Rules of Email Marketing: Tips to Keep You from Spamming

Mastering direct e-mail marketing can be tricky. Here are three rules you should never break.

Last spring, online PR pro Juliana Moore sent an e-mail message to 200 people who received a free, information-packed newsletter from one of her clients every week. The client was appearing at a trade show, and the e-mail was an invitation to come visit the booth. It even offered advanced registration for a prize drawing.

Her reception? Mighty cold. Recipients flamed her. They called her note spam. They cancelled subscriptions to the newsletter. None came to the booth. Moore’s client was not amused.

Why’d she bomb? Many e-mail campaigns later, Moore knows for sure. She violated these key rules of e-mail marketing to friendly lists:

– Use a short subject line – five words maximum. “Our headline was something like ‘Learn the Inside Story on Profits from Voice on the Internet.’ It was too long, and sounded like a pitch. Something like ‘Voice/Net Offer’ or ‘Make Voice Work’ would have been lots better.”

– Keep text short. “Ten lines is near perfect,” Moore says. “If you can’t make a compelling case quickly, your offer isn’t good enough to send to your list yet. In this lousy campaign, we had about five paragraphs of text. We’d have been better off with five lines, and then a link to a strong Web page.”

– Link from the e-mail to a Web page with the real pitch. “The e- mail box is a poor selling environment. It’s dry, colorless, and has no emotional leverage. But Web pages are terrific selling environments. They amuse people while they sell, and can communicate positive feeling through the right design. So use the e-mail to sell the Web page. Then use the Web page to sell the product.”

How can she be so sure that these rules work? “Experience,” Moore says. “I’ve done about a hundred of these e-mail campaigns since that first one, and every so often I try to bend one of the rules. It never fails to come back to haunt me. These three principles are the simple truth. Try them and you’ll see.”

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