If you are considering an e-mail blast, newsletter campaign, or other written communications with potential customers, it is very important what you DON’T write.
Obviously, you should know (and if you don’t, here’s a tip) that using unsolicited lists is wrong. I won’t belabor the many reasons why, but they range from breaking the law to breaking down a good relationship. Your lists should be clean, and going to those who have at least given tacit approval they want some form of marketing communications.
So – you have a good, clean list. And you really, really want to sell something. Now obviously, you can’t write each piece to each individual customer. So you are going to need to use some genetic copy, along with some assumptions when you write.
But those assumptions could cost you, as shown in the excellent piece “How Not to Write A Sales Letter.”
Quick Tips (for how you should write):
- Don’t assume you know their business needs. Yes, I know this breaks a rule of marketing – that you need to know your audience and what they do. But really, with a 1,000-contact list you’re going to have to write somewhat differently.
- Yes, despite Marketing 101 rules, you ARE going to talk about yourself. Because you are offer what you do or sell, and are trying to find if someone will bite.
- Don’t say you are excited, grateful, enthusiastic, or happy. They DON’T CARE how you feel.
- Don’t question why you are writing what you are writing within your writing.
- (Don’t use repetition or alliteration)
- Don’t get cute!
- Don’t put in feature/benefits that are commonplace and used by everyone. That’s not a feature.
- Nail ’em on the first sentence. In the newspaper biz, we called this the lede graf (yes, newspaper jargon was deliberately misspelled). You should stick with who, what, where, when and why, but do so in a manner that takes the customers need into consideration. Again, they don’t care about you, but they might care how your product or service solves their problem.
That’s it for this week!