Email is an intensely personal communication medium. It’s a one-to-one medium much more than it is a broadcast medium. So broadcasting emails is touchy business – you need to do it with great care. And you need to have personal flair.
Perry Marshall’s rules for Email:
Very important but oft-neglected detail: The “From” field. Is it from Perry Marshall? Or is it from “Perry Marshall” or “Marshall, Perry” or Marshall, Perry? Or is it from Perry S. Marshall & Associates? Or is it from PM or PSM or Perry? In most cases the best thing is your full name (i.e. Perry Marshall) without quotes. If you can’t be sure they know you personally, then add the company, i.e. Mike Fahrion, B&B Electronics. Do NOT send email without paying close attention to this. If it’s not recognizable and it doesn’t look like a legitimate company, people will think it’s spam and delete it. Most spam is from “JJ” or “Tonya Smith” or something – your biggest job is to NOT look like spam.
Be absolutely sure and send it to yourself and make sure! Also do not use “urgent” priority status in the header field or anything like that, it will only get your email trashed sooner.
The subject line is the most important… but I usually don’t follow the common rules for headlines. In my opinion, crafting your subject line according to classical direct response rules just makes it look like spam.
First of all, and I’m open to hearing data from anyone who’s tested this in a variety of situations, I think that putting a person’s name in the subject line is unnatural and annoying.
It doesn’t mimic nature.
It says “Hello Perry, how are you doing, Perry? I’ve got a personalized message for you, Perry, but it’s actually impersonal and I’m just trying to trick you into reading it, Perry.”
Only marketers do that. Nobody else does. Your friends rarely send you emails with your first name in the subject line.
The second rule about email subject lines is they shouldn’t sound like hype.
For example if you sell software that reduces energy consumption, don’t say
New Software Reduces Energy Consumption 36%
Rather, say something like this:
How IBM Reduced Energy Consumption 36%
The former pumps a product, the latter tells a story. What headlines should communicate, above all, is that there’s a story to be told. Here are some Email subject lines I’ve used in the last few months:
The Joy of 60Hz AC Power Soundbytes from Oz
Steamy Heat, Uzbekistan Breakfast & GoogleCash
Subversive Summer Greetings from B&B
Winning in Hyper-Competitive Markets
Attract More Customers with White Papers – Day 5
From: Mike Fahrion, B&B Electronics
Subject: The Joy of 60Hz AC Power
When I was in college, I had this Job interview at an electric utility company. The guy who interviewed me had the personality of a turnip.
Like, no personality at all. Zero.
My eyes grew heavy. His voice started getting far away.
I began to slip into dreamland. I nearly fell asleep,
just listening to him describe the wonderful department he worked in.
You never want to fall asleep in a job interview.
Late that night, I lay awake pondering… what could cause this man to be so monotone, so featureless, so completely… blah?
Suddenly it hit me: This man listens to 60 Hz tranformers humming day and night. ‘Round the clock, 24/7. It’s his job to keep that sixty cycles per second going, 365 days a year,
without fail, so that our toasters and microwave ovens keep toasting toast and popping popcorn. So that our Tivos faithfully record episodes of Three’s Company while we’re watching Seinfeld reruns.
Indeed, this 60Hz AC power is the very bedrock of civilization itself. Should that power ever fail, we’ll be plunged into the dark ages again, with chaos, bedlam, looting and riots.
And if the 60Hz hum ever stops, it’s HIS neck on the guillotine blade.
Well, I didn’t take that job. I took this job instead. Selling these networking gizmos and whatnot here at B&B Electronics.
So the other day we got this call. It’s a guy named Matt from a Power Utility in Colorado. Matt is another one of the loyal servants of mankind who keep the transformers humming.
Matt wanted to talk about his Substations.
Matt liked his 60Hz but what he was not too enamored with was the 1200 Baud. That’s the speed at which the substations communicated with the Remote Terminal Unit in the Mother Ship.
Plus Matt was having to make 2-3 trips a week to the substations to re-program breaker settings and retrieve history logs – sometimes in blizzard conditions. Semis might be jacknifed on the highway.
Lovers might be separated. But Matt had a duty to mankind which he never failed to fulfill.
You probably don’t know that most of those big high-tension power lines have fiber optic cables on ‘em? The substation has two Single Mode Fiber Optic Cables coming in from headquarters.
Matt replaced the RTU and 1200 baud with a high speed LAN and a simple terminal server box. Not only does he get the usual monitoring of voltages, currents, breaker status, power usage,
transformer temperature etc., but he can re-program devices and bring back history reports that the original SCADA system didn’t support.
He doesn’t have to make these trips anymore. Semis may be jacknifed on the highway and lovers may be separated, but Engineers can reprogram devices and retrieve data from their offices. Reports show millisecond by millisecond data during fault conditions,
and the new Automated Meter Reading System collects data for the billing computer.
The of the magic is achieved with a surprisingly simple array of DIN Rail mount devices from our catalog:
-An industrial-grade Fiber to Copper converter puts the data on the ever-familiar Blue Ethernet cable www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=IMC-101-M-SC&dept_id=604
The chief feature of these is 1) They’re intriguing, and 2) They don’t scare anybody, or sound pushy. In email, people don’t need to be smashed on the head, they need to be led by the hand.
One of my favorite formulas is the list of three things in a rhythmic cadence:
“Steamy Heat, Uzbekistan
Breakfast & GoogleCash” or “Bill
Gates, Overture & the Crocodile.”
Another great formula is a promise of something valuable like “A Zero-Risk Way to Enter Any Market.”
The next tip is it’s preferable to talk to the person as an individual, not as a member of a big group or as a subscriber to your big list. If you can mail merge the first name, that’s better. Address him or her as “you” not “you guys.”
Plain text, rich text or graphics? I prefer plain, mostly because it’s got the best chance of making it through the SPAM filters, and everyone can read it regardless of their email program. I think it’s highly annoying to get emails full of HTML junk like <DIV> and <a/> and </font> in between all the words.
Most people will not go to the trouble of trying to read that.
Story Telling in email is vitally important, especially when you’re trying to sell something. I write the email newsletter for my client, B&B Electronics, who sells industrial communication hardware. They had an application story from a utility company which was actually quite good, but I never feel safe assuming that even engineers will slog their way through an application story. So I turned the “boring” nature of B&B’s business, and of utilities, on its head and turned the boredom itself into a theme.
You can see this email message on the right:
As you can see, this is kind of wacky.
It’s the sort of wackiness that only an engineer can appreciate, really. Where did it come from?
It was an amalgamation of my own experience and Mike’s. Actually it was me who had the job interview at the utility company that almost put me to sleep, and a suspicion that pumping out 60Hz AC power all day every day is actually a pretty boring enterprise.
All engineers know what 60Hz AC power is – no spammer would ever come up with a headline like that, and putting “Joy” on the front of that subject line makes opening this email almost irresistible.
This is somewhat typical of the emails I write for B&B, and they always revolve around an external theme. Sometimes it’s a popular movie or song; recently it was the hurricanes in Florida. One time it was power spikes and lightning strikes, so the subject was “Poltergeist in Chicago.” Last winter it was “Our Dysfunctional Christmas at B&B.”
Tens of thousands of people get the B&B Email Newsletter, and our rule is that we never hard sell. We never get in a panic just before the end of the quarter and say “Hey, we need to make our numbers, so let’s have a sale” followed by a pure promo email.
Every email has some sort of story element; every email has value even if the person isn’t going to buy anything today.
And every time we send one out, we get dozens of comments, either asking questions, requesting more information, or saying “Hey guys, this is the only corporate email newsletter that I always actually read.”
We also get one or two emails from cranky people who don’t like the topic, or don’t get it, or think Mike belongs in an asylum or whatever. It would be a big mistake to pay attention to that tiny handful of
-A series of 5- and 8- port Industrial Ethernet switches distribute the data throughout the building http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=EDS-405&dept_id=99 and http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=EDS-308&dept_id=604
-A 16-Port Serial Server converts Ethernet to RS-232, extending Intranet access to all the serial devices http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=NPORT%205630-16&dept_id=604
-An RS232 to 485 converter allows multi-drop communication to SCADA devices with 485 ports:
http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=485LDRC9&dept_id=166
-Some serial devices here are optical, to reduce electrical noise; this converter links the fibers to standard 232:
http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=FOSTCDR&PathId=593
-For some devices, we need up to 2,000 volts of isolation.
This devices provides that:
http://www.bb-elec.com/product.asp?sku=232OPDR&dept_id=161
So I said to Matt: “So really, this power distribution
stuff isn’t really as boring as it sounds – you guys actually do some pretty cool networking and data acquisition tricks, huh?
Matt sez to me, “Oh yeah, this can get pretty wonky, for sure. But Mike,” he says, an alienated man yearning to be understood, his eyes pleading with me – “The 60Hz transformer hum IS interesting too.”
Huh?
I asked him please to explain.
“You make it sound so… well, one dimensional, Mike, and it’s just not that way. You see, there’s 4160 volts… there’s 13,800 volts, 35,000 volts, 115,000 volts and even 345,000 volts.
“There’s not one phase, there’s three. There’s phase to phase, and phase to ground. I’m telling you, man, transformer hums come in all colors, shapes and sizes.
“But that’s not all, Mike. Because it’s not even confined to 60Hz. All those transformers have half-wave rectification effects and hysteresis, which literally creates an infinite series of fascinating harmonics – 120 Hz, 180 Hz, 240, 300, 360 – a fourier series, integer multiples of the fundamental.
Inside those humming transformers is an organic, infinitely complex world of voltages, harmonics, and deadly chemicals.”
That Matt, he sure showed me. I just wish the guy had explained all this at my job interview. Had I understood this, I would never have accused him of having the personality of a turnip.
I am now enlightened.
So… Let it be known that here at B&B Electronics,
we think ALL of our customers are exciting. Yes – even the guys who keep the transformers humming.
Peace.
Mike Fahrion,
B&B Electronics
Rants? Raves? Psychotic angles on Tranformer Hum? Email me: support@bb-elec.com
disgruntled people. Don’t let a fringe minority of critics neuter your personality-laden newsletter with their unhappiness! Just unsubscribe them and move on. The people who matter are the ones who like you.
What I most need to make clear is that if you’re in the email newsletter business, you are in the personality business. Raw, dry information doesn’t cut it. It has to be wrapped around you and your personality, or even a personality that you somewhat invent. Being informative alone will NOT do the trick.
Another detail: I put hard carriage returns at about 60 spaces, because I don’t want some other computer or program to wrap the text for me. I keep it fairly narrow so that everyone gets it the same way.
You should study the emails you get from me to see how these things are done. Very little is done un-intentionally.
