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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If you played video arcade games in the late 80’s, even 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 led by the dreaded warrior Cats.

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…

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Gary: I want you to imagine that an ad was written by me. I mean it was just a brilliant ad… a brilliant headline… a brilliant copy. It just flowed, etc. and it was about knitting machines.

Now, I am guessing that most of the people on this call do not knit very often unless Rosie Greer is on the call. I do not think you knit very often and it would not make any difference how much skill I used to write that letter but let’s take another scenario.

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