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5 Tips for Better Results with Mobile Email Marketing

Picture this scene.

A reader of your blog and a loyal subscriber gets a new mobile device.

No problem: You’ve taken great care to make your site mobile friendly.

You’ve even taken the right steps to convert more mobile readers to your email list.

So you feel pretty confident that all your bases are covered.

Until your subscriber gets her first email from your latest marketing campaign. It’s all squished up on the screen, it’s impossible to click on any of the links, and the message overall is terribly hard to read.

Your loyal reader really wants to get the benefit of your great content. So she spends some time fumbling around trying to make sense of it.

But eventually frustration wins. She gives up and hit the red “delete” key.

Think this doesn’t happen? It sure does. I’ve seen it, more than once.

Mobile email marketing design is smoking hot. If you can manage to make sure your mobile readers are satisfied with those subscriber-based emails, then you have covered what may be the largest of your readership. And here are some tips to help you out.

Including a plain text copy of every HTML message you send will help eliminate potential issues for those subscribers with mobile readers that do not support HTML.

Any good email marketing service lets you include a plain text version, make sure you’re using it.

If your email message has links that you want your readers to click on, such as navigation back to your main site (recommended), then make sure those links stand out on their own.

In other words, keep them uncrowded so it’s easy to click them within a very small space.

Imagine your loyal reader flicking around on a tiny screen to get to that link — and how frustrated you get when the links are so close together that you can’t land on the one you want. If you want clicks, make it easy.

Hop on over and read Brian’s article on the three key elements of irresistible email subject lines.

Now … actually use those three key elements for your email marketing messages.

Like any headline, an email subject line has to capture attention quickly and drive the reader to click through.

By the way, the current best practice for subject lines for mobile devices is to keep it within 5 words. That’s right, you have about 5 words to grab the attention of your reader. Why? Because after about 5-7 words, the subject line gets truncated and thus it’s a lost opportunity.

If your email marketing message includes images, make sure you include an alternative (alt) tag to describe what the image is. (You should be doing this for any HTML content you create — mobile readers aren’t the only users who may not be able to see your images.)

Don’t stuff this tag full of keywords, it doesn’t work. Use it for what it was meant for — to briefly describe what the image is, in a way that lets your reader make sense of it if the image isn’t visible.

Many devices can display all your images correctly, but not all of them will, so it’s just smart to use alternative text to make sure every reader gets the message that image was supposed to convey.

People using mobile devices spend a little less time taking in the content due to the smaller screen sizes and the fact that they are usually on the go, so make sure your email marketing has a clear call to action.

Put it either near the beginning or somewhere where it will stand out. Don’t make it hard to find … after all, it’s the key to getting the response you want.

You might be wondering how to know what your email message will look like on all these devices. Just because it looks great on an iPhone doesn’t mean it won’t be mangled on a Blackberry. There are some great simulators out there that let you see how things will appear on the various devices. A Google search for “mobile device simulator” will give you lots of options.

Whatever email marketing service you use, spend some time in settings area and explore the various options they have for delivery. Now that you have some tips to keep in mind, you never know what options they have that you just didn’t see before.

How about you — what experiences have you had with mobile devices and email marketing?

About the Author: Shane uses his Tablet Computer Geeks blog to deliver the latest and best iPad information, including accessory reviews, app reviews, and industry updates. Follow him on Twitter at tc_geeks.

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How to Capture Your Reader’s Attention

Getting attention is the most important part of online marketing.

No matter how brilliant your ideas are, you can’t even offer them to your prospect unless you’ve made her look in your direction first.

You have to get your prospect’s attention before you can turn her into a reader, let her know how wonderful you are, or sell her something.

Do I have your attention yet?

Good. Now I’ll show you how to get someone else’s.

The brain is funny like that — in order to understand, the brain has to focus on specific information.

Attention helps us screen out the irrelevant and choose which information will enter, and stay, in our awareness. Our attention decides what to “pay attention to,” because human focus is limited, and we just can’t give our attention to everything.

Your reader’s minds are very selective. So we have to give them a reason to pay attention to our content instead of everything else out there they could be listening to.

Even if you have the best product, service, or information on the planet, it’s still difficult to get people to give you the time of day. Here are some common obstacles to getting your prospect’s attention:

The relentless proliferation of available products, services, and informationIncreased and increasingly better competitionThe multiplying methods of distributionBuyer sophisticationInformation overloadThe desire for instant gratification

These are all roadblocks you face in the attention-getting game, so you’ve really got to be good at showing readers why their limited attention should be directed to you.

Help them see what you see. You might be focusing on yourself when creating messages about your business, thinking that everyone sees things the way you do. But they don’t. People won’t “hear” you, or pay attention, until they perceive what you perceive. So you’ve got to make your position crystal clear — help them to see what you see, using storytelling, description, personal experiences, case histories, and anything that will put the prospect in the right position to understand your message.Make it personal. When you make your writing personal, you make it important. Personally interesting or perceptually meaningful information can grab attention, bring clarity, and help it slip right into your prospective client’s awareness. You don’t have to do a lot of explaining to tell someone his house (or his hair) is on fire — because it’s so personal to him. You immediately get attention.Use emotion. Emotion is a great way to bring clarity to your business messages while making them personal. Emotion also comes with the triple bonus of adding clarity, giving clients a reason to talk about you and your business, and triggering the circuits in the brain that activate behavior and decisions — emotion is much better at that than logic is. Emotional messages get attention.

You only have a few seconds to capture someone’s attention, so don’t take chances with clever, cute, or insider language or visuals, which are often lost on people. Don’t use inside jokes or industry terms, either, unless appropriate for narrow niche marketing. These tactics only tend to confuse audiences, if only for a few seconds, which is all it takes to lose them — and a confused mind does not pay attention.

Once you’ve managed to capture your reader’s attention, don’t waste it. Getting your reader’s attention is like the first strike of a One-Two punch — if you don’t land the second part, you’re not going to knock them out (and I mean KO in the good way).

Make sure your second punch, the actual information or message for which you grabbed her attention in the first place, is worthwhile.

If it’s valuable, you’ve paved the way for easy entry into her attention with future conversation.

If it isn’t, it’ll be that much more difficult to capture her attention the next time, as your prospect’s brain has already filed your information under “not worth our attention.”

About the Author: After being in the trenches herself for over 25 years, Marcia Hoeck now helps entrepreneurs create businesses that will run without them. Get a great free report 5 Power Shifts You Can’t Succeed in Business Without at her Breakthrough Business blog. (Oh, and yep, you heard right — she’s Johnny B. Truant’s mom, and lives a normal life anyway.)

Want to learn more about how to capture a reader’s attention — and how to translate that into sales? Sign up for the Internet Marketing for Smart People newsletter. It’s free, and it’s packed with advice on how to grow your business effectively, without hype, sleaze, or silly games.

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Attention: Is Your Headline Getting Any?

“There’s just no quiet in Vegas.” ~Barry Manilow

Same thing online, Barry.

Like driving down the strip, even at an ungodly hour, our old pal the Internet feeds us an unending spread of exactly what we want.

Between the inbox, RSS, Twitter, and name-your-social-network-of-choice, the competition for our attention is aggressive and utterly incapable of mercy.

How can your stuff get read, watched, or listened to if it’s buried alive (see: invisible) under the non-stop avalanche of an entire civilization’s most mundane and brilliant ideas?

It all starts in one place…

In this episode Brian and I discuss:

The brutal reality of how many readers you really haveWhat David Ogilvy said about headlines, and why it’s even more important todayThe 80/20 Rule of headline writingThe four indispensable ingredients every great headline must haveWhat types of headlines are perennially popular with readers, and how to write them

Hit the flash player below to listen now:

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Want to discover the smartest ways to mix social media, content marketing, and SEO? We’ve got you covered with Internet Marketing for Smart People. It’s a FREE 20-part course and email newsletter that delivers the techniques and strategies you need to know as an online marketer.

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About the Author: Robert Bruce is Copyblogger Media’s resident raconteur and copywriter.

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The Cowardly Lion’s Guide to Conquering Your Entrepreneurial Fears

Ever feel like you’re a little bit of a … coward?

No, you’re not spending your days hiding, running, and weeping, but you haven’t exactly lived up to your expectations, either.

Your blog isn’t getting nearly as much traffic as you thought it would. You still haven’t finished that product you intend to sell. In fact, months or years have gone by, and you haven’t made much progress at all. You’re beginning to wonder if you ever will.

You could rattle off a dozen reasons as to why, and most of them even sound pretty reasonable, but down deep, you know there’s only one thing really holding you back:

You’re afraid.

You’re afraid of telling your family and friends to leave you alone so you can work.

You’re afraid of creating a product no one will want to buy.

You’re afraid of quitting your job and watching the bills piling up and having everyone look at you like a failure.

And secretly, you’re ashamed.

You know entrepreneurs are supposed to be big and bold, laughing in the face of danger and persisting even when the whole world has turned against them. You know you have to take risks. You know you’ll never be in control of your life until you can get some time away from your friends and family and job and start working on what’s important to you.

Yet, you can’t seem to make yourself do it. You’ve been trying for so long that you’re even beginning to wonder if you’re not cut out to be an entrepreneur.

But it’s not true. To prove it to you, I’d like to take you back all the way to 1939 and reintroduce you to an unlikely hero you might have forgotten.

In the classic film The Wizard of Oz, the Cowardly Lion is … well … a coward.

He’s so afraid of everything that he can’t sleep. He cries when Dorothy slaps his nose. He runs for his life when the Wizard gets angry.

And he’s ashamed of it. So ashamed, in fact, that he can’t believe Dorothy and her companions would even allow him to travel with them.

Most struggling entrepreneurs have exactly the same problems. They can’t sleep, they’re terrible at conflict management, and they get really skittish around authority figures.

When they fail, they move to a different city, switch careers, and sometimes even abandon their family, all because they can’t stand to have anyone look at them.

But it doesn’t have to be that way. The Cowardly Lion was able to overcome his fears, and so can you. You don’t even need The Great and Powerful Oz to give it to you.

In the film, the Wizard hands the Cowardly Lion a medal and tells him he has just as much courage as any hero, giving the Lion’s story a sweet and satisfying ending.

The lesson is that courage isn’t about acting in the absence of fear; it’s about acting despite it.

That’s profound, but it also leaves a big question unanswered: how do you convince yourself to act when you’re scared to death?

Well, let’s take a look at the story.

1. Get disgusted with yourself. When The Cowardly Lion comes across Dorothy and her friends in the woods, he’s so overcome with shame that he can’t stop weeping. He desperately wants to be courageous, and that desperation propels him to go see the Wizard of Oz.

It’s counterintuitive, but for most of us, that’s the way motivation works. If you want to do big things, stop waiting for a time when everything is perfect, and you feel comfortable. It’ll never happen. You’re far better off thinking about how crappy your situation is, getting genuinely frustrated with yourself, and then using that emotion to push yourself to make changes. Misery is a useful tool. Use it.

2. Find a mentor. The Wizard Of Oz could have given The Cowardly Lion a medal for courage the first time he came to see him, but he didn’t.

Instead, he gave him a quest, a chance to grow and to prove himself and to ultimately discover that he always had what he was looking for. That’s what good mentors do. They don’t actually give us anything; they merely guide us through discovering it for ourselves. And that’s indispensable.

3. Test your assumptions. By going on a quest to retrieve the Wicked Witch’s broomstick, The Cowardly Lion challenged his assumption that he was a coward, and he ended up proving himself wrong.

That’s what we all have to do. One of the greatest lessons from cognitive psychology is you can’t trust your own thoughts. When we’re depressed, we all become negatively biased, believing the way we see things is the way things are, and that’s not usually true. If you challenge your assumptions, you’ll usually find out things aren’t nearly so bleak as you think they are, and you can do a lot more than you think you can.

That little voice in your head is not, as it turns out, all-knowing. Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain.

4. Fight for someone else. The Cowardly Lion would rather have run than try to protect himself, but when Dorothy was kidnapped by the Wicked Witch of the West, he stormed a castle of winged monkeys to save her.

Most of us are this way. We’ll fight 10 times harder to avoid letting our friends down than we will to avoid letting ourselves down. So why not harness it?

If you look into the past of almost any successful entrepreneur, you’ll find they had partners pushing them, depending on them, and cheering for them. It’s a perpetual source of motivation, and you can draw on it to do things you would’ve thought yourself incapable of doing.

5. Remind yourself of successes. When The Cowardly Lion returned triumphant, the Wizard gave him a medal for courage to remind him that he’s a hero.

Most people aren’t aware of this, but in the novels following the original The Wonderful Wizard Of Oz book, The Cowardly Lion continued doing brave deeds, and he continued to be afraid, but he reminded himself of his successes and continued anyway.

One of the best ways to build your own self-confidence is to keep a journal of your own victories over fear and to regularly reread them to give yourself courage. We all tend to get fixated on our failures, but having a record of your successes is a good way to keep yourself positive.

The fear never goes away.

You just get better at dealing with it.

I was just as afraid when I started my fifth company as I was when I started my first one. In fact, I was probably more afraid, because I understood how truly difficult it is to build a business from scratch.

But it didn’t stop me, and really, I think that’s what defines people we call heroes. They’re just as afraid as anyone else, but they keep going anyway.

They’re willing to lie in bed, sweating and worrying about how they’ll pay the bills.

They’re willing to do the unpopular thing and for everyone to think they’re an ass.

They’re willing to invest years of their life into a product, only to see it flop and have to start over again.

It’s not because they’re special. They just know the price, and they’re willing to pay it.

And really, that’s the secret. So many people I see trying to build businesses online invest all of their mental energy into SEO or the fine points of pay-per-click, or even writing killer content.

Mindset is what lets you turn tactics into an actual thriving business. It’s what lets you pay the price, to act when you’re scared out of your pants.

And you have to proactively create it. If you hang around successful people, you’ll notice they go to a lot of seminars, listen to a lot of motivational material, and surround themselves with other successful business people trying to do the same things.

It’s not a coincidence. They understand the value of mindset, and they set aside time every day to work on that mindset, to put themselves into the proper frame of mind to stand up and fight.

Because at heart, we’re all cowardly lions. Everyday, we have to wake up and remind ourselves how to roar.

About the Author: Jon Morrow is Associate Editor of Copyblogger. Get more from Jon on twitter.

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The “Common Sense” Mistake That Makes Your Writing Lifeless

Have you ever been inside a money booth? People rent them for parties and events.

If not, let me describe it for you:

You’re in a clear glass booth and money is swirling in a breeze all around you. Bills are brushing your cheeks, your hair.

You want to get as much money as you can in the thirty seconds you’ve been given, so you grab for the fattest clumps.

But as you reach for them, they disperse. Twenty seconds left. You keep grabbing after new clumps and clusters, trying to make up for lost time. You lunge for a fat bundle with both hands … but it flutters away. Ten seconds. You grab again. Seven, six, five.

All too quickly your time runs out, leaving you empty-handed.

How can you beat the money booth? Go after individual bills. Methodically, systematically. One at a time. You’ll feel a stack amass in your hands, instead of ending up with a fistful of nothing.

Strangely enough, the same thing happens with writing.

Instead of painting a picture with individual details, we try to go for a “clump,” a generalization that can cover every reader, every scenario.

And we end up with nothing.

Chasing after a single bill or a single detail feels like forsaking the greater opportunity — like we’re settling for something smaller than we should. But actually, it’s the only way of coming out with a fistful of dollars.

Drilling down on a detail entails sacrifice. It means you won’t get the chance to say everything good there is to say about your beloved product, service, brand, company, niche topic, etc. At least not on that ad, page, or post.

It feels like common sense not to exclude any potential readers or customers. It feels like common sense not to shut anyone out — particularly someone who would, in fact, be a great fit for your product or service.

So copywriters and content marketers refuse to make that sacrifice. They pull up to a 50,000-foot view so they can fit everyone in.

Their copy is filled with abstractions and generalizations, assuming readers will mentally fill in the specific from the general.

But the human brain doesn’t work that way

Tell me a Zappo’s-style story about an amazing support experience and I’ll conclude that you’ve made a commitment to superior service.

But tell me you have “great customer service” and I’ll conclude you’re full of it. You expect me to fill in the details about specific ways your service might manifest itself, but I won’t. I don’t have any details to “prove” your point to myself.

The specific can be imagined. It has dramatic power. Generalization just results in easily dismissed, flaccid copy, devoid of any emotional power or credibility.

Here’s another example of this same principle at work, as described by Jay Heinrichs (of Figaro Speech fame) in his book Thank You For Arguing:

Suppose you wanted me to be angry at my next door neighbor. You could tell me what a jerk she is — that she flirts in front of her husband and watches bad TV. None of this would make me angry at her. You described her personality, not her experience. To make me angry, give me a vivid description of a specific outrage.

You: She called the Boy Scouts a fascist organization.
Me: Well, she’s entitled to her –
You: On Halloween? When my little boy comes to her stoop wearing his older brother’s uniform?
Me: How do you –
You: I was there. When he started to cry, she said, “If you turn out to be gay, you’ll be glad you met me.” Then she looked straight at me and slammed the door.

That would make me angry at the neighbor. You re-created a dramatic scene, making me see it through your eyes. This works much better than name calling.

See what I’m talking about? You have to be willing to tell one small sliver of your story powerfully, instead of trying to summarize the whole experience in the neutered grays of abstract generalizations.

This means you have to do two things:

Find the specifics that can represent your larger points Figure out how to breathe life into those specifics through persuasive storytelling

For instance, I write radio ads for a builder of pole barns up in Ontario. His barns are markedly better built than his competitors because he refuses to cut corners and underbid jobs.

But any 30-second ad about generalized “build quality” in barns is likely to suck harder than a Dyson vacuum. I have to pick out one small detail about build quality and hammer it home through short-form drama.

For instance, I might dramatize how my client fired his old supplier of roof vents when they wouldn’t change their design to prevent leaks. My client then went out and had his own superior design manufactured for his exclusive use.

Of course, in telling this tale, I’d be as vivid as possible, making the mini-drama come to life inside the imaginations of my listeners.

I won’t ever have to say “committed to quality,” I’d get the listeners to make that conclusion for me.

And all because I put my faith in the vivid, dramatic power of specifics.

Keep In Touch with the People You Love

I helped script that video, and, in doing so, I had to make two choices:

Decide on a specific narrative I wanted to dramatize (as opposed to a general description of the product)Decide on a specific detail to act as a symbol of sharing life experiences

These seem like straightforward decisions, but both of them involve sacrifices, and so most writers never make them.

In order to dramatize a specific narrative, I had to exclude other uses. The CEIVA frame most certainly is not limited to use as gifts from grown children to their parents. A “common sense” copywriter (or her client) would be worried about excluding the many customers who don’t fit this profile.

But telling a story about “everyone” means you tell a story about no one.

Have faith in your viewers to conclude the general from the specific, rather than the other way around.

And then there’s the red bicycle. The general idea I wanted to get across was “grandparents get to see their grandkids’ life in real time, which helps them have more meaningful conversations with them.” But that general description lacks any sort of emotional power. So I had to pick a specific instance of this — the boy’s new red bicycle — in order to dramatize it.

In the moment, it can seem like a hard choice. Narrowing down to a specific feels like a loss. But it’s never a loss. Instead, dramatizing a specific always equates to a gain in credibility and emotional power.

Moving this to the content marketing realm, instead of blogging about meta-topics or generalities, why not try doing a series of posts on highly specific aspects of your membership site, niche field, product, or service?

Instead of a white paper or special report that talks about general functionality, how about a set of three case studies that show what you do with specific detail?

Chances are, many of you have already tried this and gotten some great results. I’d love to hear about your experiences and tips in the comments …

About the Author: Jeff Sexton is a partner in the Wizard of Ads consulting firm, a well-known online copywriter and optimization expert, as well as a faculty member at Wizard Academy, where he co-teaches Writing for the Radio and the Internet. You can find him online at www.jeffsextonwrites.com.

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