Sunday, October 25th, 2009 at
11:29 am
If you need some copywriting inspiration I highly recommend copywriter Richard Armstrong’s free ebook My First 40 Years in Junk Mail, which is the story of his career as an A-list copywriter.
It also includes samples of some of the letters he wrote over the years, including teasers and lift notes. I typed out the ten teasers that he shares throughout the book so I can refer to them whenever I need headline and subject line inspiration. By the way, this is the first time I’ve ever taken notes while reading a free ebook.
As I read these samples it occurred to me that the letters read like emails. Just like a typical plain text email, many of the letters don’t have bullets, subheads or headlines and were written in a friendly tone. So there’s a lot an email copywriter can learn from reading these letters. Enjoy!
[Hat tip to Ben Settle for bringing this free ebook to my attention on his blog.]
Friday, October 23rd, 2009 at
6:04 am
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 it will be that your affiliates will all send out the same email. This is especially important in the internet marketing niche.
With several emails to choose from, it makes it easier for affiliates to craft their own email more easily by taking pieces from the various emails and putting them into one email.
The most ideal situation would be to provide a custom email for each affiliate – especially the high volume affiliates.
It’s always a challenge to make affiliate emails as personal and engaging as regular email copy but I try to follow the basic structure I follow for most emails:
* Begin with a story or interesting description and make the first paragraph very short, if possible.
* The email should have a setting – a time and a place. For example, “The other day I was sitting in Starbucks…”
* Include three links in the body of the email.
* Precede each link with a question or at least a short sentence.
* Include a P.S. that mentions one bonus or benefit that wasn’t mentioned in the body and also include a link to the website in the P.S.
So if you have affiliates, it’s more than likely that your affiliate emails could be improved upon, or that you could provide more of them.
