Raised Eyebrow Blog

MarketingSherpa has a great article up now (free access until October 29th, so hurry) featuring copywriting tips from fundraising email specialist Karen Gedney. Her advice contains a number of surprising twists, like “Write the subject line first.” (Gedney elaborates: “People spend all of their time getting their email right, which is a hard job because you are trying to compellingly piece together a lot of information into a small space. And then they slap the subject line on it at the last second. I actually start writing an email by going over a number of different subject lines. It’s all about distilling, distilling, distilling, until it is a finely polished gem.”)

Another suggestion I found intriguing was to watch YouTube videos on the topic you’re writing about, for inspiration — specifically, she looks for “real language” phrases and wording that create an emotional reaction in her, and pulls from those to write compelling copy.

Here’s a summary of the tips on their own, but you’ll have to click through to MarketingSherpa to read the whole article.

1. Bring Copy to Life Via YouTube Videos
2. Create a Word Picture
3. Use a Provocative Campaign Name
4. Optimize Copy and Images for Landing Pages – Now
5. Short Subject Lines Bring In More Donations
6. Dedicate Time to Subject Lines
7. Write the Subject Line *First*
8. Test Copy on Low-Risk Campaigns
9. Don’t Expect Clickthroughs from Copy Links
10. ‘P.S.’ Still Works
11. Find the Right Copy Length: Think Short But Sweet
12. Don’t Sleep on DM

This entry was written by Lauren Bacon on Friday, October 24th, 2008 at 10:31 am, is filed under Email Marketing, Nonprofit Tech, Online Fundraising, Online Strategy, and is tagged as . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.