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?

Great post this morning from Email Insider on small business marketing with email . In it, blogger David Baker reviews just how simple and easy email marketing can be for the small business, with a few “how to” reminders.

It warms my heart to see this post, and I hope it’s read by loads of small business owners, because really, email can be such a cost-effective way to market. But, as with so many marketing tools, email is easy to do wrong.

I’ll add a couple of tips to what David suggested:

Have a plan—I see small business owners (heck, bigger businesses too!) start out with email marketing and then flounder because they didn’t have a plan. How often will we email? What is the point of our email? How will we track our results and know whether or not it’s working? (How often as a consumer have you signed up with your email address at the cash register of a small business—then never heard from them? No plan.)

Think like an editor—As part of your plan, create an editorial calendar. He mentions tying in to local events. Great idea! Know what events are coming up, know what your seasons are and what you might want to promote.

Have a theme—I use theme for lack of a better word, but I hope it resonates with you. I mean, knowing what your email marketing is supposed to be and be doing. Is it informal with tips for doing something better? Is it more of an event calendar? Is it written with humor, from the standpoint of the business owner’s dog perhaps? Whatever it is, determine the theme from the start, then be consistent.

Speaking of consistent—Be consistent with length, types of content, frequency…you want to train your recipients to know what to expect and, we hope, look forward to your email.

OK, that’s enough of an add-on to the original post. But hope it gets you thinking about email marketing if you’re not doing it already, or reviewing your email marketing if you are!

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.

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. :-)

I’m a big fan of small businesses. After all, I’m one! But I also prefer spending my money with a small business over a big one. I’d rather walk into the Kona Kai coffee shop in downtown Kent and get a hug from Michael the owner than go to a Starbucks any day, no matter how cheerful the baristas. Same for Pat’s Bar and Grill, and the Peridot Nail Salon, and City Frame, and the Balanced Athlete, and all my other favorite small businesses in downtown Kent.

Yet as much as I adore them all, I see them all making the same mistake: not enough (or zero) marketing. They tell me they don’t have the time or money for marketing, but really, like with exercising, it’s about choosing how and where you’re going to spend that time and money.

For example, one business is currently adding all kinds of services in the hopes that they’ll bring in more people…but they’re not marketing their old services or their new ones. They collect email addresses, but don’t know what to do with them. They buy ads in the local paper, but don’t know if those ads are doing any good. They talk about putting up a Web site, but still don’t have one.

Adding all these services took an investment of time and money that could have been spent on email marketing and blogging instead, two extremely cost-effective ways for small businesses to market. (Especially when a blog can take the place of a Web site for some businesses.) But I guess their mindset is just that marketing is hard, so they’ll stick with what they do know (getting a liquor license, for example) than find out what they don’t.

How do we shift that small business mindset? Let me know what you think... leave a comment or email sharon@weknowwords.com.

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.

Earlier this week while in a Tully’s coffee shop, I saw a display for a drawing that is both clever in how it engages with customers and clever in helping to grow Tully’s in-house email marketing list.

The entry forms ask you to enter your “super-long” coffee order. You know, like the ones you overhear the pretentious people say while you’re waiting in line: “I’ll have a Venti skinny mocha with half soy, one packet of sweet ‘n low, at 170 degrees, with 2 tablespoons of whip.”

You make up a long order (and there’s plenty of room to go all out with it!), and Pemco Insurance donates a dollar to Children’s Hospital for each entry. That’s neat! That’s a feel good! You’re also entered into a weekly drawing for a Tully’s gift card. So it’s self-serving too. You get to help a charity and help yourself. Plus you have fun making up the absurd order.

Then at the bottom you enter your email and below that is a check box to sign up for Tully’s email club, to “receive the latest Tully’s news and coupons.”

By the time you get to the bottom of that form, you’re feeling pretty good about this whole deal. And besides, you’ve just given them your email address so you can be notified if you win. Why wouldn’t you just go ahead and check that little box to sign up?

Compare that to just a “sign up for specials” box on a Web site. I bet this converts much better. And I’m pretty sure growing their in-house email marketing list is the point of this contest! Although it’s so subtle, the customer doesn’t see that.

Very well done. I love it.

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.

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…

And this will be a short one, lots going on! Check out the email marketing survey results from Datran Media. Lots to think about here as companies continue recognize the value in email marketing. So email marketing is good for business, obviously, but that means small business too, and that’s not reflected in this survey. Why does email marketing for small business make sense? Because it lets small business owners and marketers build a voice and relationship in a way that other marketing channels can’t, other than blogging. See the survey at www.datranmediasurvey.com.

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?

Last night I heard an NPR piece about a publishing company called Twelve that only publishes 12 books a year . Six of their 9 books so far have become best sellers. Jonathan Karp, the man behind Twelve, explained that by only publishing one book per month (in a world that publishes 33 books every hour of every day of the year), they can really focus on an author and his or her book, to edit it, shape it, and publicize it.

Earlier that day, I attended an email marketing conference in Seattle put on by StrongMail. According to analyst Julie Katz of Forrester, the first presenter, 77% of consumers say they get too many email offers and promos. And 72% delete the emails without reading them. Why? In my opinion, it’s the publishing equivalent of 33 books published every hour: Marketers just keep sending out emails, believing quantity will win out over quality, which leads to lots of duds and only a few best sellers.

Consumer trust of email has gone down dramatically as a result. And that’s bad for everyone.

There’s a lesson here for marketers: If you target more selectively and send to fewer people—those more likely to respond--your response rates will go up and your boss will be happier with you.

And your copywriter can do a better job. No matter how well written your email marketing is, no matter how hard your copywriter tries, if you’re sending out too many emails to too many people who don’t care, all your copywriter’s hard work is simply being deleted.

Go to www.strongmail.com to download the Jupiter Research report “The Maturation of Email."

Although we’re often locked away expressing our brilliance with words behind closed doors, sometimes a copywriter gets a chance to go public. This copywriter gets another chance this spring.

In March, I’ll be part of an email marketing panel presenting for the Northern California Direct Marketing Association. We're calling it Extreme Email Makeover: Marketers will submit their email marketing campaigns to have them reviewed by the panel. We’ll be covering deliverability, content, design and mobile deployment, and giving attendees the chance to learn from the email marketing mistakes of others.

It's a great panel, and I’m delighted to be part of it as the copywriter and messaging guru:

• Michelle Eichner - COO and Vice President of Client Services, Pivotal Veracity
• Morgan Witt - Director of Marketing Strategy, Juice Media Worldwide
• Cameron Kane - President, Strategic Design Group
• Michael Kelly (moderator) - Director, Sales and Business Development, ClickMail Marketing
• and me as President of We Know Words and Past President of the SDMA

Read more about it at http://www.dmanc.org/calendar.html (scroll down to the March 19 event).

And if you’re in the area and you can make the event, please do!

I envy the freelance copywriter who can cite an exact response rate for a direct mail campaign. Much of the copywriting we do at We Know Words falls more into the category of what I call indirect marketing. Our copywriters are often busy with writing whitepapers, email newsletters, case studies, guides and writing for the Web. It’s a nice change of pace when we write email marketing or landing pages, where we can get definite feedback.

The truth is, as much as executives might like it to be otherwise, not all marketing is measurable. Yet it is still valuable. Just about everything a small business or large corporation does in some way is marketing that has nothing to do with metrics. Can you measure the positive yet subtle effects of clean uniforms, courteous customer service folks or brand appropriate content? What about a tagline, or a well-written how to guide? Convenient parking at your location? Free mints by the cash register? I could go on and on. Marketing is a promise you make to your potential customer that their experience will be a certain way. And it’s a promise we are making each and every day in business, whether we’re copywriters, graphic designers, marketing managers, or the “director of first impressions” who greets people as they walk into your office.

Just because we can’t measure something doesn’t mean we shouldn’t do it.

p.s. I apologize for the seemingly random font sizes in the blogs lately. It's getting fixed on the tech end, nothing I can do about it for now!

I used to be a strong advocate of email newsletters, probably because of my publishing background, but also because I believed in them enough to create a list of 25 reasons to publish an e-newsletter. I came across that list the other day rummaging through a file. I laughed to myself at how much my thinking has changed in the last 4 years. But then as I read through the list, I realized most of those reasons translate to blogging! So below are the 18—count them, 18!—of the 25 reasons I used to use to support enewsletters and now offer up as reasons to blog.

Blogging can:

1. Help your search engine rankings by putting useful, relevant content online
2. Give prospects an easy way to learn more about you, and for clients past and present to keep up with you
3. Strengthen your brand and market position
4. Lead to referrals
5. Drive traffic to your Web site
6. Market without coming across as marketing
7. Increase your credibility and that of your business
8. Evolve and change in a way printed material can’t
9. Offer cost effective testing and adapting
10. Communicate quickly and efficiently
11. Establish a dialog and enhance customer loyalty
12. Educate your customers in new ways to use your products and services
13. Generate leads
14. Reinforce other marketing efforts, offline and online
15. Cost the same, no matter how many people are reading it
16. Lower costs compared to printed marketing
17. Be tracked, showing you how many hits and where they come from
18. Build an ongoing relationship with your target market

I still believe in marketing with enewsletters, because what I’ve been preaching for years is still true: it’s not just what you say but how you say it. Delivering the right marketing message with the wrong marketing medium doesn’t work. So use blogs when they’re right, and create newsletters when they are.

Sometimes marketers and copywriters get too caught up in the words they write, and they forget that the job of those words is more than just to sound good: those words have to do a job.

Every piece of marketing collateral we tackle, from writing for the Web to press release writing to email marketing to even the lowly sales letter, every piece has a reason for being.

This seems obvious, right? But it’s not. Often people, even the copywriters themselves, get caught up in the words and forget to do the reality check. And the result is fluff, which the world has plenty of but it doesn’t sell.

I’m not arguing for hard-hitting copy focused solely on a call to action. One reason We Know Words is a successful copywriting agency here in Seattle is because we give marketing a personality and voice. But even when your turn of phrase is clever and your alliteration a delight, if your marketing isn’t marketing, it’s a waste.

So next time a piece of marketing or copywriting crosses your desk for review, ask yourself: What is the purpose of this marketing piece? What result should it deliver? Then read it with that critical eye, not the eye evaluating prose and checking punctuation.

Is that sales letter convincing the prospect to call? Is that email persuading the reader to click through? Is that Web page enticing the visitor to delve deeper into the site?

This applies whether you’re a big business or a small one. In fact, small business marketing should be even a bit easier, since you’ll have fewer reviewers and more concensus!