The Chameleon Copywriter

When I look out at my bird feeder the scene out there often
reminds me of an online business in action.
You see, when I started feeding the birds a few months ago, everything was peaceful for a few weeks.
Only the best kind of birds showed up at the feeder.
The cardinals, chickadees, finches, nuthatches, flickers,
etc.
Then the house [...]

While at the mall today I saw a crossword puzzle that is a cover
of the Beatles White album.
In other words, the puzzle is almost entirely white.
This reminded me of how I loved putting together jigsaw puzzles when I was a kid. I was almost tempted to buy this puzzle because my daughter is [...]

If you have affiliates, it will help your bottom line if you provide your affiliates with several emails that they can use to promote your product.
I’ve written a ton of affiliate emails for clients and they usually ask me to write 3-7 emails for their affiliates to use.
The more emails you provide, the less likely [...]

When’s the last time you ordered a product and received a series of emails that were NOT sales pitches but instead held you by the hand and guided you through the use of that product?
I can’t think of a single time I’ve received emails like that beyond a “thank you for your purchase” email.
Emails [...]

If you have an email list, I’d love to hear what your biggest problem is in creating emails for your list.
I created a short survey with only three questions about your biggest autoresponder problem and what would help you solve it.
It should take you only a minute (literally) to fill out the survey. I’d [...]

There’s an interesting article in Catalog Success about emails that various catalogs sent that contained mistakes.
These catalogs then had to send out apology emails and almost all of them used HTML emails.
My favorite subject line of the bunch was this one from Urban Outfitters: “Take a Extra 25% off. This time, we mean it.” The [...]

Just read a Twitter post from Michel Fortin in which he says: “After an email broadcast of a new blog post, add it to your autoresponder cycle so that future subscribers will eventually see it too.”
This is great way to get extra mileage from an email that you only write once. I’ve noticed Michel doesn’t [...]

Ryan Healy’s blog post about how to get your email opened set me to thinking again about how marketing is ultimately about connecting with people.
Email is the true test of whether or not a marketer can or cannot connect with people. Most marketers can’t rely solely on email to do this. They need to use [...]

Do you have an email list? Then you should have a blog too.
If you are a copywriter and a client asks you to write email copy, you should always ask them if they have a blog. If they don’t have a blog then offer to create one for them.
Why? Because you can get more mileage [...]

In his book Effective Email Marketing, Herschell Gordon Lewis gives a “dangerous” general rule about email marketing. He says it’s dangerous because stating that something is a general rule opens up one to criticism. But here goes:

Text tends to outpull HTML when your message suggests urgency. HTML tends to outpull text when your message suggests [...]