Copywriting

Professional Direct Mail, Email Newsletter, & Internet Copywriting Services – Portland, Maine

Good copywriting comes in many forms for many purposes.  Many people think of copywriting only for advertisements or direct mail pieces.  When and where is just as important as what you are writing!  Good copywriting must engage your readers.

This is how Spire Express, as Maine direct marketing experts, use content and specialized offers to capture customers for our clients. As an example, our average e-mail open and click-through rates are 4-5 times greater then industry averages. Great copywriting is the result of putting a laser-like focus on our clients’ target market!

Give customer’s content and offers they want, and you have a better chance of engaging them. The best email marketing campaigns inject elements designed to stimulate interest and encourage interactivity. In short, our emails and direct mail pieces delight and engage readers.  Your customers are much more likely to open and read your e-mails.  Here are some ways to do this:

  1. Value-added Content: If you include engaging editorial content in your promotional programs, your readers will begin to anticipate this information and be more likely to open your e-mails. Content can take the form of tips, facts or how-to information of interest to your audience.
  2. Use Customers’ Comments or Compelling Quotes: Share feedback you’ve received from your readers or give them something to think about.  Everybody understands the selling power of network and referrals.  Put this in your copywriting.
  3. Include Polls or Surveys: Anything you can do to encourage interactivity with and among your readers will tighten your relationship with them. Invite them to weigh in with their opinions and thoughts.
  4. Give Readers a Chance to Ask Questions: Readers often are intrigued by situations others are facing, and this gives you another opportunity to encourage interaction.   Any time you can have a chance to interact with a potential customer, you’ve gone from marketing to sales.
  5. Lists:  People love to know what others are buying. Why not use this as a way to sell more products? And, they love lists of best things to do. Becoming a trusted reference or source of information is a great way to build loyalty.
  6. Use Multimedia: With the growing use of broadband and high-speed Internet connections among consumers and most businesses, it’s time to consider integrating audio and video into your e-mail marketing campaigns.  When L.L. Bean wanted to underscore its product guarantee in a recent e-mail, it explained that every product is put to the test in the lab and in the field. It provided a link to its latest TV spot called Testing for Life and examples of reports from independent testers.

Taglines

As a subset to great copywriting Spire Express is often asked to create taglines for clients.  These are copywriting projects that we love. It’s a great creative process, but to see it working in the marketplace and catching wind is a great source of pride (and obvious benefit to our clients.)  Plus, we often start to see the copycats; you know what they say about flattery!  In any case, L. Geller had a great perspective on the power of taglines.

At their best, taglines are short, pointed statements of who you are, and what you can do for your customers and prospects. Another crucial element of a great tagline is its stark simplicity. Nothing could be more simple than “Just do it,” “The Real Thing,” “Life Takes Visa” or “The King of Beers.”

Taglines should be simple and evocative, and present both a benefit and a personality. Great tag lines have three things in common:

  1. You see them.
  2. You understand them.
  3. You connect them to the company.

Taglines do more than jog the consumer’s memory about your company; taglines strengthen the brand promise. Coming up with memorable, distinctive and relevant tag lines that succinctly summarize your product or service can be tricky. But when done well, the right tagline makes the promise of the brand so much stronger.

A tagline is a kind of elevator pitch. Say what you have to say really fast, and make it great. Of course it’s also a lot different from an elevator pitch because outside the elevator your little tagline has to clamor for attention along with a zillion others.

A tagline is good for direct marketing for several reasons:

  1. In the mail, on an ad and on a Web site, the right tagline is as good as a headline, even if the prospect has never seen it before.
  2. If people have seen your tagline before, it can be a strong reminder of what you can do for them.
  3. A tagline can hold together a multimedia campaign, particularly if consumers are apt to view your message at different times through different media. The repetition helps build awareness for the overall campaign.
  4. It’s a brilliant and attractive summary.

As Maine direct marketing experts, Spire Express follows guidelines to getting your tagline right. Contact us today to discuss how we can turn ideas into clients for you.