Too Much Of A Good Marketing Thing

One of the world’s leading internet retailers is bombarding me with emails. A weekly update on their latest offers and new products would be OK. But daily? This is spam, no matter how good the targeting is. It’s a classic marketing mistake and is bound to lead to people blocking their emails. That includes me, much as I like buying from this company.
At Your Life Your Style, we email about once a month, which may not be enough to keep us constantly on our customers' radar, but I'd rather that than become unwelcome in the inbox.

Bad People Can Write Good Copy

I always delete spam emails without a second thought but the Subjcet Line of one the other day did catch my eye. One of the abilities I most admire is being able to write good advertising copy- finding the right words presented in the best way to get a positive response from the targeted audience.  So let me deconstruct the Subject Line of this spam email: "I sexual Russian blond, want to see, come closer".

To start with, it has the authentic 'foreign' phrasing that someone not totally familiar with English might use. You can almost hear the sexy Russian accent. Then there's the choice of words. "Sexual", as opposed to the more predictable "sexy", implies the sender is actually wanting sex rather than simply offering it. "Russian" is the nationality currently most associated with women who are keen to offer sexual liaisons. And of course she couldn't be anything other than a "blond", it's a hair colour perennially associated with sexiness but it keeps the description at a fun level instead of going for more potentially offputting explicit sexual attributes. 

So, having got the target's attention, we move on to getting the interest- "Want to see". Not a question, more an assumption intended to get you nodding in agreement.

Finally the call to action- "Come closer". In practice, this means 'click on the email' (then open a virus infected attachment or go to a website where we'll extract money or identity data from you). But by using this metaphor, the writer has created something far more powerful, evoking the memory of past experiences and that frisson of excitement when an intimate friend has wanted to get to know you on a more physical level. No-one but an idiot would even consider opening the email but that clever copy might just be enough to persuade the aforesaid idiot to click.

I deleted it, being neither the target market nor an idiot. If only such copywriting skill was being used for the power of good.

My Loss Was My Copywriting Gain

I'd just written an email for Your Life Your Style customers. I went to the loo and when I got back, someone had inadvertently logged into the website administration and my email was lost. I wrote it once more and clicked to send a test email. The website software froze and again I lost it.

Strangely I was not dishearetned or frustrated by this. Because you should re-write and re-write and re-write again. And ideally you should not refer to what you already wrote.

When you've gone through the process of writing copy a few times, the ideas are firmly lodged in your brain, so you don't have to think about what you're saying. You become one with the copy, grasshopper.

What comes out of your head when you re-write on a blank screen is sharper, leaner and more natural.

Funny Marketing

I was interested to read in the ClickZ newsletter that the late US comedian Red Skelton used to collect the addresses of members of his audience, then write to them next time he was due in town. A simple but very cost effective tool for selling tickets and building a fan base that most acts fail to exploit to this day.

Faking It

Does authenticity matter, asks Seth Godin. If the fake Rembrandt has fooled the experts, if Shakespeare didn’t write parts of his plays, if Churchill put his historic speeches on record after the event, if some of The Beatles’ songs weren’t recorded by all four of the Fabs, does it matter?

If the effect of the fake on you is the same as the ‘authentic’ version, it probably doesn’t. It is, if you like, all in the mind, and we should all trust our own feelings not what we’re told to feel. In business, it does matter though, because, if someone deliberately sells a fake Rolex, no matter how authentic looking, as the real thing, and they therefore charge a much higher price than justified- that’s fraud. And if you tell a customer something that isn’t true, you’ll be found out eventually, seriously damage your reputation- and may even be prosecuted.

How To Market Yourself Out Of Existence

Around Christmas, I seemed to be getting an email from HMV every other day- on one occasion there were three emails in my inbox. It's probably not a coincidence that the other day I read that their shops' seasonal sales are disappointing. I sympathise with them but bombarding their customers with sales emails is not the answer. It's an abuse of the permission I gave them to email and, like others before them, they'll probably find it backfires.
The maximum I want to hear from even my favourite businesses is once a week and then only if they have something interesting to say. i-tunes tell me weekly what's new and I'm grateful. Play.com (my favourite online CD/DVD site) mail me every couple of weeks or so and that's even better. Email me too often and I'll do what I've done to HMV- unsubscribe!