Editor’s note: Sundeep Kapur is an educator and technology consultant who has teamed up with OMI to bring our readers a free Email Marketing Master Class. In preparation, he joins us to share his notes on delivering an effective message to email subscribers.
At the core of an email marketing campaign is the email itself, and this is where a brand succeeds or fails. After arriving in a prospect’s inbox, your email has one chance to make an impression. As such, crafting the strongest message possible is vitally important. Here are some questions to ask yourself:
What is your brand’s value proposition?
Can you verbally deliver it in less than 30 seconds?
Would the listener or recipient remember your key points an hour later?
At every email marketing workshop, I ask my students to apply the less-than-30-second rule to these three scenarios:
- You are at a conference; how would you introduce yourself?
- You are calling to get an appointment; what would you say?
- You are meeting someone you haven’t spoken to in a while (while your plane is taking off); how would you quickly (and not abruptly) deliver your message?
The answers I get for this exercise include the following terms: recognition, interactive conversations, brevity/succinctness, emphasis on key points, high impact messaging, something the recipient can remember, and value based messaging.
Next, I ask my students to write a note for each of the above scenarios – “what if you couldn’t speak and had to type?” I offer them the following pointers:
- How would you greet them?
- How would you grab their attention?
- Would you use an image/What image would you use?
- What would you want them to remember?
- What would you want them to do?
- How would you measure the success of your message?
- What would your next step be?
Then, I ask them to take what they have written and look at it on a mobile device. Most times, the message is too long, seems disjointed, and leaves the reader confused as to what to do next. Consider this simple advice to write better emails and craft better messages -
3 Practical Steps to Improve Your Email Messaging:
1 – Go through the exercise of creating a message for a prospect. If I gave you a list of 100K consumers who were well to do, enjoyed a high level of online engagement, and were frequent buyers – how would you message them? Consider designing a series of messages – two to five emails to get your point across. Use the above bullets to think about the content sections and be brutally brief.
2 – A high impact, easy to understand, and memorable message should be designed like a movie poster. Take a look at the three posters below – they clearly tell you what their movies are about.
Like a movie poster, your message should be self-contained, brief, and highly impactful. Readers should be able to remember the core points of an email after one read, hopefully anticipating whatever you have on offer.
3 – In my master class, we cover a simple approach to messaging that has delivered results for many brands. Rich with case studies, my forray into email marketing highlights lessons from Anthropologie, Dillard’s, and Overstock.com. B2C, B2B, or even C2B: these practical ideas will help you deliver on the perfect message.
Author Bio: Sundeep Kapur is an educator. After 24 years in corporate America as a business and technology consultant he returned to his passion – teaching brands best practices so they can achieve the same success. His email marketing class has been taught across the globe for more than 2,500 brands and he continues to receive outstanding reviews for his content.
Take Sundeep's Email Marketing Master Class for free, and learn everything you need to know about crafting the perfect message!
Join us Tuesday, Jul 25, 2017 from 12:00 - 1:00 PM PST / 3:00 - 4:00 PM EDT