Ten years ago, a tattoo shop I went to subscribed my email address to their email newsletter.
They didn’t send updates very often, so I never unsubscribed.
However, when new owners acquired the business — and apparently their email newsletter list — they started sending not very good emails more frequently.
I should have unsubscribed after receiving the first few, but I kept forgetting. I’d just scroll through an email quickly and delete it.
And I’m glad that was my routine, because today I have a copywriting lesson to share that I took directly from a mistake they made in an email they sent me.
What was the email marketing mistake?
The first three paragraphs of the email contained too many comma splices and exclamation marks for my taste, but those goofs didn’t really bother me.
As I continued to scroll down, a photo caught my eye and I wanted to read more about the tattoos in the image.
But when I looked at the caption below the photo, it said:
“Create a great offer by adding words like ‘free,’ ‘personalized,’ ‘complimentary,’ or ‘customized.’ A sense of urgency often helps readers take an action, so think about inserting phrases like ‘for a limited time only’ or ‘only 7 remaining!’”
The person who wrote the email didn’t fill out that section of their template and forgot to delete the placeholder text. Although that’s a forgivable mistake that any busy person could easily make, it communicates a bit of carelessness.
If someone else proofread the email, they would have caught the error before it was transmitted to everyone on their list.
Even though I’m not interested in getting any new tattoos in the near future, I’m a potential customer to the shop and they didn’t take steps to demonstrate that their business pays attention to details.
I was also disappointed that there wasn’t a caption with descriptions about the tattoos.
All businesses need to establish trust with prospects, and that’s especially true when you use needles and ink to permanently mark your customers.
What’s special about your offer?
So, now that I’ve reminded you to double-check all the information you send to your email list, let’s discuss the copywriting lesson that was accidentally sent to me:
What else can you add to make a reader say “yes?”
When you’re ready to make an offer, the first part suggests including words like:
- Free
- Personalized
- Complimentary
- Customized
If you craft your own content and copy, you may take information you’re quite familiar with for granted. See if you’ve forgotten to communicate any powerful benefits as you review your writing.
The second part suggests creating a sense of urgency with phrases like:
- For a limited time only
- Only 7 remaining!
Ultimately, you want to reveal the details that compel your prospect to take action immediately.
Talk to one person intimately, as if you’re sharing the secrets of a great deal they need to act on right away. Explain why it wouldn’t make sense to wait.
Some speculation, just for fun …
I’ve been thinking about possible reasons why the tattoo shop left that portion of the email template blank.
In addition to the likely possibility that it was an absentminded error, I’m speculating that they didn’t intend to make any direct call to action in this email, so they ignored the “create a great offer with a sense of urgency” suggestion.
My assumption is that they mainly want to provide interesting and useful content to their audience in order to build relationships with people who will eventually become customers.
Unfortunately, they didn’t persuade me to continue a relationship with them. I’ve now unsubscribed.
Want to learn about writing emails that work? Grab our free ebook below …
Reader Comments (13)
Good stuff here, Stefanie. “Only seven left!” means nothing if they mean Beta tape players or a bag of silly bands, right? I love the idea of talking to one person intimately and telling them why they shouldn’t wait to take up this offer.
A bucketful of sloppy template emails doesn’t seem like the way to do it.
Hi Stephanie,
Thanks for sharing this post and your experience. It’s somewhat mind-blowing to me that businesses and marketers don’t proofread or test their newsletters to see what it will look like for customers. I highly agree with you that it communicates carelessness.
Thanks again,
Amanda
Some are utilising Timer inside emails, which makes the user to take action quickly.
It’s amazing how little time some people take to do a once over of their work. Even a small shop owner wants to provide clean, fresh, inviting text. Thanks for sharing your experience, Stephanie.
Proofreading is not an expense. It is an investment.
Hey Stefanie,
The words like free, personalized, complimentary can really generate an urge to get it.
People are too curious to grab the freebies. Whether it’s about the tattoo or your content marketing, you can use your email newsletter to get more exposure.
I always try to make it more personal. People like to get connected.
Thanks for sharing your experience.
~Ravi
It is very ironic that an email pushed to a huge list of customer would be so poorly edited to contain entire missing sections. Some things are hard to recover from, and when you give the impression of a sloppy business making sloppy mistakes, it is difficult to get back from it.
Technology helps with this kind of thing, but it also makes it very cheap and quick to make a big mistake.
One way to resolve this kind of problem is to do a small test-run with a few people internally to the organization (5 or 10, for example), and ask for feedback or issues with the mail.
For the specific problem in the example, a simple way is to highlight the template areas that need to be changed, so that it is hard to forget.
Hi, Stefanie!
This copywriting lesson reminded me of a follow-up newsletter that I once sent to a select group of subscribers that didn’t open my previous newsletter. I just added a prefix to the same subject line.
It was:
“You Missed this:” [The Blog Post Title]
Then I observed a spike in the open-rate. In fact, a subscriber told me that the follow-up newsletter caught his attention, and he quickly went on to open my email.
So, I can vouch that these lessons make a huge difference. I enjoyed your blog post.
THANK YOU!
This further emphasizes how crucial proofreading is. A poorly written piece of copy within any client facing correspondence can deter a customer from your business forever.
Lovely article, Stefanie! I really enjoyed it.
I often see the “only 7 left” or the “only open until Friday” kind of phrases. But after realizing that this is hardly ever true, they no longer have any effect on me anymore. I think soon more people will become numb to this kind of false copywriting just like display adds.
Blunders happen. Another note : use a email newsletter which proofreads some basic stuff. In Mailchimp, the system warns if such a placeholder exists – so it solves half the problem.
On another note, it is better to send a test email to someone in the team before sending it to everyone in your email list.
Hi, Stefanie.
Great post! I’ll now take proofreading very seriously.
Keep up the good work!
Some people fail to understand that online marketing is as good as other conventional methods of your marketing. It can either make your brand’s reputation or break it; therefore it should be taken seriously and if possible, handed over to professionals.
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