Commentary

The Medium is Tricky

  • by June 13, 2001
The Medium is Tricky

If your client is a business selling to businesses, a recent convention of Direct Marketers had lots to say about the conversion of traditional DM tactics to effective eMail marketing strategies. Copywriters Herschell Gordon Lewis and Bob Bly offered tips, as reported by Debbie Weil at ClickZ, for strategy and promotion using eMail.

- Creative rules for email recognize that "Email attacks, whereas a Web site is passive."

- Email is a "push" tool, and a powerful one. The message must be carefully targeted to the recipient, relevant and interesting, with a compelling offer.

- Recommended words for subject lines include: "attention," "congrats," "flash," "hot," "inside," "miracle," "shocking," "private," and "SOS."

- B2B messages should be warm and friendly. They should be "as personal as possible without being assumptive," Lewis said.

Other useful tips:
- Don't use initial caps in your subject line (dead giveaway that it's an "ad")
- keep the first sentence short
- fire your biggest gun first (i.e., the offer or your hook)
- put the first "click here" (link to landing page) as high as possible
- make no paragraph longer than seven lines
- leave plenty of white space
- as a rule of thumb, use no more than 100 to 125 words in a prospecting message.

You still have to move a prospect through the proven stages of AIDA (attention, interest, desire, action). The challenge is to distill a direct-mail package down to its core essentials, and then figure out how to translate that to email and the Web.

Read the whole story here.

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