Email Marketing

One of the most important areas of marketing… and one of my personal favorites… is email marketing.

Here's the top of an email broadcast that I wrote for my financial investments client in January 08:

Email Planning and Personalisation

What I have discovered is that highly personalized, person-to-person appearing email works up to 510% better than advertising agency graphic laden blatant adverts.

…That's no surprise to any direct response long-copy copywriter, but it was nice to see it happen whilst contracted with an advertising agency by beating their largest clients back-end monthly email control piece by a whoping 510% on a split test.

With 100% more click-throughs (120 compared to 60). Followed by 510% more actual applications (61 compared to 10).

You might not be interested in loans yourself, but for the target audience, this hit their sweet spot. Here is my email copy:

Hi [firstname],

Do you qualify? From our records I think you do.

In fact: This could be one of the best financial considerations you can make right now. Especially if you feel trapped by high monthly repayments on loans or credit cards…

If you qualify I can show you how to:

Save over 50% of your monthly outgoings

Consolidate expensive debts

Easily manage your financial obligations

Start right now (no matter how poor your credit rating is)

Quickly find yourself with extra spending money for the family

And here’s another great benefit you’ll take advantage of:
You can immediately stop all debt repayments for 3 entire months!* Won’t that give you some breathing space to catch up on a few of life’s basic necessities?

But do you qualify? Let’s see…

Question 1: Are you a homeowner?

Question 2: Would £5,000 or more help you pay off some debts? Giving you money to spend on improving your family life?

If yes to both questions then don’t worry if you have poor credit because helping people with debt despite poor credit is our specialty.

And the more debt you’ve got, the more we can help.
Here’s how this could work for you:

Jane owed £10,000 and she was paying an average of 3% interest on her credit cards. That’s £300 per month.

We helped Jane get a new debt consolidation loan of £10,000. She only pays £114 now, instead of £300. That’s a whopping saving of over 50% every single month!*

[firstname], if you’ve read this far then I’m sure you passed the 2 qualifying questions above. Click here to get in touch with us right away because we can most probably help you reduce your monthly outgoings by a lot. Just like we did for Jane and her family.

You could also have extra money to spend for the family on anything you like:

* Refurbish or extend your property
* Buy a new car, boat or caravan
* Take a luxury holiday or cruise
* Generally spoil yourself & your family

We know the difficulties that poor credit ratings can cause for you. But right now we have new lenders policies, and new rates are available.

Why give the credit card or expensive loan companies your hard earned money when you can get our help and spend the money on your family instead? And for the next 3 months you won’t have to pay a penny.*

Find out right now how our latest homeowner loans could help you save up to 50% on your monthly outgoings.

Best regards,

[sig]
Client Service Director
[company logo]

PS: Here’s part of a letter from someone we helped recently.

“From day one you were helpful and kept me informed, you changed my opinion of loan companies completely." - Miss Grantham

Let us help you the same way [firstname].

PS #2: Here’s part of a recent advertisement we put in the papers of the Digital Camera that we can GIVE you after success transferring your current debt to your lower cost debt consolidation loan with us.

So that’s:

* 50% monthly savings
* No payments for 3 months
* 6MB digital camera
* And much, much more!

Why not take just another minute right now to find out about our latest homeowner loans?
* Rates and conditions are subject to status and are for illustration
purposes only and do not include optional payment protection

- end of 510% e-mail broadcast copy -

I won't include the Agencies own creative to maintain their privacy. At first the Ad Agency complained the copy I write for them was 'too long' or 'too American'.

510% more conversions baby. In a UK market. 'Nuff said..

August 07 Update: The client has now used the exact same copy 3 consecutive months in a row because of it's record breaking response.

You can see the full ROMI metrics on this campaign on the Marketing ROI page.

The lesson here is definitely that personalised copy in a plain email written by your staff expressing their views about your companies product can effectively compete with high-graphic advertising agency creative. Don't get trapped paying high agency fees whilst getting low conversions.

Email Tracking

In fact, if your emails are so valuable and useful, prospects will return to them a numbr of times, which can mean that your open-rates and click-through rates can exceed 100% of your sent rate. Here's a diagram from one of my own email campaigns: