Email Sending – Email Marketing Blog

How to Make a Boring Topic Sound Exciting in Your Email Marketing

Posted by Alyssa Riceon January 14, 2021January 14, 2021in Email Marketing Best Practices

7 Proven Tactics to Consider For Your Next Marketing Campaign or Promotion

As a content creator, there are lots of topics that need to be written about that can be boring. Odds are, if you find it boring, then the reader will, too. The last thing you want to do is put your reader (and yourself) to sleep.

According to Create & Cultivate, you have 2.7 seconds to grab someone’s attention.

So how can you come up with something interesting to say when you have to write about insurance, whitepapers, legal documents, statistics, actuarial science, ISO standards, computer manuals, annuities, Robert’s Rules of Order, or other potentially boring topics?

Here are seven tactics and strategies to spice up your next campaign:

1. Take the Topic and Spin It

If you can raise some eyebrows while discussing a boring topic, congratulations. This is a great way to convey your topic in a shocking way. This campaign from Huckberry makes a joke out of the use of Zoom during the pandemic.

They use this unique subject line to make fun of those who do not wear pants on Zoom, while promoting their 365 Shorts.

2. Paint a Picture in People’s Minds

Some of the best writers are able to paint a picture in people’s minds. This will guarantee that you provoke emotion and connect with your readers.

This wikiHow thread gives multiple tips on how to write to paint picture’s in minds.

3. Use Gamification Tactics

If you’ve never heard of gamification, it is using games, puzzles, or quizzes in digital marketing.

Companies use scratch-offs, mazes, spin-to-win wheels, crossword puzzles, quizzes, and more to spruce up their emails.

Pizza Hut used this slot machine for promotions. Everyone loves free stuff and discounts, so this is a great way to bring boring topics to life.

4. Invite Your Reader to Participate

By making your reader participate, it makes them feel special and creates a connection between them and your brand, thus creating excitement when you email them.

There are tons of ways to create engaging emails.

You can do this by creating compelling call-to-actions, include a dynamic visual or video, add personalization by using their name or any information you have about the reader, asking questions and encouraging replies, and segmenting your email lists.

You can even encourage your readers to forward emails to their friends. To some people, running is fun. To other people, running is boring. In this tweet, Adidas creates excitement and encourages their Twitter followers to “retweet” the tweet to challenge their friends to a run:

Here are 20+ other ways to increase engagement in your email newsletter.

5. Understand What Your Audience Wants to Know

Your reader wants to hear your content because they want value from you. Give them exactly what they want! If you are an advertising agency, give your readers some advertising tips. If you are a clothing brand, give your readers coupons.

You want to marry your voice with your customer’s voice. If you have to discuss that boring topic, give your readers what they would want out of it.

6. Add a Personal Touch

It doesn’t always have to be serious. Include some of your own personality into emails. It becomes more personalized and increases that connection. You can interject facts or your own personal experiences into your email copy.

For example, if you are an insurance company, include some wild facts about insurance. Starbucks actually pays more for their employee’s health insurance than it pays for their coffee beans. That will get your audience’s attention!

7. Include Eye-Catching Visuals and Graphics

Sometimes it is nice to show, rather than tell. Windsor creates this aesthetically pleasing email for the fashionistas out there. They show some trendy outfits while including promotions and using a clean and pretty color palette.

Including graphs like this one about sleeping disorders are fun and way better than normal bar charts or line graphs. Find some online or make some of your own!

Conclusion

In a perfect world, we would all write about what we love. For now, we can’t do that but we have ways to work around it. Add some spice and seasoning to these boring topics and you will capture your reader’s attention for sure.

Resources

26 Real Ways to Increase Engagement in Your Email Newsletter https://www.netatlantic.com/resources/articles/26-real-ways-to-increase-engagement-in-your-email-newsletter

How to Paint Pictures in Someone’s Mind https://www.wikihow.com/Create-Sentences-That-Paint-Pictures-in-People%27s-Minds

You Have 2.7 Seconds to Grab Someone’s Attention, No Pressure https://www.createcultivate.com/blog/2016/2/16/wtf-you-have-27-seconds-to-grab-someones-attention

Prohibited Content: The Shark in the Email Marketing Waters

Posted by Steven O'Brienon August 4, 2016August 4, 2016in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Engagement, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Sender Reputation

As you dip your toes into the waters of email marketing, you need to prepare yourself for the possibility that some of your email might contain content that people don’t want to receive. This is what ESP’s refer to as prohibited content. When you send a message with content like this — snap! — you’ll feel the jaws of compliance bite down on your email program!

Take Time To Test!

Posted by Karen Frascaon June 9, 2016in Design & Layout, Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Email Marketing Testing, Email Templates, Email Templates, Design & Layout

Picture this: you’ve created a phenomenal email. One of your best ever, in fact. It’s got highly compelling content that’s relevant to your subscribers, gorgeous images, and a call to action that’s practically irresistible. This email is so good, you can’t wait to put it out there and watch the clicks and conversions start rolling in. So you’re really tempted to just pull the trigger and skip the whole testing phase. After all, you know your email is practically perfect.

What could possibly go wrong?

Ramp Up to Email Marketing Success

Posted by Steven O'Brienon May 26, 2016May 26, 2016in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Marketing Strategy

Here’s a scenario for you: You’re new to email marketing, or you’ve got a new list of thousands of addresses that you want to send to. You’ve got an account with an ESP, so you should be ready to go, right? Not so fast! You can’t just open the floodgates – your sending has to be “ramped up”. But what the heck does that mean??

Fear the Walking Dead…DOMAINS

Posted by Steven O'Brienon May 19, 2016in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Engagement, Email List Maintenance, Email Marketing Best Practices, Sender Reputation

Addresses from dead domains are like zombies. They exist in your list and look kind of like the real thing (i.e., valid addresses that you can send to). They may have been on your list for a long time, maybe since you started collecting addresses way back when. But, like zombies, they are mere shadows of their former selves.

When compliance folks like me talk about dead domains, we are referring to addresses within a sender’s list that are from domains which are no longer in business, or are no longer providing mail client services. Having addresses from these domains on a mailing list is an indication to any good compliance specialist that the list is in dire need of clean-up, or that the list owner may have purchased addresses. Neither of these scenarios is good for the client’s sender reputation, nor the ESP’s overall reputation.

To Test or Not to Test: That is the Question

Posted by Steven O'Brienon March 17, 2016in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Engagement, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing Content, Email Marketing Testing, Marketing Strategy, Mobile Email Marketing, Mobile Optimization, Subject Line Best Practices

Recently, I was reading some articles about William Shakespeare (stay with me here, folks!), which led to some posts that discussed whether he revised his plays, how many revisions there were, and how they evolved from first draft to finished masterpiece. Since I’m such a geek about email, I started wondering:

If Shakespeare had a mailing list, would he have tested different versions of his plays to see which one got the best response?

Time To Switch To A New ESP? Here’s What You Need To Know

Posted by Karen Frascaon July 16, 2015July 16, 2015in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Engagement, Email List Maintenance, Email Marketing Best Practices, Email Marketing CRM Integration, Email Marketing Tracking & Reporting, Marketing Strategy, Targeted Email Marketing

Is achieving your email marketing goals becoming more and more challenging? It might be time to take a look at whether your current ESP is still meeting your needs.

Are you experiencing any of the following issues?

5 Keys to Avoiding a Bad (Sender) Reputation

Posted by Miller Ramoson June 11, 2015June 11, 2015in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Marketing Strategy

Your Sender Score, a ReturnPath metric to gauge your reputation as an email sender, is pretty important. It determines whether or not the door to recipient inboxes is open to your email communications and whether or not you’re even a welcome visitor. Heck, it determines whether or not you can even knock on that door as email marketers with poor Sender Scores are often not permitted anywhere near the premises! They either have their emails shunted to a spam folder automatically or recipient ISPs outright refuse the delivery of their messages entirely. Your Sender Score is pretty serious business.

Read More “5 Keys to Avoiding a Bad (Sender) Reputation”

What is a Sender Score And Why Does it Matter?

Posted by Miller Ramoson June 4, 2015in Email Delivery & Deliverability, Email Marketing Best Practices, Sender Reputation

For your eye-catching calls-to-action to get clicked on, your carefully crafted and targeted content to get read and engaged with and, heck, your messages even opened altogether, your email needs to first make it into the inbox. And it makes total sense: in order for your email to get interacted with, it needs to get to where it needs to get to in order to be interacted with there. Pretty basic.

But, sadly, there may be times when your mailings don’t get too far past the clicking of the send button, when their handshake with a recipient ISP gets refused outright.

Three Popular Email Superstitions – Debunked!

Posted by Karen Frascaon September 13, 2013July 8, 2015in Marketing Strategy

It’s Friday the 13th! Many people in western culture are superstitious about today’s date.

But is Friday the 13th really an unlucky date, or have we simply believed in the idea for so long that it feels true? And how, exactly, does all this relate to email marketing? Read on to find out!

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