Amazon Accidentally Sent Out Their Email Template
Though whilst amusing, it does offer some worthwhile thoughts on good copywriting technique.
A while ago, Amazon ended up sending out their blank email template. [Albeit with descriptive placeholder text].
A bit of a blunder, for sure. However it does offer up some useful thoughts as to good copywriting technique, and to how to create engaging emails that will get read more often by the recipient.
Here’s what was sent out, having found it on LinkedIn:
What they ended up showing was essentially their recipe book for how they create engaging email marketing campaigns - and there’s a lot we can take away from this for use within our own businesses!
All too often, when a business thinks about sending out an email campaign, it ends up being all about them - ‘we’ve done this’, ‘we’ve been there’, ‘we did this for this client’, ‘we won this award’, ‘we were shortlisted for cleanest carpets in Norwich’, ‘shiniest break room cutlery this side of the Thames’. Whatever it may be - ultimately, it can focus too much on the business themselves.
You have to ask yourself, why would someone reading it care?
Any email you send out, should contain some form of value for the recipient, giving them something they can action themselves, something of use to them; at the very least, something that will give them something to think about.
But when you do update your email list with new product or service offerings (and you certainly should from time to time, absolutely) - think benefits, over features.
Always.
And this Amazon template demonstrates just that - keep it short, simple, get to the point; don’t write a thesis when a couple of paragraphs will do. Keep your Call To Action (CTA) obvious, and enticing. Forget the ‘click here’ nonsense - make it more tailored. Use better labelling on your buttons, make it clear what the intention is, so the recipient knows exactly what to expect when they click it.
After all, by sending someone an email, you want something in return, be it more work, a like, share, or some form of response (or return), in some way.
We should all constantly reevaluate our output, and review what we send out to our clients. Is it useful? Does it have some value? Or is it just a humblebrag about your new executive leather-bound set of pencil sharpeners with the gold foil monogrammed inlay?
Stuff I Found To Make Your Life Easier
Editing video has, over the years, gone from being the dark art of a select few, to anyone with a smartphone, pretty much. Computers and phones have become more powerful than I could possibly have ever imagined 20 years ago, without the need to spend £15,000 on a dedicated edit suite. (Which I may have done back in my old video production days - *breathes deeply to not feel the rage again*).
There are now numerous smartphone apps that will do a more than decent job of putting clips together from the 4K footage captured on your phone; plus stepping up to utilising tools like Canva Video which enhances things even further. Then further still to the more professional end of the scale with the ‘old standards’ like Adobe Premiere, Final Cut Pro et al.
The latest contender to make your life easier, where you can even edit video through its browser based platform - enter CapCut.
With dedicated apps for phones as well as desktop, or even keeping things straightforward without any downloads whatsoever, editing your videos directly in your browser. It couldn’t get much simpler.
Designed for the TikTok generation in mind, there are lots of elements up for grabs to enhance your videos with animations, titles, graphics etc.
(I’m not of that generation, so whenever I hear TikTok all I can picture is a full size Grandfather clock. But that’s another story.)
Even more impressively, is the cost. It’s free. At least, a good portion of it is.
There will be various elements within the platform which you’ll need to stump up for in cold hard cash as plugins/add-ons, but the base platform itself is free to use. So if all you’re wanting is an uber-simple solution to edit up some video for your ‘soshull meeja’ without chewing up your ageing computer’s RAM , you’re good to go.
All without an expensive subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud! Bonus.
How To Ditch Another Expensive Subscription
While we’re on the subject of avoiding the need to pay for expensive software subscriptions, let’s take a sideways glance at Microsoft.
Naturally, they have a long history in software development. Some love them, others hate them. Another subset are sitting on that fence over there.
Having been someone that used Microsoft products all their life up until I switched over to Mac in 2007, I’m afraid I’m one of those people that left everything Microsoft well behind in the rear view mirror. Like a bitter ex that takes the kids, dog, and your summer house in the Hamptons.
For me, everything in the Apple world made more sense; they worked more intuitively, they were usually cheaper (yes I said cheaper) and generally nicer to use.
Point of note. User Experience (UX) design plays a big part in stuff we will end up using day in day out; and it’s something you should always consider when choosing various platforms to use, that you’ll likely end up using for many years to come.
So with my Mac transition, came with it the Apple equivalent software that I swapped over to as well; their own version of Microsoft Office - iWork - which they sold for around £80/$80 back then. A mere fraction of the price of the ‘full’ commercial use Microsoft Office suite which was around £300 or so, 15 years ago.
Nowadays, the iWork suite (Pages, Numbers and Keynote - the equivalents to Word, Excel and Powerpoint) are offered for free, as it just became a perk of being an Apple user - same for the iOS versions too. These are the apps/programs I use daily, and have done for many, many years.
There are however still occasions where, say, if someone sends me a script for voiceover in Word format, & they have the ‘track changes’ thing enabled because every single person at their office including the janitor has chimed in with ‘creative input’, these sometimes don’t open quite so well in Pages (as Pages and all the iWork suite will open Microsoft files, in case you weren’t aware).
In these instances, it may from time to time make the formatting a little skewed and hard to read when in the voiceover booth, when you’re deliberating whether the final script should be using Colin’s ‘from whenceforth’, or Barbara’s ‘hitherto’.
So I doffed my deerstalker hat, initiated Sherlock-mode, & went to look for an alternative, for the rare occasions that required it.
Being someone so Apple-oriented now that I’ve actually become my own orchard, there wasn’t any atom of my existence that was going to remotely entertain the notion of paying Microsoft an annual subscription to use the latest Office suite, Microsoft 365 - and of course you can’t just ‘buy’ the software outright now, it’s all subscription only.
The base subscription price for business use is £4.50/month, with the highest sub coming in at £16.60/month. Neither of which I was going to do, not for software that would be used once in blue moon.
And then I stumbled upon WPS Office.
WPS Office is freeware, meaning it’s open source. And is pretty much as jam-packed with features as Microsoft’s subscription software. So I downloaded it, and found it to be really rather good. With all the various equivalents to Word, Excel and Powerpoint built in, it’s proving to be a commendable option for those who don’t want to go down the Microsoft rabbit hole too far.
As software goes, as sometimes can be the case with free stuff, it doesn’t feel overly clunky at all. The download file size itself was pretty lean, and it loads and operates speedily, enabling you to do all the things you would do in Office 365, but without the price tag. So for anyone who has a similar mindset to me, it’s got to be worth a punt.
My only minor gripe with it, is that it can be mildly annoying by logging you out all the time. Granted, it’s a completely free account that it prefers you to log in with when using it; but unlike every other piece of software in the world that keeps you logged in until you actively logout, it seems to decide, all by itself, to log you out, purely for its own sick humour. So you’ll get a banner constantly at the top saying ‘to use further features, hey, why not consider logging in?’.
Gits.
Still, it’s free. So I’ll suck it up. (*menacing voice* For now….)
Some say the best things in life are free. Sometimes they’re absolutely right.
Until next time…