…everything.

And as a copywriter, I firmly believe that your words are part of your brand, in all your marketing communications: your email marketing, your web writing, your print collateral. Yet in all the brand guidelines I’ve reviewed in my eight years as a copywriter, only once was voice addressed.

This particular brand guideline even says in there “Our Brand, Our Voice” yet there’s no mention of voice. It offers up 9 pages on the logo, typeface and colors, showing exactly how to use, not to use, going into details of file formats and more. But no examples of messaging or voice other than describing the brand personality with words like “agile” and “synergy” but without any examples of how to do copywriting that fits the brand. Which is akin to telling someone how to bake a cake and telling them to use eggs, flour and sugar…with no more direction than that.

Your logo alone won’t tell your story. You need words that work.

Earlier this week, I attended a stellar WTIA event on Web 2.0. The panelists were entertaining and informative, and the whole dialog around monetizing Web 2.0 fascinating.

But the message that most resonated with me as a copywriter was that content still matters. I don’t mean the user generated content (UGC) that people typically think of when they think Web 2.0. I mean the content that your company and marketing team puts out into the world.

And that’s good news to me, because it means copywriters have a place in making Web 2.0 marketing work!

Done right, the content you generate as email marketing, email newsletters, and blogging can be viral, can start a dialog and engage your customers. So you still need great copywriters, relevant content, and even a strategy.

The best news is that small business marketing can involve Web 2.0 because all of these tools and mediums can be used by small businesses to engage their customers.

Yeah, rest easy, copywriters. Content is still queen. :-)

Maybe this is sacrilege coming from a copywriter, but it’s not what you say that matters, it’s what your customers say that matters.

From clean uniforms to a usable Web site, from friendly service to great product…what your marketing promises better be delivered in the actual experience, start to finish, or your marketing is lying.

Check out the “Trusted Sources of Information” table at http://www.bridgeratings.com/press_08.01.067.Influentials.htm. Note that family, friends and acquaintances are the most trusted but a close second is strangers with experience. This group rates second overall as a trusted source. Strangers are trusted over religious leaders and teachers even. That’s how important your customer’s experience is. All the marketing in the world won’t replace a bad experience because people will talk, or blog, or post a review online.

OK, then, why do you even need marketing? Why do you need a copywriter? Because marketing gets people in the door, to the Web site, or on the phone in the first place. Then the experience either seals the deal or kills it.

Speaking of the customer experience, I want to share a nice email I received recently about this blog:

“I definitely enjoy your blog. I can only assume that this type of thing comes naturally for you in your line of work, but yours is one of the few blogs I always look forward to reading.”

Tim Oten
Chukar Cherries

Thank you, Tim! If you find this blog helpful or not, speak up and let me know! I write it to share my opinions and musings, but want it to do some good in the marketing world too, hoping to change how marketers look at messaging!

Last night I was skimming through a marketing research magazine while waiting for my kids. I joke that if reincarnated I’d like to come back as a market researcher (or gospel singer!) because as a copywriter and consultant, I don’t get to work with numbers. In the marketing world, people like me are usually brought in when the researchers are done. But I wanted to see the articles on name research because as I’m sometimes asked to help come up with company or product names.

 

It was interesting to read about all of the research that can go into a naming project, but what most struck me was one author’s assertion that the name should to specific to the customer that it sells the product.

 

What he was saying about customers tied in exactly with my mantra about talking to customers not at them. That applies to naming too! I hadn’t considered that before, but reading his comment gave me a flashback to a few years ago, and it’s such a great example of this, I have to share.

 

We were asked to help rename a company that copied and delivered legal documents (or something like that, my memory is a little fuzzy). The pain points we were addressing were accuracy and speed, an also a specialization in the legal field. So the name ideas we were coming up with were all meant to tell this story (plus we were doing domain name research at the same time to make sure the URL would be available).

 

In the end, the graphic design firm that had hired us to do the naming decided to do it themselves. As part of the rebranding of this company, they had come up with a certain color box that all documents would be delivered in. That box would be the company’s brand.

 

So they decided to rename the company ColorBox. (Not “color,” a specific color, but I don’t want to say.)

 

Now, if I’m a potential customer and I’m shopping around for someone to do legal document reproduction, how in the heck am I going to know that ColorBox can meet my needs?

 

It’s a classic example of talking at the customer. “We’re going to have this really hip, cool name, but you won’t be able to figure out what we do based on the name, so you’ll never know that we can meet your needs.”

 

I guess as a copywriter and marketer I should be glad, because decisions like that simply scream for great copy because at some point someone is going to have to explain what that company provides.

 

But wouldn’t it have been easier to have a customer friendly name to begin with?

 

I’ve been thinking a lot lately on email marketing and Web 2.0 marketing for small businesses. By small, I mean a wide range from hyper small, like mom-and-pop shops, up to mid-size companies. The reason I’ve been (let’s use a more accurate word here) dwelling on the topic is two-fold:

 

First off, I see far too many small- to mid-size businesses doing a poor job at email marketing.

 

Second, I see far too many of these same businesses not taking advantage of Web 2.0 marketing.

 

In the first case, I blame the ease of email. Email marketing is easy to do, and therefore easy to do wrong. Despite all the talk about segmentation and relevance and one-to-one marketing, most of the calls I get as a copywriter and marketing consultant are from businesses doing batch and blast email. Or they’re not using email at all. Not sure yet which is worse…

 

Regarding Web 2.0, there’s one incredibly easy way for these businesses to take advantage of Web 2.0 marketing that has nothing to do with podcasting or Facebook or Twitter. And even though it’s easy to do, unlike email marketing, it’s easy to get it right.

 

I’m talking about blogging for small business. Blogging is one Web 2.0 marketing tool that business owners can put to work right now, today. Seriously, if you’re a small business owner reading this blog, you could be writing your own blog within the next 30 minutes depending on which platform you choose. Ditto for the marketer for the mid-size company reading this blog: your company should be jumping on the blogging bandwagon too.

 

That said, the whole idea of blogging for business stymies most clients I mention it to. OK, it stymies all of them, I admit it. That’s why I started making up a guide for getting going. It’s still pretty rough right now, although I’ve given it out to a few people, but if you’re thinking about blogging as a marketing tool and you’d like to see it, email me at sharon@weknowwords.com.

 

If you’re not thinking about blogging as a marketing tool, definitely email me at sharon@weknowwords.combecause we need to talk!

 

My corporate and personal taxes are finally done, yay! Thanks, Rick!! And I now have two bills to pay, one for each. Rick is a doll and keeps his costs down for me, but still his rate is $200/hour and he’s worth every penny because I know my taxes will be done right. I’m paying for his time and knowledge, but also his experience…which is hard to price at all!

As I work through my divorce, I am paying my lawyer $175/hour. (Don’t tell the lawyer what the accountant is charging or else his rate will go up to match it!) As my “ex” and I navigate the complications of a “dissolution of marriage” in the county we live in, where people with kids jump through lots of hoops to get divorced, I know my lawyer’s also worth his hourly rate. He knows the system, and he knows how to work with couples who have lots of difficult discussions to work through. Again, I’m paying for time and knowledge, but also 20+ years of experience as a family law attorney.

And that’s what copywriters sell: their time and their knowledge, but ultimately their experience. In a word, their expertise. And the more experienced and knowledgeable the copywriter, the higher the hourly rate should be, whether you’re paying her for email marketing or Web writing, a case study or an online press release.

About half the time we are asked for a copywriting estimate, we don’t get the job because the prospect doesn’t want to pay the price. (Note: We’d prefer to know the budget upfront so we can just tell the prospect what we can do within that budget, but somewhere it is written that budgets are to be guessed at, not disclosed! Silly people.) For me, it’s a filter. If someone doesn’t recognize the value in what we’re selling, I don’t want to do business with them anyway. Every freelance copywriter I’ve ever talked to agrees it’s the clients spending the least money who take up the most time!!

For those businesses who choose to scrimp on the copywriter, and plenty do, the results are typically less than stellar: email newsletters that don’t deliver, Web sites that don’t convert, direct mail goes directly into the recycle bin. That’s because you get what you pay for.

Just like my accountant, lawyer and saddle are all worth the money they cost, so is a great copywriter.

Thanks to my annoying friend Chris Baggott of Compendium Blogware, I finally saw the light about blogging back in July. He had been after me for two years to blog, but it wasn’t until I got the whole search engine optimization part of it that it made sense to me to do so. I stopped writing my email newsletter and started blogging instead. (Side note: I have recently decided to do both because they are different mediums and I like delivery my copywriting message both ways. Email me at sharon@weknowwords.com if you want to get the newsletter, I’m aiming for a June start.)

 

Once I started blogging though, I found myself going back and forth between blogging for SEO and blogging as a means of putting useful, relevant information out into the world. The latter is always my primary goal, to further my cause of convincing marketers to talk to customers not at them, but then I want people to find the blog too, so they get the message which leads me back to keywords and SEO and…can you see where I’m going with this?

 

It has been like a flip flop, until I finally realized that it was no different than writing Web copy for a client. When the copywriters at We Know Words take on a Web writing project, we first write the copy regardless of the keywords so we can master the tone, message, voice, length, etc. Then after the client and the copywriter are both happy, we go back and optimize the text using keywords. (We also get more natural sounding Web writing that way. I can usually tell when a Web page was written with keywords and SEO top of mind.

 

Since I’ve started blogging, I’ve definitely seen how it can help one win search wars. (See other blog posts on “soap is dumb.”) But to really create a win win for all, the blogger’s challenge is to find the balance between the search and the reader.

As a copywriter, I had to laugh when I read the following comment in Email Insider yesterday:

 

“44% of marketers surveyed believe the biggest challenge in email is providing relevant content. - eMarketer (2006)”

 

That’s hilarious to me because any copywriter worth her salt can serve up relevant content on a daily basis. Really what these marketers are probably saying is they don’t know how to not talk about their products or services. Relevant content means simply information that’s useful to the recipient, not a sales pitch.

 

Take the email newsletter as an example: I’ve yet to sit down with anyone thinking about doing an email newsletter and been at a loss when we started talking topics and articles. Quite the opposite! My brain typically goes into overdrive.

 

Maybe it’s my magazine editor background, maybe it’s because I’m a writer, or maybe it’s because I’m not stuck in the company mindset meaning I can think like a customer: What would be interesting to me, the customer, not you, the marketer?

 

And this should be true of any copywriter.

 

So if you’re a marketer who thinks “relevant content” is a challenge, I challenge you to bring in a copywriter who doesn’t eat, drink, breathe it like you do…and relevant content will be a breeze.

 

A while back, a company called We Know Words looking for a copywriter for an email campaign. I asked a ton of questions, as I always do, and found out this company was sending their email newsletter to a list of 80,000 people who had never requested it. At the same time, they had a list of 1,500 people they’d had contact with in the last two years, and a list of 500 from the past six months, but they weren’t doing anything with either of those lists.

 

Pop quiz!!!

 

Which list should that company focus on?

a)    The 80,000 people who don’t even want to get their newsletter

b)    The 1,500 from within past two years

c)     The 500 from within past six months

 

If you answered c or both b and c, good job!

 

But they didn’t want to, because all they can see is the numbers. Yes, 80,000, that’s a lotta prospects, baby! In real life, however, they’re not prospects, just victims of an overzealous email marketing effort. The smaller lists were the prospects, they were the people who had raised their hands and said “tell me more.” And they were ignored.

 

It’s a mentality I run into a lot: Companies choose quantity over quality when marketing. “Better to market to thousands who’ve never heard of us than concentrate on the few who actually expressed an interest!” And we wonder why direct mail averages a 1½ % return rate.

 

I was telling this story to my friend Jim Rosemary of New Tech Web, and he put it so well: Marketing to the masses is just that, mass marketing. Marketing to a specific audience is direct marketing.

 

Mass marketing vs. direct marketing. How many marketing managers know the difference? Not just in how they’re marketing but in how they’re impacting their potential ROI?

 

The biggest irony here is the job title of the person I spoke with: Manager of Direct Marketing. Sigh…

As a follow up to yesterday’s post about marketing and dating, here’s another argument for being more targeted in your marketing, in this case, with your direct mail…

 

Time and again we copywriters run into clients who choose the quantity over quality approach to marketing via direct mail. They’d rather spend the same money to send out a lot of boring, likely-to-be-tossed-right-away direct mail pieces than to spend the same amount of money on far fewer but much more impactful pieces.

 

It’s like shooting a bunch of arrows into the sky hoping one will hit a target vs. taking careful aim with one arrow and shooting straight at the target.

 

If you can spend $25 a pop to create, produce and mail a killer package to 100 C level executives that are your ideal prospects, for a total cost of $2500, why would you instead choose to spend that same amount of money to mail a plain postcard (OK, maybe it’s over-sized) to 1250 people who either won’t notice or even get the postcard? Seems silly, but that’s the route so many marketers take, I guess reasoning they are getting more bang for their marketing bucks because they are spending less per piece…

 

I ran into this with a copywriting client a few years ago who confessed that winning one customer from a direct mail campaign would equal $15,000 a month in revenue. But that company was unwilling to page for a campaign that would have cost just $1,500 because the cost per package was so high ($15), never mind that it was so targeted and likely to get noticed too.

 

If—after reading this blog post--you’re rethinking your quantity over quality approach to direct mail and seek inspirational, unique ideas, I highly recommend “Design for Response: Creative direct marketing that works” by Leslie H. Sherr and David J. Katz. I just got a copy and love it so much, I’m keeping it on my coffee table for now.

Newly single, I find myself the recipient of much dating advice. Imagine my surprise and delight last week as one of my clients turned friends turned my marketing advice back on me as dating advice! It’s such a great analogy, I’m using it here…to make the marketing point once again.

 

Over lunch I was lectured on casting too wide a net, and told to be more selective and targeted in my dating efforts. Just like I tell clients to be with their marketing efforts. If you market in a generic way to a general audience, you’re a lot less likely to connect with a perfect prospect because your message is watered down and doesn’t speak to anyone in particular. If you market to a narrowly defined, targeted group, your message can be very specific to their needs and pain points and you’re a lot more likely to make that connection.

 

Think of your marketing like dating: Do you want to do Match.com and hear from all kinds of potential suitors who don’t interest you at all? Or do you want to be strategic and meet people you have something in common with? (Not sure yet fulfills that means in the online dating world; I’ll keep you posted.)

 

Quality is better than quantity, in marketing and dating both.

In the March issue of Deliver magazine, I read an interesting article on big businesses marketing to small ones.

 

Funny, I’ve been so focused lately thinking about small businesses being found online and the growth in numbers of people using search engines to try and find local businesses, that I didn’t even think about the small business owner searching online for products and services that they might want to buy from the bigger guys. And sure enough, one of the pieces of advice in the article is to be found online, meaning big businesses have to follow the same practices as small businesses marketing on the Internet. Search engine optimization using relevant, keyword-rich, updated content!

 

No matter the size of your company, search engine optimization is where it’s at because search engines are where your customers look. Make sure your SEO writing gets you found.

My head is swimming with blog topics this week, all around email. First I went to the StrongMail email marketing conference Monday morning, then yesterday downloaded a fantastic report from MarketingSherpa on common email newsletter mistakes. So bear with me, but there are so many topics to take on…and so many seem like they’d be no brainers but I see our copywriting clients make email mistakes all the time.

 

Heavy on my mind right now is how many times marketers forget to make use of their non marketing emails. For example, I’ show the Welcome email can be the most often read email. So after someone subscribes to your email newsletter, for example, you’d send them a welcome email. But are you using it to reinforce your voice and brand? To remind them of all the benefits they’re going to get as a subscriber? To confirm for them that they made a smart choice when they handed over their email address? Or is your welcome email (if you’re using one, and you should be) generic and dry and dull?

 

Another missed opportunity is the transactional email. For example, yesterday I posted a press release (about our upcoming talk on online press releases) at PR Web, and received just a straightforward, boring confirmation that thanks me twice and has the order details in it:

 

Dear Sharon,

 

Thank you for your recent order of $80.00 with PRWeb.

Order Summary

 

Invoice/Tracking Number: xxxxxxxxx

 

Date Paid: February 05, 2008

Payment type: Credit Card (Visa)

Paid to: PRWeb

 

Order Details:

- PRWeb Press Release - $80.00

Order Total: $80.00

 

Again, thank you for your order.

 

Sincerely,

 

PRWeb Staff

 

Excuse me, but that’s it? I just spent 80 bucks on this, and yeah, I want a receipt, but how about something more? Something like:

 

Dear Sharon,

 

Thank you for entrusting your news to one of the Internet’s most popular press release distribution sites. After the release date (noted below), be sure to keep an eye on the useful metrics so you can track how well your press release is doing. And if you have any questions, don’t hesitate to contact us at ….

 

Then give me the order details. (And can we just outlaw the word "sincerely"? There are so many other wonderful ways to sign off!)

 

That’s not so hard, is it? To be a bit human and to reinforce their marketing message?

How many emails is your company sending out that could be working for you, instead of not working at all? Or worse yet, against you…