background preloader

Writing

Facebook Twitter

How CDBaby Built 20,000 Citations With One E-Mail. CDBaby* is an online distributor of independent music. Founded by well-known entrepreneur Derek Sivers, the service became a huge hit with independent musicians because it offered the first easy way for artists to distribute and sell their music online. Sivers, a professional musician, took CDBaby on a unique path that differentiates it from many other businesses – in that he didn’t ever want to run the company at all. He started CDBaby in 1997 because his friends asked him to post their songs online as he had his own. One favor led to another, and eventually Sivers built his company to the point where it was sold for $22 million in 2008. Sivers’ unique background and thought process pervaded into his business practices. At one point in the process, Sivers looked at his purchase confirmation e-mail and found the blasé, boring business-speak there didn’t match the core ideologies of his company.

Link Building Lessons From CDBaby Content Types That Promote Linkability Privatized. 7 Ways to Spice Up Your Email Marketing. My friend Andreas over on the product team at WordStream is fond of saying, “Make it spicy,” as in, “Here’s some dry, descriptive copy of what this tool does. I’ll leave it up to Marketing to make it spicy.” Depending on your industry, the right level of “spiciness” can be difficult to achieve. For example, it’s a little harder to write exciting copy about B2B search engine marketing software (which is how I spend a lot of my time) than it is to write about hot, new summer sandals or consumer gadgets. Still, you can almost always add a little bit of spice to bring your content to life.

Here are seven ideas for livening up your email copy and design. 1. An analogy is a way of comparing one thing to another, usually with the purpose of making that concept easier to understand or illuminating some aspect of it, such as telling a search engine newbie that Google is the new Yellow Pages. 2. See above! 3. I really love the new weekly email Twitter has started sending out. 4. 5. 6. 7. Email Copy Tested: How adding urgency increased clickthrough by 15% You have exactly 60 seconds to retweet this blog post. If your tweet isn’t detected by our internal twitter monitoring algorithm by then, your hard drive will be completely erased. Don’t believe me? That is probably because I’m lying. I have no way to erase your hard drive and no algorithm (I know of) that tracks whether you will retweet this post. I’m feeding you a false sense of urgency to get you to take an action.

The truth is, urgency is a powerful copywriting tool. And, while a false sense of urgency might work in the short term, it will over time erode your conversion rates. But when used authentically, urgency can be quickly added to almost any piece of copy for a lift in conversion. For example, here is a recent email test for a MarketingExperiments Web clinic invite: In this test, all we added was three words near the call-to-action to intensify the urgency of the click. All we had to do was mention it in the copy. Where are you missing out on urgency in your copy? Related Resources. How to write emails that give you no choice but to read on. America’s No.1 sales authority Jeffrey Gitomer recently wrote a widely syndicated article about an email he received from me, writes Robert Clay of Marketing Wizdom. He told me after he received it that he really liked it and would be writing about it in a future book. I had no idea he’d actually written about it until a lovely lady who works for a bank in Iowa contacted me out of the blue citing an article he’d written.

I don’t consider myself to be a copywriter, so it was of course a very nice ego boost. But more importantly, the article makes some excellent points that are worth passing on about what made Jeffrey “click” on the link in email. I got an unsolicited email this morning that gave me no choice but to read it. The subject line was: Jeffrey, How to go from market penetration to domination. Then the headline: What one thing determines your success in business, more than any other single factor? Hello Jeffrey, This is Robert Clay. These are the responses I get all the time.