Posted by Adam T. Sutton in Email Marketing Tips	June 5, 2007

These eight techniques will boost your click through rates

By Adam T. Sutton, Managing Director, Mequoda Group, LLC

When you are drafting your email promotions, be sure to focus on the readers. Remember that they are people, just like you, who enjoy good content and can be annoyed by advertisements.

Make sure your product promotion emails provide valuable content and avoid being blatant sales pitches. This will engage the readers and they will look forward to reading your promotions.

That was one of many valuable tips provided by HR Daily Advisor Managing Editor Jay Schleifer during the "Creating Great Free Email Newsletters" session of SIPA's 31st annual conference in Washington D.C.

The three-day conference has been packed with tips from successful marketers and copywriters like Schleifer that the Mequoda Daily will be relaying to our readers in the coming days and weeks.

Schleifer was generous enough to explain the following eight copywriting strategies that he uses to sell thousands of Business and Legal Reports products through what he calls "advertorials."

1. Product development story — describe the creative process of the product you are selling. Describe what problems the product targets, how the information was gathered and other elements that would give the reader insight into the topic.


2. Solve a problem — propose a problem and solve it with tips from your product.


3. Product review — write an editorial critiquing your product as an industry reviewer would.


4. A product like...— write about the class of products that the featured product belongs to. "We happen to have one, it's called..."


5. Do it right — a variation on the "solve a problem" strategy, this approach provides tips on avoiding mistakes rather than solving problems.


6. Hidden treasure — if you have many products, like BLR, you can dig through your archives to find good ones that haven't been promoted in a long time and hype them as an editor "discovering" buried gold.


7. Free gift — this will work, but Schleifer warned that it can get expensive.


8. Product samples — give away sections of good products, like full pages or paragraphs of some good content
   

The foundation for Schleifer's "advertorial" approach is to always offer the reader valuable content, even in a free email newsletter.

This strategy should retain more readers that using solely promotional copy, because who wants to read blatant advertisements all day?

Once readers are engaged enough to click on links to read more, you will need well-designed landing pages ready for them. If your conversion architecture is not well designed, your sales are going to be limited and your "advertorial" could become a waste of time.

To learn how to optimize your landing page designs and maximize conversion rates, attend our Landing Page Driven Internet Marketing executive webinar. You'll learn the eight different types of landing pages and their best practice guidelines from our Managing Director and Chief Information Architect Don Nicholas.