So you’re eager to use email marketing because of its obvious benefits, but perhaps you DON’T have an email list…or maybe you just wish you had more email addresses.
If that describes you, don’t feel bad, for you’re not alone. In fact, we hear from people with this problem every week.
About Renting Lists…
Regrettably, the world of email marketing lists can be a very confusing place. On the one side, you have the legitimate, super-pristine — but usually somewhat expensive — opt-in email list brokers. And the key word here is “legitimate,” for these brokers offer genuine opt-in email addresses.
Moreover, they typically rent these email address on a pay-per-use basis; they seldom, if ever, “sell” the email addresses. That means that you’re not sending out the email yourself. Instead, you’ll send your email’s HTML file (and possibly the related images) to the list broker, and they’ll handle the mailing for you.
These rentals can be pricey, though. For consumer email lists, prices run about $100 to $150 CPM (that’s “cost per mille,” which is fancy-talk for “cost per thousand”). So, that’s 10 to 15 cents apiece for a one-time rental of the email address. And if you have very specific “selects,” then the price can go up quickly.
It’s cheaper than postage, for sure, but quite possibly not very cost-effective, either. More on that in a moment…
Business-to-business lists will run even higher, usually starting at $250 CPM and running as high as $1,000 CPM for a very well targeted list. And yes, $1,000 CPM means that you’re paying a DOLLAR for each email address, and remember, that’s for a ONE-TIME use.
Pricey!
About Buying Lists…
At the other end of the spectrum, you have what I call the real “fly-by-nighters.” These are the people who purport to have 100 million or 200 million “opt in” email addresses, and they’ll send out crazy amounts of email for you (like 10 million emails) for a ridiculously small amount of money (like $500).
This is just crazy talk!
These companies must simply work on the assumption that they will always find new customers willing to gamble, because I can’t see how they ever get any repeat business. In the handful of cases where I know for a fact what happened when someone used this kind of service, I’ll tell you how many responses were received:
ZERO.
I guess these vendors just rely on people saying to themselves, “Wow, 10 MILLION emails going out for my business for only FIVE HUNDRED BUCKS! I mean, that’s only a NICKEL to send out a THOUSAND emails!”
And sure, when you compare a nickel for a thousand emails to, say, a hundred bucks for a thousand emails (which is TWO THOUSAND TIMES the cost), it’s easy to further calculate that even if the response rate is only 1/2000th as good, you’re still coming out ahead.
But ZERO is still ZERO.
So, the next time a vendor offers you 10 million emails for $500, think very hard about whether you’re really willing to flush five hundred bucks down the toilet. Because that is precisely what you’ll be doing…
And that leads me to the wild, untamed world of “buying” email addresses.
The Importance of Permission — and RELEVANCE…
If your goal is to own and market to a legitimate opt-in email list (that is, the kind of email list that has a shot at garnering response), then buying an email list is not for you. The reason for that is simple…you really can’t “buy” someone’s permission. They have to give it to you.
Moreover, permission is only half the battle when it comes to email marketing. Relevance is, in my opinion, just as much a factor in email marketing success, because if you’re not relevant to the recipient, who cares about permission?
If I sign up for an email newsletter to ABC Company because I love their widgets, I’m going to be more than a little confused when ABC Company starts to send me emails about the donkle manufacturer they just acquired.
I like widgets, not donkles — remember, ABC?
In fact — and this applies more to the business-to-business world than the consumer world — I’d even go so far as to say that relevance is even more important than permission.
I’ve seen a handful of business-to-business companies use non-permission email lists with tremendous success, because the content of the emails was of great interest to the majority of people on the list.
Were there unsubscribes? Sure. But were there also email replies saying, “Die, spammer, die!” Nope — not a one! In fact, I’ve seen open and click through rates for these efforts that would make some true opt-in email marketers more than a little jealous.
That’s not to say that I endorse this as a business practice. I don’t. BUT, it does show that relevance may trump permission when it comes to email marketing. And it’s pretty darn hard to buy a list outright and be anything close to relevant to all of the recipients.
So, getting back to the reasons why you should never “buy” a list…
When you “buy” a list, you’re actually taking ownership of the file. In theory, that sounds great because you are free to do with the list whatever you wish. In particular, you can send as many emails to the list as you like without paying any more money (deployment costs aside).
The problem with buying such a list, though, is that the quality is most likely nothing short of horrible. A good percentage of the email addresses are likely to be stale and undeliverable. Moreover, it’s highly probable that the list was compiled without permission from the people actually on the list.
There are numerous ways to compile such lists. You can simply harvest them off the Web and aggregate them into a file. You could set up a bunch of various Web sites with different free offers that require an email address to participate. Think about that method, though. Do you really think that anyone would sign up for anything like that if they understood that their email address was going to be sold countless times?
Now, take it the next step further. What happens when that person starts to get bombarded with promotional email that is simply not wanted? Either he will tune out any message that is from someone he doesn’t know, or he will simply abandon the email address and start a new email account elsewhere.
Either way, the result is the same: Your email is not going to be well received, assuming it’s received at all.
And of course, once you have purchased such a list, your battle is not yet even half over, because you still have to find a way to send the emails out.
The Challenge of Delivering Purchased Emails…
Perhaps you intend to send them using your own email server, but are you sure that you’re equipped to process the volume of email that you’re intending?
If the list is small (say, under 100,000 records), maybe you could do this. Maybe not. But you have to be aware of the fact that sending a high quantity of promotional email out using your own email server could very well put your ability to send regular business email at risk.
If your IP address ends up on one or more of the many blacklists out there, you could have a real problem getting your regular business email delivered. That’s not a risk I would suggest taking.
In addition, you will need to have a process to handle all of the hard bounces, soft bounces, out-of-office replies, verification messages, and unsubscribe requests. There’s a lot more to handling your email marketing than just hitting the “send” button.
And even if you do manage to get your emails deployed, odds are very good that your email will generate enough “this is spam” complaints to block your current and future emails at places such as AOL, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, and Yahoo! If you have a consumer focus, the majority of the email addresses on your list are going to come from these service providers.
You can also pretty much forget about making deliveries to Comcast and other Internet service providers, as when they see someone trying to deliver thousands of emails to their customers at one time, they will terminate and reject the entire mailing.
This is all starting to sound like a bad idea, isn’t it? You’ll spend all that time and money, and when all is said and done, very few of your emails will actually be delivered, let alone opened and acted upon.
What about “whitelisting,” you might say?
Absolutely, you could go through the whitelisting process with AOL, Gmail, MSN/Hotmail, Yahoo, Comcast, etc., but it won’t matter if your email generates an inordinate number of bounces and spam complaints. And once the complaints start to roll in (and trust me, they will), your whitelist status will be terminated.
It’s really a shame, too, because I know that these lists are always priced so attractively that you think there’s no way you can lose!
A “Bad Apple” Example…
I’ve seen one vendor who claims to have 300 million fully opted-in email addresses available (segmentable by just about every category you can think of), and their price to buy this data is only $400 for 1 million email addresses – and only $1,000 for 15 million!
Moreover, this vendor claims that they can send out up to 15 million emails for you for only $20, or they’ll even GIVE you the software necessary to do it yourself.
In other words, for just over $1,000, this vendor purports to be able to send out 15 million fully opted-in, segmented emails. That’s less than 7 cents per thousand emails – and you’ll own the list afterwards.
Well, let me tell you…
One day I saw a representative of this company offering 5,000 email addresses for free (he’s on LinkedIn), so I figured, “OK, let’s get a peek behind the curtain here, just to see what kind of email addresses they have.”
I got my user ID and password, and started looking around their Web site. I figured since we have done a lot of email marketing work for publishers, I’d use publishing-related SIC codes to narrow my search. Then I narrowed things down a little more using nearby states, adding new states until I got close to the 5,000 email mark.
So, using SIC codes 2721 and 2741, as well as the states AL, FL, GA, MS, NC and TN, I had a list of 4,917 records to download. I was very interested to see what kind of data I’d get — but the results were dismal, to say the least.
First off, of the 4,917 email addresses that I received, 1,483 of them were for “Arthur Frommer’s Budget Travel.” Is anyone else having a hard time believing that nearly 1,500 people from ONE company genuinely opted in to this list?
And let me tell you, mixed in with those email addresses were a huge number of European email addresses. I’m no geography major, but I don’t think Russia is in any part of the southeastern United States.
It became very clear to me that this list was harvested, which basically means that the email addresses were found on the Web. These are NOT opt-in email addresses.
Adding fuel to the fire is the fact that there were MANY email addresses in the list that started with admin@, advertise@, customerservice@, and webmaster@. These “role-based” email addresses may be valid, but they are certainly not opted in. In fact, there were 284 email addresses that started with “info@,” which is a clear giveaway that this is not an opt-in list.
One of the email addresses was actually “xxxx@xxxx.xx” (and that’s no typo).
Thankfully, I knew better than to even try to send email to this list. Others have not been so fortunate, though.
Here’s a comment posted to Ripoff Report from an unhappy customer of this exact company:
“The lists were not cleaned and opt in like he said the (sic) would be and were full of spam traps and complainers. I lost my mail servers and because it was down for 4 days I lost revenue. I even lost my website because of complaints to my host.”
Apparently this bad experience cost the customer the tidy sum of $1,999.
Ouch!
So, the lesson to be learned here is, “DO NOT BUY EMAIL LISTS. EVER.”
(And if you must rent, run your numbers carefully, and start with a credible email list broker!)
# # #
Do you have a story to share about buying or renting email lists? Have I got something completely wrong here?
Share the details with me!
I’m always trying to learn more about the world of email lists, so please provide your comments here, or send me an email.
Thank you!
I’m not sure “the perfect Web site” exists, but there’s no shortage of those that need an awful lot of help.
And I’m not talking about “help” in the sense that they don’t look good, I’m talking about “help” in the sense that they don’t do a darn thing to make your phone ring or bring in new customers.
Most times, these sites just need a few tweaks here and there to work a little harder, but today I encountered a site where the business owner simply got it all wrong. Every last bit of it…
It’s understandable, of course. This business owner is probably very good at what he does (he’s an HVAC contractor), but when it comes to marketing himself on the Web, he needs help. And in fairness to him, he probably knows more about my business — email marketing services — than I will ever understand about his.
When I reviewed his Web site, however, I developed a list of a dozen things that, if given the chance, I would have done differently or better, all with an eye towards making the site a more valuable marketing tool.
Almost all small business owners have heard of “search engine optimization,” which basically means that you’re tweaking the content, structure, and layout of your Web site so that more people will find it when they are searching places like Google and Yahoo!.
There’s more to just being “found” on the Web, though. Once people find you, you have to “sell” them on the idea of picking up the phone, filling out an inquiry form, or coming to your business. So, keeping in mind that the goal here is the “one-two punch” of (1) being found on the Web, then (2) selling the person on connecting with you, here is my list of 12 ways to make your Web site do more for your business:
- Web Page Title. This is probably one of the most overlooked items on small business Web sites. Have you ever noticed the words at the top left of your Web browser? They are usually white letters on a blue background. This is the Web page title. Most businesses simply use their name and leave it at that. However, that’s a huge mistake, because the Web page title is one of the most important considerations to search engines when they index your Web site. Your Web page titles should contain important words that people use when conducting Web searches (“keywords”), and your Web page titles should be different for each page. For example, if you own a barber shop in Alpharetta, your home page’s title should be something like, “Alpharetta Barber Shop,” not the actual name of the barber shop. (This assumes, of course, that your business is local in nature.)
- Header Tags. Each of your Web pages — especially the home page — should have a headline that is keyword-rich and unique. Also, those headlines should be wrapped by “header tags” in your HTML (the code that is used to produce your Web pages). Search engines put an incredible amount of weight on the content that they find wrapped in these header tags. If you don’t have keyword-rich content wrapped by H1 and H2 header tags, you are missing out on a better search engine ranking.
- Unique Web Pages for Important Keywords. Now that you know that the title page and header tags are important for search engine rankings, you might think that it could be a good idea to have a separate Web page for each keyword phrase that is important for your business — and you’d be right! For example, if you own an HVAC business that caters to the cities of Alpharetta, Cumming, Milton, and Roswell, you would probably be wise to set up individual Web pages with titles and header tags that included “Alpharetta HVAC,” “Cumming HVAC,” “Milton HVAC,” etc., and links to those pages should be part of your home page navigation.
- Meta Tags. Meta tags are more bits of HTML code that hide behind the scenes. You can’t see them on a Web page, but when search engines index your site, they are seen by the computers doing the indexing. Meta tags used be considered the “end all” of search engine optimization, and while they are not quite as important today, they still remain very important. Moreover, it takes only a few minutes to set up meta tags for each Web page. At the very minimum, you want to have meta tags for each Web page’s “keywords” and “description,” and these should be unique for each Web page.
- PageRank/Inbound Links. One thing that top search engines like Google take into account when ranking your Web site is how many other sites link to yours. The theory is that if more sites link to yours, there must be some valuable content there. When you have more of these “inbound links,” you should achieve a better Google PageRank (which is a number between 0 and 10). You can check your own site’s Google PageRank by either (1) downloading the Google Toolbar and enabling the PageRank checker (which will allow you to see the PageRank of any site you visit) or (2) going to a site such as prchecker.info and typing in a Web address. Generally speaking, any site with a PageRank of 5 or higher is doing pretty well. A PageRank of 0 or 1 is very weak and needs immediate attention. You should never use a link-swapping service as these are usually a waste of money, but you should consider trading links with non-competitive businesses where you know the owner. You can also build your incoming links by writing articles for places like ezinearticles.com, and then including links back to your Web site.
- Keyword Rich Web Content. In addition to ensuring that you have important keywords in your page title and header tags, you should also ensure that the copy of each Web page uses those keywords in an appropriate quantity (known as “keyword density”). Generally speaking, each Web page should have about 250 to 350 words of copy, and about 7% to 10% of those words should relate to the keywords related to that specific page. It can also be helpful to format those keywords in bold and/or italics, as that indicates that these keywords are important. You can also take this one step further and make those keywords links to other pages on your Web site.
- Sell, sell, sell! It’s important to use keywords, but don’t forget to pepper your Web site with some good-ol’-fashioned sales copy, too. Don’t make your site only about you, with the words “I” or “we” at the beginning of each paragraph. Make your Web site about your prospects and your customers, with copy written from their point of view. When possible, write in terms of benefits, not features. And don’t forget the most important part of any sales copy — a call to action! People generally need to be told what to do, so if you want them to call, fill out an inquiry form, or otherwise connect with you, you have to ask them to do it.
- An Offer or Special. While on the subject of the call to action, don’t forget to give people a reason to call. The word “because” is very powerful here, as people are proven to respond better when they have a reason to do something. So when people visit your Web site, give them a reason to either pick up the phone, fill out that inquiry form, email you, or come in to your business. This could be because you have an offer or special that they can only take advantage of right now, at this moment. Perhaps it’s a coupon, a service special, a price-matching offer, or some other carrot that you can dangle to entice them to action.
- Blog. Yes, there are times when I think that the whole blogging thing has been done to death, but when done correctly with purpose, it’s a valuable component of your Web marketing effort. First, it gives you a chance to establish yourself as a subject matter expert. Second, search engines love new content, so writing a new blog page at least once a week is a great way to show those search engines that you’re keeping your Web page fresh. Third, you can stuff your blog posts with keywords that will improve your search engine ranking. Blogs are easy to install, too, and they encourage reader participation. You never know who is going to be reading your blog or what good things they might have to say about you as a result.
- Testimonials. The most important part of direct-response copywriting is without doubt the “proof” element. And the more specific the proof, the better. If you are positioning yourself as the “best,” or the “cheapest,” or the “fastest,” then you’re going to need to prove it. That is why you absolutely must take steps to ensure that your prospects know that you’re credible and that they can count on you. If you don’t have testimonials on hand already, go back to your most recent customers and get some — fast. And don’t forget to get them going forward so that you can always update your site with fresh, current testimonials. This will let people know that you’re not just clinging to that one job you did right back in 2003. When they see a testimonial from the last month, they’ll know they can trust you.
- Use Other Sites to Your Advantage. There are now numerous Web sites where people can talk about your business. Examples of these are Kudzu and Yelp, where people can rate and write reviews about your business. It’s important that you’re aware of what people are saying about you in these places, and respond if necessary. Also, be on the lookout for competitors who might write things about you that are not true. In addition, just like how you’re going to ask for testimonials from now on, you can also ask happy clients and customers to write reviews on these sites, and then link back to these reviews from your own site. Again, the “proof” aspect is among the most important part of your Web site. Likewise, if you’re a member of the Better Business Bureau or a trade association, be sure to highlight that. It’s all about credibility.
- Multiple Response Options. All too often, I see that business owners simply put up their phone number and an email address as response options for prospects. You need to have as many choices for people to get in touch with you, including at least a Web inquiry form and possibly a “call me back” button. Some people are not going to be comfortable calling you just yet, and they may not want to be bothered with writing an email, yet they are more than happy to fill out a short form. This form should ask for the bare minimum of information: a first name, a phone number, and an optional email address. Make it as simple for people to connect with you, and then don’t let them down: respond right away! Also, if someone sends you their email address, ensure that you have an auto-responder set up so that they will receive an immediate reply.
Yes, it’s a lot to take in, I know, but the good news is that you don’t have to incorporate all of these updates at once. You can do them one at a time, and even if you do them individually, they will help your Web site work just a little harder. When you’re done, though, you’re almost certain to see more traffic, and as a result, more business.
In a recent post, I wrote about the pre-deployment tasks that an email services provider (ESP) should include when you outsource your email marketing effort. In this post (the second of two parts), I’ll cover what happens when the campaign goes live.
And Now, We Hit the Send Button
Once you hit the “send” button, there’s not much you can do if you find a mistake. However, just because the mailing has been sent doesn’t mean the job is finished. Far from it!
Monitor Deployment. Your ESP should watch the progress of your mailing, verifying before the scheduled send time that the mail is in the queue for deployment. Once the deployment begins, progress should be monitored. You don’t want to find out at 6PM that a mailing scheduled for 10AM has yet to leave the server.
Answer “Challenge” Messages. With the advent of “challenge-response” solutions, a meaningful percentage of your mail will go undelivered (some say as much as 10%) unless someone handles these responses very soon after the mailing goes out. Your ESP should offer this service.
Handle Responses. Your email will generate some automatic as well as manual replies. These replies will vary in content from “I’m out of the office” to “Please remove me from your list” to “Have a sales rep call me” to “Die, spammer, die!” Your ESP should have an established protocol as to how response management is handled so that you see only those replies that require your direct involvement.
When the Dust Has Settled
When the mail has been sent and most of the responses have been generated, it’s time to for post-deployment reporting and analysis.
You’ll look to your ESP to give you basic metrics such as deliverability, open, click-through, unsubscribe, and possibly even conversion rates. If you’re stopping your review at these one-time numbers, however, you’re not getting a complete picture.
Look at the Trends. More important than the individual campaign’s results are the trends. Are open and click-through rates holding steady? Decreasing? If dropping off, you need to scratch beneath the surface and try to figure out why, and your ESP should facilitate that. The same goes for bounce rates and unsubscribe rates.
Lessons Learned. With each campaign, try to learn at least one or two lessons that you can take with you on the next effort. Did you do any subject line testing? What were the results? Which article generated the highest click-through on your newsletter? Your ESP should provide you with this feedback and come up with ideas to make your next deployment even more successful.
Domain Analysis. Your ESP should look at the Top 10 or Top 20 domains to which you send mail, ensuring that your mail is being delivered. Also, less popular domains that might represent important customers should be reviewed. You do not want to find out six months after the fact that mail to one of your biggest customers has been blocked.
Filter Resolution. If not all of your mail is getting through, it is the ESP’s job to work diligently on clearing the matter up. We have found that many corporate email system administrators are receptive to brief, personalized, truthful explanations as to why incoming mail should not be blocked.
List Maintenance. Finally, as part of the care and feeding of your email list, your ESP should provide you not only with an unsubscribe file but also with ideas as to how to build up your list by obtaining accurate information for names where inaccurate information currently exists. Although there’s little you can do to win back an unsubscribe request, there will come a time when you should visit your bounce file and see what data can be reclaimed.
As you can see, there’s a lot more to setting up, testing, and deploying an email campaign than uploading a couple of files and hitting the “send” button. Keep in mind, also, that some ESPs do even more than what I’ve outlined, and others do less. I’ve seen pricing for this service as low as $55 and as high as $1,000-plus, so it’s safe to say there is a wide range of services and capabilities. Choose wisely!
I once saw an ad for a self-service email marketing solution that went something like this:
Q. Can anyone tell me what I get for email campaign setup fees?
A. We couldn’t begin to tell you because we don’t charge any.
The underlying message of the ad is that all campaign setup fees are a waste of money, and this is just not true. Many organizations struggle with time and resource issues, and others just want to ensure that their campaigns are professionally executed from Day One.
Having said that, it’s important to ensure that you get your money’s worth when hiring an email services provider (ESP). In this first part of a two-part article, I’ll discuss some of the more important services that you should receive.
Quality Control of List
Unsubscribes. If you submit a list for use in the mailing, your ESP should run that list against the unsubscribe file. Apart from being a good business practice, it’s important in terms of CAN-SPAM compliance.
Soft Bounces. Similarly, your ESP should ensure that you don’t attempt to send mail to addresses for which you’ve received a number of soft bounces. (Soft bounces occur for a number of reasons. Some of the most common are: the domain exists, but the email address is invalid; the mailbox is full; or the receiving server was down or busy.)
A high bounce rate often indicates a list in need of maintenance. Also, and perhaps more importantly, if major ISPs and Web-based email services see that you’re repeatedly attempting to send email to bad addresses, you might end up getting blacklisted by them altogether.
Seed List. This is easy to overlook, but the ESP should ask if there are any people at your company (who might not already be on the list) who need to see the campaign when it goes “live.” The ESP should then add these email addresses to the seed list.
Quality Control of Outbound Content
Review Grammar, Spelling. Even if your ESP does not generate your content, a second set of eyes is always nice. Your service provider should be genuinely concerned with helping you put your best foot forward.
Review Content for Filters, CAN-SPAM. Your ESP should run your creative files through a content checker to ensure that they are unlikely to trip common spam filters. When problems arise, suggestions as to copy changes should be offered. Also, a quick review ensuring that you have a functional unsubscribe option and a complete snail-mail address should be part of this process.
Weight, Size, Other Specs. Among other things, your ESP should ensure that your HTML file does not “weigh” more than about 25K to 30K, and that the file is not wider than practical, usually about 600 pixels. In addition, the HTML file should be a combination of images and text as opposed to one giant image (which, incredibly, I have often seen used).
Image Weight, Location. Your service provider should either host images for you or ensure that your images are hosted correctly on your server (and that the HTML code is accurate). In addition, the ESP should check to see if the images have been optimized for fast loading.
TEXT Version. Despite the availability of tools that claim to automate this process, you or your ESP should manually prepare the TEXT version of your message. The TEXT version should have no more than 60 to 65 fixed-width characters on each line, followed by a hard return. There should also be a decent amount of white space to increase readability, and all hyperlinks should exist on unique lines with hard returns before and after the links.
Creation, Hosting of Web Version. Your ESP should generate a Web-based version of your email communication, then include a link to that version in both the HTML and TEXT versions. Either you or your service provider can host this version, whichever way is easier for you.
Link Tracking, Testing. In addition to setting up link tracking, your ESP should assign “friendly” names to each link so that reporting will be easier to interpret. Also, each link should be checked prior to testing to ensure that it is functional and that the target is correct.
Internal Test. Given the concerns that email marketers have with deliverability, filters, and SPAM issues, the internal testing process is more important than ever. Your ESP should have a protocol established to send tests to major ISPs and Web-based email services to ensure not only that the mail is delivered but also that it is not routed to a junk-mail folder.
Your ESP should also include test email addresses using different software (such as Eudora, Lotus Notes, Outlook, and Outlook Express) to ensure that the message renders correctly and is not routed to a SPAM folder.
External Test. The time that your ESP actually deploys your message should not be the first time that you see it “live.” Rather, there should be an external test cycle with appropriate seed names from your organization so that approval can be given to deploy the mailing as instructed.
And with that, your email campaign should be ready to deploy. In an upcoming post, we’ll actually hit the send button!
Before you write the copy for your next email marketing effort, ask yourself these five questions and write down your answers:
Question 1: What problem does your target audience have?You only need a few sentences here. Your prospect needs to know that you really understand her. Remember, we’re not writing copy yet, so you don’t need to be creative here. Rather, we’re developing a framework that we will turn into great copy.
Question 2: What have been the obstacles to the problem’s solution?
Again, this answer can be short, with just a few factual sentences. You need to identify what the historical roadblocks to the problem’s solution in the past. Think about what’s been keeping the problem from getting solved.
Question 3: What is possible because of your product or service?
You’re getting ready to set the stage for what your prospect’s life will be life after buying your product or service – your solution. The answer to this question should paint a picture so the prospect can see himself enjoying the benefits.
Question 4: How is your product or service different?
Write a few sentences on your unique selling proposition (USP). Your USP is what sets you apart from your competition in a favorable way. Your USP is what gives your business the advantage from which your clients and customers benefit.
Question 5: What do you want the prospect to do?
This is the call to action. Think about what you want the recipient to do. Sign up for something? Call you? Register for an event? Make a purchase?
With this framework in hand, you are on the way to crafting copy that will elevate your email marketing results.
In a future post, I’ll give you “5 Copywriting Steps to Better Email Marketing.” In that article, we’ll turn this framework into a professionally written email that lifts response and delivers results!
