How long do all of your folks' very best-selling emails take to create, on average?

I'll volunteer some stats on mine:

-Average new content-focused email, about 2-3 hours each, sent weekly

-New product/service promo-focused email .. my recent one
today took me 6 hours and over 40 minor revisions for all
the copywriting, graphics and testing work I did
(Sending to myself many times to test/refine it's appearance
til I was happy with it)

Most of my emails are 80%+ new content with 20% promo/sales
writing ... However when I have a major new service/product to promote
I'll typically send out an announcement type email for it as well as
do follow up 'sound bites' in my content emails..


ideas from others? doing things like testing new headers, headlines, bullet points, html formatting etc, all a critical part of the process... time-consuming..

thx,

ken

What I've had more success with are smaller "teaser" emails leading to a long copy salesletter or web page. Why? Three reasons:

1) Less content in the email is easier/faster to download and reduces risks of triggering spam filters. More content means more words that can trigger the filters. (Larger emails have a much smaller "open rate" than smaller ones. For example, I really love Marcia Yudkin's Marketing Minute or Markus Allen's $10,000 Tip of The Day. Their emails are 2-3 paragraphs, often with a URL leading to a web page.)

2) Causes curiosity and also adds a sense of value -- why? because if they have to go online to a "secret" or "private" page (so to speak) to retrieve the content, it adds a sense that they are privileged in getting such content. It's not easily accessible and projects an aura of scarcity. Whereas straight, full content emails are "free" and thus lessens the perceived value somewhat.

3) Small emails also tend to "pre-qualify" reader before hitting the promo. If they read the email and then visit the web page with more content, they can be put into a favorable frame of mind and pushes only those people who are truly interested in what the content (or topic) may offer. We tend to track not just open rates (achieved only with HTML emails) and clickthroughs, but also sales per clickthrough (rather than sales per campaign). Sales per CT's are higher with smaller emails.

Plain "html" emails work best over plain text and html-rich. Meaning, I use html for formatting, colors and adding strong borders (which increase readership), but no graphics, scripts or forms.

Thanks Michel, excellent ideas re scarcity and targeting appeals..


ken

Ken,

Read your post and thought I would time myself doing my ezine for my other project at http://hairee.com.

It took me just over 40 mins and its html.

Here is the way I do it.

I collect all of my comment from previous replies and format them all the same fonts etc in Word. As it is a discussion list I dont go overboard checking typos etc.

I then go into my last ezine and open it in my web editor. I save the page as a copy but re-named. So last weeks was 56 I rename as 57.

I then simply replace all the copy with what is on my Word Doc.. When pasting the html into my email manager I then have to go through the html and make sure all the link tags for images are right.

Click and send to 3,000. That really is it.

I do the same with my ezine at Orange Beetle.

Hope this helps Ken

thx - good to hear it...

I learned a lot of useful tips from Michel, using what I've learned from him so far in his coaching, my email that I sent out this weekend created enough sales to almost halfway sell-out the seminar coming in March (^_^). So it was worth the hours of craftsmanship.

I've never got this many orders this far ahead of time, til now. And I've been doing seminars for decades. It's not for another 3 1/2 months and it's already almost half sold out. Yippee.

But I have to give my brain a week's rest after any major copywriting effort ... it's Hard work.

Copywriting's great. Now where do I spend all the money??
Oh yeah, the high-maintenance www.kencalhoun.com/wife.jpg lol


ken

in case anyone's curious, here's the control piece email, that pulled those sales:
http://www.daytradinguniversity.com/...irdseminar.htm

a tad wordy, but it sold 5 figures in one weekend $$

Here's an interesting stat. This client hired me to write an email promo campaign. (He's done some throughout the year but hired me to write his copy this time.) The first one, he insisted, was a long copy HTML email. Results? Not bad ... 80 sales for $8,000 profit (it's a $100 digital product).

This was late November last year.

But I finally convinced him to try a short copy plain text email "pushing" the reader to a long copy web page (salesletter) instead. The results? See for yourself...

http://SuccessDoctor.com/images/sales.gif

Total of $150,000+ in just 3 weeks.

W W

That's incredible!

I've just built a site and am ready to start on the next step (developing an ezine/newsletter). I've been reading up on it, and some "experts" say that short ezines with links to longer articles on your web site are a BAD idea because a certain percentage of your email readers won't bother to click on the link; if they don't have instant access to your info/article (and thus your sales pitch), they won't ever see it.

Your test results sure blows that theory out of the water, huh?

Thanks, Michel!

Interesting. My friend Dr. Ralph Wilson -- http://WilsonWeb.com/ and http://DoctoreBiz.com/ -- has produced one of the most popular ezines for years: Web Commerce Today and Web Marketing Today (they are small synopses with links to articles).

That said, those types of theories were made before spam filters, pop-up blockers and spyware removers became so popular as they are now.

Mike,

Here is a spanner in the works. I actually tried one of my lists this way and it went from a 30 plus click through/open rate to a less than 10%. Gave it 3 weeks and went back to full HTML. Open rates rose again!

Makes me wonder were the open rates "fake" as in, if the message was displayed on their PC in the view window before deleting without reading, it was a false reading! Just not sure but have stuck with full ezine since then.

Then again, tried this way with my OrangeBeetle ezine and rates although didnt rise, they never fell.

Here is a point of interest though; although going away a little from topic. My ezine at http://Hairee.com gets a rate of 30% plus open rate. My ezine at http://orangebeetle.com gets a rate of nearly 100%.

Hairee is weekly. Orange Beetle is random. I wonder if more value is perceived on randon rather than weekly?