I was perusing some Gary Bencivenga material today and struck a real diamond.
More email marketers should think about it.
He was talking about how to get your advertising consumed by more people, a task growing in difficulty as we’re bombarded with more and more messages from every direction, and how your advertising message should provide value in and of itself.
So, if I read your ad, do I gain value from that time I just invested reading your message? (Yes, you should be appreciative of those reading your message – even if they don’t buy… yet.)
The Magic Ratio
What Gary said was you should be going 50/50 on your allocation of space between value-add and your actual sales pitch. But that’s for print and more traditional direct response media.
Not for email.
Email, he said, should be more 90/10 – 90% value and 10% pitch. I agree. Subscribers should feel like each message alone is a joy to read, a message from a friend, a source of the same happiness they feel when mom drops a note.
That’s how you build a relationship, a precursor to building a list sustainably valuable in the long run.
This is especially relevant today as our inbox becomes the next great bloodbath of attention-seeking marketers hoping you enjoy their latest project update in between reading your crazy uncle’s travel stories and cousin’s pregnancy.
Email marketing today is vastly misunderstood, even by most of copywriting’s greatest. Thinking of it as a sales letter is exactly the WRONG direction to go when visualizing before you write.
But what, exactly, should your message be looking, feeling, and reading like?
Go to your inbox. Open a message from a friend.
That would be a good place to start studying.