E-mail Marketing: Herschell Gordon Lewis on E-mail Creative, Part II: Copy

* “Don’t get diarrhea of the fingertips,” he advised in regard to overly complex e-mail copy containing long, technical words. “We tend to show off our gigantic vocabularies.”

* Specifics out-pull generalizations, he said, and e-mail is today’s most significant example of that rule.

* The rule of negative subtlety is 100 percent valid in e-mail communications, Gordon Lewis pointed out. “The effectiveness of a force-communication message decreases in the exact ratio to an increase in subtlety.”