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

Among the myriad e-mail creative tips Herschell Gordon Lewis, president of Lewis Enterprises, delivered during a session at the DMA06 Conference in San Francisco this week, he brought out several key copywriting pointers for marketers. Here are several of them.

* Tell your message recipient what to do. “Don’t just say what a wonderful company and offer you have; tell them what to do,” Gordon Lewis pointed out. People respond to a command.

* “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.”

* Asking a relevant question is unusually potent in e-mail, he pointed out. Make it relevant to the people you’re sending the message to.

* E-mail is the only medium in which the approach, “It’s important to me, so it’s important to you,” is a valid marketing ploy if properly used, Gordon Lewis asserted. “Rapport is the key to response and fewer opt-outs,” he said.

* In an e-mail message, “I” is infinitely superior to “we,” he said, because “I” am the one contacting you.