The secret to successful e-mail marketing: Be succinct

[mandy]

With only a second or two to hook the e-mail reader, online retailers can literally win or lose business in the blink of an eye. In catalogs and circulars, retailers and direct marketers have the luxury of using a few extra column inches or lines of text to romance the reader with a new offer or product innovation. But in e-mail, they need copy that’s short, to-the-point and compelling.

“Many retailers still treat e-mail as cheap paper and that’s why they are getting poor campaign results,”...

Web retailers are committing major time and money to building highly segmented opt-in lists, designing e-mail messages with sophisticated images and using web analytics and click-stream analysis to track their campaigns. But many marketing managers and copy writers are also producing e-mail content that’s ineffective, ignored by shoppers and blocked by spam filters. “Taking a traditional print approach to e-mail marketing doesn’t produce effective results,” Baggott says. “E-mail promotions need to be very interactive and give the readers numerous chances to click on a link for follow-up information or a conduct a transaction.”

full article: http://internetretailer.com/article.asp?id=17442