A few days ago, I got HUMILIATED by Laura Belgray of Talking Shrimp because she made me cry real tears as I read her email.
If you’re unfamiliar with Laura, she’s my favorite female email copywriter, and from my vantage point of not knowing her personally, she seems like a real sweetheart.
Well, she was a real sweetheart.
Until she made me cry, that is.
Now, the reason she made me cry isn’t as humiliating as the fact that I, a man, did in fact cry.
So, let’s get into it before you unsubscribe for not being aLpHa enough.
Laura sent an email the other day about how, despite not smoking, she’s starting to develop fine lines around her mouth. Time doesn’t care about any of us, eh?
This new development on her face caused her to panic–and she’s currently in the process of trying whatever she can to eradicate her fine lines.
Well, turns out, her fine lines are the direct result of overusing a straw to sip her iced coffee every day. She doesn't want to give up iced coffee or drinking it through a straw, but she’s experienced enough emotional pain to change her habits, which was the point of her email:
How do you make these painful-enough connections to your audience to encourage them to change their habits?
But that’s not why I cried…
The reason I cried is because after reading the entire email, I found a “hidden” section of her email:
In the footer, in the smallest fine line print, Laura wrote a 982-word soliloquy about absolutely nothing. It started with “You aren’t meant to read the following.” Intrigued, I continued to hear a story about her college days, how she hung out with the jocks at an art school, and had an admitted copy and pasted privacy policy part.
I read this entire 982-word soliloquy for “research purposes.”
And, yes, the text was so teeny-tiny that my eyes watered as I read through her story of nothingness.
That ain’t the interesting part though.
The interesting part is why she wrote a 982-word soliloquy in the footer of her email.
Turns out, she’s doing it as a way to avoid being sent to the Promotions Folder because her emails aren’t landing in the primary inbox.
This is a problem everyone who sends emails has to deal with:
When your emails get sent to this dreaded folder with an endless amount of promotional emails with discounts varying from 15% off to 50% off—all for things you forgot you signed up for and no longer need, but don’t have the time to click and delete and unsubscribe from each one—nobody sees them.
They are, quite literally, drowned by promotions.
And I don’t know if her 982-word soliloquy will magically make her emails appear in the primary inbox, but it’s worth a try if you have this problem with your emails.
Also, a couple more points of note before we wrap today:
I’ve long said that landing in the spam folder is better than landing in the promotions tab. I think Laura reinforces this point. Not only am I (at least, and mayhap even you) more likely to check my spam folder, but I don’t have even a fraction of the amount of emails in my spam folder as I do in the promotions tab.
Second point?
SEO ruined content marketing (including email marketing) for all of us.
Here’s what I mean:
After reading Laura’s soliloquy, I decided to head to Google and search how to avoid the promotions tab.
Of course, there are the usual suspects like not using too many images or inserting too many links into your emails.
But the rest of the “advice” I received from blog posts was just god-awful.
Things like:
* Personalize your emails with a first name tag because people like being greeted by first name
* Segment your audience
* Ensure your email brings value (how in tf does a Google algorithm even check for “value”)
Here’s the thing…
Whenever you read a marketing article you found via Google search, it’s the bottom of the barrel content. I know because I used to write this bottle of the barrel content.
Everything is regurgitated with the most obvious “hacks” that nobody thought up themselves, rather, they copy and pasted it from another high-ranking article at the time.
That’s why search queries like “best practices for email marketing” gives you an endless list of drivel an intern wrote who never even used email before landing their first job.
Worst part?
This applies to every marketing blog post you find on Google.
I skimmed through a good 20 of these bullshit articles, and nowhere in any of them was Laura’s footer text trick. Why? Because Laura’s business depends on her emails being seen, read, and opened. Her solution, whether it works or doesn’t, has a level of creativity that no intern or SEO agency could muster if they put all 3 of their brain cells together.
Some food for thought.
The good news?
Since you somehow found me, you’ve found one of the best email copywriters in the game today.
And while I won’t rank on Google for “best practices for email marketing,” I know them so intimately that I’ve forgotten more than most of these Google article-reading suckers will ever learn.
And so, if you wanna grow your email marketing revenue, there’s mayhap nobody more qualified than me.
Wanna see?
Hit reply, and we’ll set up a quick call.
John
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