Why e-mail is changing the rules of direct marketing
Herschell Gordon Lewis’s presentation at this week’s Annual Catalog Conference in San Francisco was blandly entitled “A 2003 Update on E-Mail Testing,” but what the direct marketing guru had to say was considerably more earthy, informative and provocative than the title implied. Indeed, like a good direct marketer, Lewis, who is president of Lewis Enterprises, crammed into his 75-minute session enough practical information on e-mail marketing to fill a how-to book.
It’s a book that could not have been written two years ago, Lewis concedes, because the rules of e-mail marketing are only being developed now as more catalogers use the medium. “We are on the verge of a sea change in e-mail marketing,” Lewis told his audience, and his remarks underscored his conviction that new guidelines for success in e-mail marketing are vastly different from those which have governed conventional direct marketing for decades.
Lewis identified four major changes taking place in direct marketing as a result of the web and e-mail, and he addressed these changes with colorful language and dozens of useful tips. The immediacy and directness of the web and e-mail and the withering attention span of those who rely on these media, says Lewis, require direct marketers to totally change their approach to include more informal language, more emphatic persuasion, greater substantiation of claims and, above all, a quick call to action.
On the subject of informality, Lewis argued that e-mail is a far more direct and personal medium that printed mail brochures and catalogs, and hence requires more informal communication techniques. “If you aren’t using contractions in your e-mail messages, you are costing yourself responses,” he declared. Similarly, he says that putting the recipient’s name in the subject line of an e-mail will result in a better response rate than leaving it out. Messages have to be shorter and paragraphs should not exceed seven lines of copy. With the overwhelming amount of information communicated on the Internet, noted Lewis, “People today have the attention span of a gnat. You have to grab them, impress them and then get out.”
The need for informality requires subject lines that dispense with initial capitalization of every word. “Catalogers are in love with initial caps, but lower case works better in e-mail subject lines,” noted Lewis.
Yet, the need for informal communication does not suspend the need for clarity, good grammar and correct spelling. Too often, Lewis said, e-mail promotions lack all three, because the ease of communicating over the Internet has led to sloppy copy editing. “It boggles the mind that some marketers excrete these e-mail messages without checking for spelling and grammar,” said Lewis, noting that such errors reduce credibility and dampen response.
The flood of e-mail messages with come-ons and empty claims, said Lewis, requires e-mail marketers to employ more “emphatic persuasion” and to readily substantiate any claims they make. “People have been overwhelmed with e-mail claims, with free offers they know aren’t free,” said Lewis. “People out there are just not ready to believe us. Their skepticism has hit a new peak.”
In the early days of e-mail promotion, he said, recipients might well have clicked on a subject line that read “Start saving money today.” Now, they will hit the delete button unless the subject line is compelling and specific and the offer behind it is meaningful. “On the web, people want specifics,” said Lewis. “They don’t want blather and chest-thumping. You can’t make empty promises; you have to be prepared to follow through on them.”
And to get a positive response that leads to an order, declared Lewis, e-mail messages must quickly get to the call to action given the short attention span that most e-mail receives. That means that e-mail must get to the sales proposition quickly and that the “click to order” has to be placed high up in the message and repeated throughout the message. “Being able to click (to order) at the moment of decision in an e-mail message parallels good salesmanship,” said Lewis. “Teasers in e-mail promotions are a total waste of time. You are at point-blank range when you communicate through e-mail; you must fire immediately.”
While there are other rules that can help guide e-mail markets, Lewis believes nothing beats testing a wide variety of e-mail promotions to determine which pull the best response. “There has never been a medium where testing different messages has been so easy and so effective,” he said, “and yet, most people don’t do it. Not testing an e-mail message is simply arrogance.”
But when tests show that one message outpulls another, the e-mail market has to be willing to bet on the winner even if it goes against traditional preferences. Lewis cited an example of a marketer who preferred putting the recipient’s name first in the subject line, followed by the headline. Nevertheless, he also tested the reverse order. Yet, when the test showed that putting the recipient’s name at the end of the subject line increased response by 13%, he chose to ignore the results and follow his initial preference. E-mailing, said Lewis, often requires marketers to break with tradition. “We get hung up on tradition,” he said, “because it’s easier to renounce the obvious than to renounce the traditional.”
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