Targeted Email Advertising: Tidying Up Your Ad Copy
Despite what you may have heard, email advertising is alive and well. It is actually the slow, but steady decline of effective ad copy that is giving the entire industry a bad rep. These days, far too many legitimate email advertisements are horribly composed, making them look like junk at first glance. If your copy isn’t tight, recipients will instantly perceive you as nothing but an aggravating spammer trying to aggressively market something nobody wants. In this article, we will introduce a few tips that will help you maximize the effectiveness of your copy and distance yourself from the naggers.
Avoid Crucial Subject Line Mistakes
One of the most common mistakes email advertisers make is crafting subject lines that are all hype and no substance. Internet users have seen all the “Lose 50lbs in 30 days” and “Your Financial Freedom Inside” tricks. They instantly recognize the hype of these emails by glancing at their subject lines. More often than not, messages like these are tossed in the trash. There are numerous mistakes that can literally kill the effectiveness of your advertising message and these are just two examples. Your subject lines should make the reader want to read your message, not panic or assume something other than what you intended. Keep your subject lines descriptive and relevant because honesty and genuine creativity are two of the best ways to get your ads in front of potential buyers.
Tune Up the Body
The copy in the body of your message is critical and deserves special attention for obvious reasons. While this is your opportunity to entice subscribers and encourage them to make a purchase, don’t be too aggressive by shooting them a hard pitch in the beginning of the email. You must get them to warm up and feel comfortable with you first. If the reader sees that all you are out for is a sell, they just may decide to group you with all the other advertisers who annoy them and unsubscribe from your list. When composing your inner copy, remember keep it light, tight and to the point.
Write Copy with Spam Filters in Mind
Email ad copy is far more susceptible to triggering a spam filter than the text you would find in a personal email. For this reason, you need to be selective when creating your subject line and the copy in the body of the message as well. It is very important to understand that your email cannot be packed with words and phrases such as “bonus”, “prizes” or “order now”. This will do nothing but send your delivery rates plummeting once your message is stamped with a spam label and sent to a desolate folder the recipient might not even check. These filtering programs can be very tricky, so you may want to consider testing your ad copy with a spam checker. There are many free tools available for download so give one a try and put your copy to the test.
When considering that you must account for both the reader and their spam filter, writing effective ad copy can be more difficult than it sounds. Cheer up, because you can make things much easier by abandoning the traditional sales pitch and communicating with your audience on a personal level. Keep this in mind and your email advertising campaign can be just as successful as the next.
Jamie Colbs is a html email newsletter templates best practices activist advocate for Benchmark Email , a leading Web and permission-based email marketing service. Author Links Business URL: http://www.benchmarkemail.com/email-marketing/html-email-templates Business/Social Networking Links Twitter URL: http://twitter.com/benchmarkemail
