One morn­ing, you go into your mail­box and dis­cover there’s an enve­lope wait­ing for you from an unknown source. You bring the pack­age into your liv­ing room, tear open the enve­lope, pull out what’s inside, put on your read­ing glasses, unfold the let­ter, and begin to read the contents.

After com­plet­ing all of these steps, you then quickly glance at the let­ter to decide if the let­ter is worth reading.

If not, you throw it in the garbage.

But if the enve­lope looks like junk mail, there’s copy on the enve­lope and it screams “hype,” or the printed address label just says “dear occu­pant” as the addressee, chances are you won’t even think about open­ing it and you’ll just throw it away.

How­ever, let’s say the enve­lope works, curios­ity takes over, and the let­ter does get opened at this point. Once unfolded, though, if it looks like some kind of sales pitch at first glance, not even a sin­gle word will likely be read. So into the round file it goes!

Your web­site is the enve­lope. What does it say about you?

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If you played video arcade games in the late 80’s or early 90’s, you might remem­ber Zero Wing — a game in which a bat­tle takes place in the year 2101, where you must defend the planet Earth from an alien invasion.

Zero Wing may have been a favorite among teenagers, but like the Cab­bage Patch doll the fad faded… until Sega Gen­e­sis came out with their ver­sion of the pop­u­lar arcade game in ’98, giv­ing Zero Wing new breath.

But this time, one is offered an ani­mated intro­duc­tion in prepa­ra­tion for the space bat­tle, which started with: “In A.D. 2101, war was begin­ning.” And a dia­logue between the ship’s cap­tain and the dreaded war­rior Cats ensued, offer­ing these price­less gems:

• “You Have No Chance To Sur­vive Make Your Time.”
• “What you say!” “Some­one Set Up Us The Bomb!”
• “You know what you doing. Move ‘Zig’ For Great Justice!”
• And of course, “All Your Base Are Belong To Us.”

The result became a viral phe­nom­ena that spread quickly, first among early adopt­ing geeks, then to main­stream media. It has become so per­va­sive that it inspired a new gen­er­a­tion of web­sites show­cas­ing bad trans­la­tions, and the explo­sion in fail blogs.

Now, what does a video game have to teach us about copywriting?

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As an online mar­keter, it’s impor­tant that you should take every oppor­tu­nity to elim­i­nate bar­ri­ers and chal­lenges to the deliv­ery of your mes­sage to your tar­get audience.

While RSS feeds, blogs, and social media are all the rage right now, noth­ing beats that long-​​reigning monarch of the message-​​to-​​market medium online. Good ol’ email.

As one Twit­ter user, Michael Kern, once remarked while com­ment­ing on one of my arti­cles, “Email is still king.”

For instance, at the time of writ­ing this blog post, this blog has close to 50,000 sub­scribers — grow­ing by about 100 new sub­scribers every day. How­ever, just 15% of that num­ber are sub­scribed to my RSS feed, while the remain­der are email subscribers.

My num­bers are far from being unique. They are the same with a large per­cent­age of blog­gers and social media mar­keters, let alone Inter­net mar­keters with blogs.

With the vari­ety of ways avail­able to deliver an opt-​​in email newslet­ter, such as plain text, text with images, embed­ded HTML, and attach­ments, which one is the best?

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With spam inces­santly inun­dat­ing our inboxes and people’s atten­tion spans con­stantly shrink­ing, some have claimed that email mar­ket­ing is on the way out.

I say “nonsense.”

In fact, it’s because of those very rea­sons that email mar­ket­ing is now stronger than ever before. I per­son­ally know of some mar­keters who have made lit­er­ally mil­lions of dol­lars with email mar­ket­ing alone in recent weeks.

I’m talk­ing about legit­i­mate, law-​​compliant, optin email.

Remem­ber, the most com­mon use of the Inter­net is still email — not instant mes­sen­g­ing, social net­work­ing, or brows­ing web­sites. It’s often the very first thing peo­ple do when they log onto the web.

Granted, the biggest stum­bling block is to increase your “open rate” (i.e., the per­cent­age of peo­ple who actu­ally open your emails). And to do so you first need to get your emails deliv­ered and over­come overzeal­ous spam fil­ters.

But once they do reach your read­ers’ inboxes, the most impor­tant step in get­ting your mes­sages through to your audi­ence is with good copy. And like a good head­line in sales copy, it all starts with the sub­ject line.

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A mis­take busi­ness­peo­ple often make is when they try to sell their com­pany directly in every com­mu­ni­ca­tion they pro­duce. (I’m refer­ring to the idea that they try to sell their com­pany as being merely open for busi­ness, also called “insti­tu­tional adver­tis­ing,” and not direct mar­ket­ing, which is different.)

Insti­tu­tional adver­tis­ing (or what I call “blind brand­ing”) will draw up imme­di­ate clients. When adver­tis­ing, they spend hoards of cash on repeated, slick and enter­tain­ing ads. When mar­ket­ing to peo­ple for the first time, they blab on until the cows come home. When send­ing out infor­ma­tion, they send beau­ti­fully designed pack­ages that make ship­ping crates look like a joke!

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This another phase of adver­tis­ing which all of us have to con­sider. It enters, or should enter, into all cam­paigns. Every busi­ness man receives a large num­ber of cir­cu­lar let­ters. Most of them go direct to the waste bas­ket. But he acts on oth­ers, and oth­ers are filed for reference.

Ana­lyze those let­ters. The ones you act on or the ones you keep have a head­line which attracted your inter­est. At a glance they offer some­thing that you want, some­thing you may wish to know.

Remem­ber that point in all advertising.

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The com­pe­tent adver­tis­ing man must under­stand psy­chol­ogy. The more he knows about it the bet­ter. He must learn that cer­tain effects lead to cer­tain reac­tions, and use that knowl­edge to increase results and avoid mistakes.

Human nature is per­pet­ual. In most respects it is the same today as in the time of Cae­sar. So the prin­ci­ples of psy­chol­ogy are fixed and endur­ing. You will never need to unlearn what you learn about them.

We learn, for instance, that curios­ity is one of the strongest human incen­tives. We employ it when­ever we can. Puffed Wheat and Puffed Rice were made suc­cess­ful largely through curios­ity. “Grains puffed to 8 times the nor­mal size.” “Foods shot from guns.” “125 mil­lion steam explo­sions caused in every ker­nel.” These foods were fail­ures before that fac­tor was discovered.

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