How to Craft the Best Email & Social Media Marketing Content
November 3, 2011
You have an almost unfair advantage over the big brands even with their zillion dollar promotional budgets: You’re a mom and you are able to speak directly to other parents with a wisdom borne of experience. You can come off sounding real and natural while the copy generated by the big Madison Avenue agencies reads as faked and insincere.
Follow these tips to leverage this very special status by crafting the most effective email and social media marketing content … and always communicating that you’re a mom first and foremost!
Avoid Selling, Embrace Informing
Your email and website content should not aim to sell as much as inform and engage. Your customers are looking to you for authoritative solutions and your reality of being a work at home mom should not be camouflaged but heralded.
If your product or service is in any way related to parenthood, use your working mom status as a beacon to attract customers who can learn from your knowledge, wisdom, and experience. Make sure that your online promotions hit all of these critical points:
- Lead your customer through your engagement process by providing the information in a very clear, comprehensive, but warmly personal manner.
- Explain to them the benefits which they will gain when they make the critical decision to proceed to checkout.
- Remove any barriers to their purchasing decision while amply demonstrating that you are directly involved in their concerns.
- Promote your mom-hood as an imprimatur of quality and reliability: What inspires more trust in American consumers than Mom & Apple Pie?
- Reinforce responsibility by ensuring that the customer knows that you’ll be there after the sale and stand behind the transaction.
The Subject Line & Preheader Are Critical
With some of your customers receiving dozens or even hundreds of emails per day, the last thing you want to do is come off as if you’re wasting your prospect’s time. Focus on a single theme in each email and ensure that it comes through loud and clear. If you have two things to say or sell, save the second for your next scheduled newsletter.
The subject line and the preheader are critical to convincing your subscriber to open your email in the first place, so condense the essence of everything that the entire email message has to say within those two short but critical elements.
Adopt a Reader’s Digest Writing Style
The rest of your content should reflect a similarly condensed “Reader’s Digest” writing style. Make it brief, to the point, and respectful of your prospect’s time and effort. If you have to go off on a tangent, make it one that directly relates to your primary appeal: that you’re a mom. Therefore you should discuss parenthood and working mother related issues, not esoterics like politics, high technology, or other mega-issues.
Applying your mom-hood to every aspect of your email and social media marketing is a prerequisite to the success of your online promotions. After all, you’re probably not trying to sell a $250 million server farm to a multinational conglomerate: your product or service is much more accessible and of primary appeal to the average person.
Tell them what it can do for them, how it can help them, what great value it is, and most importantly, how you’ve used it yourself in your own life and have become a complete believer.
Watch out for the Don’ts
Be extremely aware of violating any of these important don’ts:
- Don’t overstate your case
- Don’t go off track
- Don’t hard sell
- Don’t make claims you can’t support
- Don’t exceed a couple of paragraphs per subject or item
- Don’t sound corporate or formal
- Don’t make believe you’re something you’re not
Consider email and social media marketing as a way to share your story with other interested individuals rather than an avenue to be exploited in order to make the mortgage payment this month and success will find you!
