Online marketing that works
Since Ray Tomlinson sent that first email in 1971, it’s been the backbone of all social technology.
40 years later, and it’s still the most powerful (digital) communication tool on earth.
My reclusive pal Ben Settle jumps on the show today to talk email marketing.
While the seven-step “snowball effect” he lays out can be applied to almost any aspect of profitable content marketing, we bring it all back to the loyal, always-willing, unbeatable and unstoppable … email.
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Welcome to The Lede.
Every week I’ll be digging up and linking to stories, news, and opinion relevant to online marketing and copywriting.
Email, social media, innovation, SEO, productivity, mobile, conversion, publishing, and everything in between.
No commentary, just a fast, single page of headlines that you can grab, scan, and squeeze for all they may (or may not) be worth.
All right then, on with it …
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Every writer who has ever lived has lusted after ideas.
Where are they, how do I get them, and how do I keep them coming?
If you’ve been writing long enough, you know that — like Solomon — there is nothing new under the sun.
Try as you might to sweat them out of your head or pull them gently from the stars above, there are no new ideas.
So, relax.
But the page is not going to write itself, is it? Where then do we turn for ideas that work, ideas that move, ideas that persuade?
In short, we steal them.
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If there’s an art to email marketing, it’s being able to write messages that are simultaneously:
Unfortunately, most emails are either pure content or pure pitch.
But when you merge those two elements, you can see a large (and long term) increase in sales.
I’m going to give you precise examples of what I mean.
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We live a lonely life out here on the internet.
Sure, we’ve got email and blogs and social media and Skype and the occasional contact via an actual phone, but in real-life terms we’re pretty isolated.
We usually live far away from our “work friends.” We swap ideas in small, discreet blocks — a half-hour IM chat with someone here, an email or two with someone else there.
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Imagine you’re having a discussion with a talkative, hyperactive teenager.
The conversation goes something like this …
We went to the mall, and like, there was this fire in the mall. And we went from there to the movies, but we didn’t have any money and anyway the popcorn machine was broken, and so we didn’t really want to go to the movies without popcorn. But right after that we went to have some pizza and there was this creepy guy outside the store. But listen to this — because that’s not the best part. The best part is that Sylvie dumped Josh, and like, they ran into each other in the street …
Annoying right? Then why do we so often write our web copy just like that teenager talks?
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