Email Marketing in 1,500 Words or Less

I have a friend applying for a project management job with a local company that focuses on email marketing. She’s an excellent project manager, but doesn’t have much experience with email marketing. I don’t have anything else going on, so I wrote up a primer to get her through the interview.

I can’t say it’s the best organized writing in the world, but perhaps handy if you’re trying to quickly understand email marketing.

How Marketers Measure Success in Email

1. Numbers of emails successfully sent: Sometimes you get bounces, spams, or bad emails. It’s good to track those numbers and clean the list occasionally.
2. Open rate: Total emails sent out / Emails opened = open rate percentage. The biggest three contributors to whether people open an email are:
   1. Do I know who sent this to me? The name and email address in the from: field.
   2. Is the subject line interesting to me? Words like “Free” usually end up in spam, but knowing that it’s the user’s birthday or that their anniversary is coming up can generate interest. The more relevant personal information you can add in the subject line (in a way that’s not creepy), the higher your open rate.
   3. Is this a good time to talk to me about this? Emails about insurance sent at 5 pm on a Friday? Not going to get opened. Emails about “three fashion tips you already have in your closet” at 4 pm on a Friday might get opened for the “going out” crowd.
3. Click-through rate: Total emails sent / # of clicks in all emails. Typically, just like a web page, the biggest visual will get the most clicks. And the stuff at the top of the page will get the most clicks. Know what your client really wants from their email campaign, and put it up there.
4. Spams and Unsubscribes: A certain number of people will categorize your email as spam and a certain number will unsubscribe. Marking an email as spam is easier than unsubscribing, and many people use it. It kinda sucks, but you’ll get a few. Unsubscribe is fine, because you can  at least offer them incentives for staying in the course of unsubscribing, like a free flashlight or something. Or you can ask why they’re leaving: “Hey wow, bummer. Did we not send you interesting content? Maybe you could choose from one of these three things to help us do better next time.” At least you get a very short exit interview.

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“No Man is Poor Who Has Friends”

Week 1 of funemployment?

Tough.  A lot of near misses. A lot of helpful emails. Tons of support from the best cast of friends I could ever hope for. A few meetings with a lot of coffee and a fair amount of beer.

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Business Cards on the Way

Just ordered business cards from moo.com because, yes, my copywriting services are for hire. Plus the Moo interface slays with its simplicity. Highly recommend them. I wrote different sayings on the back, with just my name and contact info on the front.

My business cards, from Moo.com

• People like to like things.
• You can’t bore people into buying.
• Your friendly neighborhood copywriter.
• We all speak English. I happen to do it for a living.
• LOL
• Will write for money.
• Words that make the page bleed.
• The word “solution” is never the solution.
• People love stories.

They’re supposed to arrive Oct. 6. We’ll see.

King Retail Solutions: Really? “Solutions” as Navigation Item?

For a short period of time down in Eugene, I took a job as Marketing Coordinator of King Retail Solutions. They did interior design and fabrication for retail. The fact that they did both design and manufacturing was the “solution.”

The King Retail Solutions homepage. Click for a larger view to read. We got a new client in Europe within a week of launching the site, who specifically said it was because of the site.

I fought solutions. A lot. I mean seriously. You want one navigation item to be the word, “solutions” and the other to be the word, “integrated”?

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SPARQ: Magazine and Website

Slam City, a knock off of Sin City. "Every city has a dive like this. The neon sign says it's 'The Post,' but it's really a gauntlet..."

SPARQ stands for speed, power, agility, reaction and quickness. The sports company’s goal was to scientifically improve the training that young athletes did — focusing less on the weight room and more on well-rounded athleticism.

It was a fantastic job. Combine my love of sports, coaching, and teaching, then add in a team of psychotically brilliant people who’d rather work until midnight than accept mediocrity. We did five years’ of worth in one year.

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Ending Interruptions in the Office

Cross-posted from my Pop Art blog.

There are Two Types of People in the World: Makers and Managers

There are two types of people in your office, Makers and Managers. And scheduling a meeting with Maker can kill that person’s effectiveness for the day, according to Paul Graham.

I find one meeting can sometimes affect a whole day. A meeting commonly blows at least half a day, by breaking up a morning or afternoon. But in addition there’s sometimes a cascading effect. If I know the afternoon is going to be broken up, I’m slightly less likely to start something ambitious in the morning.

Makers Need Uninterrupted Time

Makers do the work — at Pop Art, our Makers are designers, developers, programmers, writers, designers and media planners. These people create the work that ends up online. Here’s how Graham describes the conundrum Makers face.

They generally prefer to use time in units of half a day at least. You can’t write or program well in units of an hour. That’s barely enough time to get started.

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Ad Testing: Use Facebook CPC Instead of Polling

How do you test an awareness campaign with traditional and online display media? What if you ran a Facebook cost-per-click campaign that tested all your messages and offers across your demographics?

By doing minimal targeting — regions, for example. Or another variable not expected to influence results — then you could compare the percentage of impressions to the percentage of clicks to tell how varying demographics respond to your messages and offers.

In other words, instead of paying an ad testing company to poll customers, you can use Facebook to extend your campaigns for similar actionable data and yet more impressions. Ad testing can extend your campaign, rather than merely being an added cost.

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A Dozen Doozies: My Favorite Pop Art Blog Posts

This cracks me up to no end.

Hard to believe I’ve been blogging and working at Pop Art for more than two-and-a-half years now. In that time, I’ve tried to write posts that other writers will find useful, and maybe even demonstrate that we know what we’re doing.

Lately, my blogging has fallen off since I’ve taken on our media planning and buying department. But I thought it’d be a good time to look back.

1. The fake layout above comes from one of the funniest jokes ever made at Pop Art. Well, it was funny to me, anyway.
2. At some early point at Pop Art, we moved a lot of the SEO responsibility over to editorial. Here’s why. Read the rest of this entry »

WebVisions Recap on Twitter, 2009

Here’s the link to all the WebVisions chatter on Twitter, using just the #wv09 tag. I’ve been going through and reading it to see what people were commenting on — an excellent reminder about how a hashtag can unify and aggregate people’s experiences at an event. And it makes great notes to crib from later…

My Two Favorite Slides from WebVisions

1. First day, @bikehugger’s slide about how to be interesting online: “Do Epic Shit.”
2. Each one of @erictpeterson’s slides had his twitter handle and the (wrong) hash tag in the footer. Super convenient.

I’ll keep reading the #wv09 hashtag comments and see what other interesting tidbits I can pull out. I know @texagonian (Kevin Platt) had some good comments and nuggets, as well as at least one laugh-out-loud putdown. As you might expect if you know him.

If It’s May, It’s Time for More Copywriter Portfolio Tips

Every May, I get about 10-15 emails from graduating copywriters hoping to share their portfolio, and looking for copywriter portfolio tips. Most of them suffer from the same problem: no context. So here’s the portfolio tip I usually email back to them.

Dear Madison/Toby/Emily/Tyler,

If I could make just one (very long) comment on your portfolio, it’s this: I want to know why you made the choices you made for each ad/campaign. What business or creative needs led you to these executions? What funny dead-ends did you find along the way? Tell me a little story that explains why you did what you did. Read the rest of this entry »