New Age Copy

I have been involved in writing a lot of sales newsletters recently and one thing I have come to learn from writing all these emails is that your subject line is everything.

Failt to pull them on this one simple sentence and not only will they fail to read your email, but you will fail to convert them into a sale too.

As one copywriter once told me, a 2 million mailing list means nothing if you haven’t got the trust of your subscribers or have got nothing of value to offer them when you message them.

Bombard them with sales message after sales message and they will get fed up and will begin deleting your emails on sight.

So what do you do? You give them an impossible to ignore subject line, which will have them clicking on open without hestitation.

The best tricks I have learnt are the following:

1. Give them a shocking result – a statistic/figure that they will want to know more about i.e. ‘93.2% of mothers swear by it…’ – the first question your mailing list is going to ask is ‘what do they swear by?’

   Using this curiousity, they will open your email. The only point that you need to remember here is, that you cannot ignore this statistic. Whatever you mention within your subject line needs to either remain a theme within your email or act as a starting point to enticing them towards your product/service

2. Ask them a question – now I don’t mean ‘How are you?’ These question has to draw their curisosity as well and make them want to know the answer. For example if you to ask them ‘Have you had much success with these?’ they will then think ‘With what?’

   In most instances you will be writing emails to a mailing list that has subscribed to your newsletter, so if you specialise in weight loss, property, mens health etc, they will expect your emails and subsequently your subject lines to relate to this niche area.

Your subject lines though are only part of the battle. Yes you have got them to open your email, but that doesn’t automatically mean they will read all your email. Write poor sales copy and you could potentially lose them on your first sentence!

That is why it is incredibly important to make your sales copy strong, enticing and fluid.

Some clever tricks I have learnt to prompt readers on is the use of the following:

• … – these 3 simple dots may look like nothing, but subconsciously they prompt your mind to continue reading. In many ways, your mind views these 3 full stops as a sign that your sentence is incomplete.

  Now I feel that these can become increasingly extensive if done constantly, but time them right throughout your copy and you can experience this effect of naturally pushing them down the page

• Be grammatically incorrect  – starting sentences with ‘And’, ‘But’ ‘Therefore’ or ‘Also’ is a great way to keep consumers reading. Similar to ‘…’ consumers naturally assume you are continuing with the last sentence, so will keep reading to find out the outcome of the sentence

All of these are only a starting point for improving your open rates and ultimately your sales, but in the next few weeks I will expand on this subject.

If you have got any questions in the mean time, send me a message and I will get back to you as soon as I can.

Rowena xx