Tinker, tailor or tear it up and start again?

Most of what we learn about email marketing is tinkering. Making the kind of changes that give little boosts to responses and results.

These kind of micro-level adjustments are not to be underestimated. Small changes to subject lines can make big differences to the results. Which is why the few words that go into the subject attract so much attention.

Here are three new posts on the topic: Michael Fortin covers the role of urgency, curiosity and controversy in driving people to open your email, while Stephanie Miller has two posts (Part 1 | Part 2) on making a good "first impression."

But there is always going to be a limit to how much success you can get with tinkering and modifying your design, copy and promotions.

Sometimes - and the start of a year is as good a time as any - it might pay to stop tinkering and ask whether it's time to tear up the blueprints and make some wholesale changes. Changes that reflect modern email habits and the ever-evolving marketing environment.

At the least, a period of reflection is called for before going back to the daily email grind. Two articles might help with this task.

I was much impressed by a recent commentary by Jim Crotty at Online Media Daily. He reinforces my belief that it's better to have a strong relationship with a few customers / readers than a weak one with many. He notes...

"You may only send communiques to 10,000 people a month,
as opposed to 100,000, but those 10,000 will be putty
in your marketing maw. And they will communicate the
beauty of your brand to the remaining 90,000"

And take a peek at Patrick Ruffini's thoughts on political emails in the run-up to the US election primaries. His argument that politicians still don't grasp the true potential of email to mobilize the readership has valuable parallels to commercial email.

Happy thinking.

More on copywriting and strategy | Tags: email marketing, subject lines, email copywriting

Permalink | January 04, 2008 | 1 comment(s)
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1 Comments:

Yes I agree with you that maybe this is a good time to tear up and start again.

But before you tear up the old one, make sure you have thoroughly tested your new blueprint again and done some tinker tailoring on it to make it battle ready!! :)
By Roy Rajan, on 06 January, 2008

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