Oak Hill Ink April 2006: Creating Email that Creates Leads

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ISSUE 3: APRIL 2006

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By Barry Feldman, FeldmanCreative, and Debra Gotelli, Oak Hill Corporation

Your inbox is the place to be. It seems just about every company is tossing email into their marketing mix. Why not? Email marketing can be an effective mechanism for generating leads, fostering customer relationships, and building your brand.

The relatively low cost of entry is among the many reasons that email programs are so attractive. However, emails have run rampant, which leads to the point of this article: how do you get people to open, read, and respond to your email?

Establish an objective and plan.
Though email marketing comes with its own specific set of challenges, you'd be wise to apply some basic rules of marketing at the onset of the project. You need a plan, which begins with defining your objective. Ask yourself what you're trying to accomplish.

Is yours the kind of company that often makes news that customers and prospects stand to gain something from? If so, consider creating an e-newsletter. Then execute with objective news that contains facts, third-party commentary, maybe insights and observations that people will value. Tell your recipients what to expect from your newsletter and deliver it, using good judgment about content, frequency and length.

You need not go into the news business, however, to practice email marketing. Email is a good media for making announcements about products and services. It's ideal for promoting events. Even in the B2B arena, consider email for highlighting special offers, sales, and other programs. Whatever route you pursue, begin by establishing a realistic goal, and parlaying the intended objective into a strong execution strategy.

Your list is all-important.
You've developed an enticing offer and some killer creative to spread the word, but the response turned out disappointing. What gives? Your list let you down. You see, in email, as in all direct marketing, the quality of the list reigns supreme. Here are some pointers:

Grow a list. Do this perpetually, everywhere, and in every way possible. Obviously, you need to build a subscription form into your site and direct visitors there. Offer a "refer a friend" feature in your emails. Allow prospects to "opt" into your list wherever possible: at your reception desk, at trade show booths, at webinars, during customer service calls. Promote your program in your advertising, direct mail, even in your invoices.

Manage the list. Weed out bogus addresses. Allow recipients to update their addresses. Make a phone call or send a postcard to those you may otherwise lose.

Buy lists. Permission-based email works best, but buying or renting lists can be effective too. Find a reputable broker and make them do some work on your behalf. Be sure they're doing all they can to segment the list every which way: demographically, geographically, etc. Insist they demonstrate the integrity of the list with samples and guarantees.

Reach out and be relevant.
The more targeted and personalized you can make your email the higher response rate you'll generate. Begin by segmenting your lists. Then, create separate versions of the email. The goal is to tell a relevant story by being specific wherever possible.

You might even consider leveraging user-specific variables to create an ultra-targeted campaign. To do so, you use software that allows for dynamic assembly of the communications. We'll leave it at that for now. Suffice to say that when you're able to get information about the recipient, the added price (or effort) of fine-tuning your message is likely to be dwarfed by the rewards.

Write an effective subject line.
A subject line is your calling card-the critical component that determines whether or not your email gets opened. Thanks to the omnipresent spam filter, the subject line might dictate if your email ever arrives at all. Consequently, a number of do's and don'ts loom large.

· Do motivate the reader with some concise informative and/or interesting statement.
· Don't be vague or self-serving
· Do offer discounts, premiums and special offers in the subject line.
· Don't be misleading and risk losing the reader's trust.
· Do instruct the reader to take the action you want.
· Don't use the word "free," streams of exclamation points, CAPITAL letters, or do anything to trigger the filters.
· Do personalize your subject line whenever possible.
· Don't ramble. Aim to keep your subject line under 50 characters.

Getting the writing right..
Email is a form of direct response marketing, even if you don't sell off the page. The point being, invest the necessary dollars to have advertising pros do the job and your ROI should skyrocket. But this is a "how to" article, so here we go-some advice that might help should you opt to write your own copy.

Start selling in the subject line. Then work top down hitting your most important points first. Please don't mistake this tip for the common misconception that emails need to be short. They don't. They simply need to be well organized and well written. If your email has a lot of content, place a table of content with "jump links" at the top. Readers like that.

Don't be afraid to sprinkle in some tricks of the trade, a testimonial, for example, research findings, maybe a "top ten" list. Try different formats such as a one-to-one letter. The more personal you can be, the better. Above all, practice the essentials of good copywriting. Tell a compelling story about how your product or service solves a problem with the best reader-focused selling proposition you can muster. Make your offer powerful and impossible to miss.

Beauty is screen deep..
For my money, most emails lack the tasty design that comes from (you guessed it) a talented designer. The email needs to subscribe to the principles of good design. Yes, it'll be displayed on a screen, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be easy on the eyes, organized, simple. The elements should have a balance that works, but contain a dominant element. A common, but nonetheless an effective trick, is to place a banner or "masthead" treatment atop the space.

Use professional photography or illustration. The typography should be clean and the page should have ample white space. If you have a ton of points to make, use lists and parcel your content into different spaces that draw the reader's eye. Callout boxes and sidebars can be used to good effect. Avoid a lot of italics that might be hard to read and CAPITAL letters that bombard the reader's eyes.

This is the age of multimedia. Consider including audio, video and/or animation. These types of email, when delivered with distinction, have been known to increase response rates. All that said, it's always best to have a text-only version for those dinosaur email clients that don't accept HTML.

Think active.
Email marketing falls into the "interactive " category, so your goal should be to inspire the reader to interact, to take action. So don't be bashful about your call to action. Tell the reader what to do, provide reasons for doing it, and make it super simple.

An offer is your best bet, the more valuable the better. Offers take different forms: discounts, sweepstakes, free gifts, etc. In B2B marketing, especially for products with long sales cycles and careful consideration, the value of the offer typically comes in the form of "more information," preferably useful information. Using webcasts downloads, demonstrations, white papers, articles, and other credible publications have proven to be effective ways to generate leads.

Experts profess the more links you offer the more clicks you get. So place links strategically about the page and consider making the links send the reader to a series of appropriate pages: event registration pages, download forms, product pages, or success stories. Scour your site to identify logical spots that will help accomplish your objectives.

A common practice now is to build landing pages, microsites, or online "resource centers" that take the prospect to a library of materials that are of value to them (or should be). This is a good strategy for leveraging your marketing efforts across various media. Perhaps you have a broadcast (or podcast) you want your prospect to see (or hear). Use these tactics as an entry points to the next step in the sales process. There's nothing wrong with asking something from your reader, but use good judgment being careful not to be too demanding of their time or making them feel unnecessarily cornered.

Make each email more effective than the one before.
Email marketing is inherently trackable. You can quickly determine who is and isn't responding to your emails. You can also learn which links they've clicked. This is valuable information for improving your campaigns.

Don't neglect this valuable opportunity. Build metrics to analyze your campaign and apply them each time out. Email marketing partners will offer software with detailed reporting features and valuable shortcuts for managing lists, results, responses, and more. You can use these tools to help draw conclusions about what works best.

Do some testing as you go. You can test by trying different subject lines or offers, change the timing of the delivery, use different designs, or any number of variables. A simple, yet effective testing strategy is to split your list right down the middle and test a new variable against a constant. The point is to learn from your work and apply the lessons for refining the next effort and creating emails programs that generate more and more leads.

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Barry Feldman (www.feldmancreative.com) is a freelance copywriter and creative director with nearly 20 years of experience working with agencies and corporate marketing departments. Barry writes for a wide variety of companies and all across the media spectrum.

Debra Gotelli, director of marketing services for Oak Hill Corporation, has 20 years experience managing marketing for Meru Networks, Trapeze Networks, Cisco Systems, Novell, and others. Deb's forte is launching new high technology products into the marketplace.