A Quick Copywriting Lesson Taken Directly from an Email Marketing Fail

A Quick Copywriting Lesson Taken Directly from an Email Marketing Fail

Reader Comments (13)

  1. 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.

  2. 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

  3. 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.

  4. 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

  5. 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.

  6. 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!

  7. 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.

  8. 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.

  9. 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.

  10. 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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