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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So, if you’re fol­low­ing the com­mand­ments, you should now have a unique name, pos­si­bly a tagline, and estab­lished your­self as the first or leader in your unique cat­e­gory. What about the ser­vice or prod­uct you offer? Do you offer an extra­or­di­nary prod­uct or ser­vice, or do you offer an ordi­nary one?

Even if the ser­vice you pro­vide is cus­tom­ary, tra­di­tional, and prob­a­bly offered by your com­pe­ti­tion, you should make it appear unique just as well.

Remem­ber that per­cep­tion is more pow­er­ful than truth. You don’t need to empha­size that your prod­uct or ser­vice is unique, bet­ter than the com­pe­ti­tion, or even the best for that mat­ter. Doing so by declar­ing that it is can some­times be worse than not say­ing any­thing at all, and the rea­son for that is that it makes your self-​​serving claim appear sus­pect or exaggerated.

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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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In the sec­ond com­mand­ment, you learned that you should be the leader in your cat­e­gory or in your unique area of exper­tise. Now you need to be known as such. And one of the most effec­tive ways to do this is through publicity.

I met a fel­low once while work­ing in New York City who ran his own show on cable tele­vi­sion — his very own cable show! Cable and com­mu­nity tele­vi­sion sta­tions are won­der­ful medi­ums to get the word out effec­tively. This is an area in which you can get a lot of pub­lic­ity at lit­tle or no cost.

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Some of the tests results I love to fol­low are those from The Poyn­ter Insti­tute. Their eye­track­ing stud­ies are some of the largest ever con­ducted in this space.

While their tests are pri­mar­ily done for, and funded by, major news­pa­pers, their stud­ies are incred­i­bly reveal­ing nonethe­less. For instance, they’ve tested how read­ers read sto­ries in three dif­fer­ent for­mats: tabloid-​​style (folded ver­ti­cally), broad­sheet (larger size, folded hor­i­zon­tally), and online.

Of course, my inter­est is cer­tainly focused on the online ver­sion. But their news­pa­per stud­ies are very reveal­ing in terms of what cap­tures people’s atten­tion, how they read, and how much of it they do read.

Their web­site has come out with five key find­ings. (Their full report is due out in a few more weeks from now.) But let’s take a closer look at these find­ings, and my inter­pre­ta­tion of what they mean for the web.

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They say that the head­line is the most impor­tant part of your online copy. But your deck and lead copy are just as impor­tant. These often make up the the sec­tion called “above the fold,” which is the top­most sec­tion of your website’s page, with­out any scrolling.

(Think of the front-​​page head­lines and pic­tures of a news­pa­per, folded on a news­stand. This sec­tion is vital, for it’s the sec­tion that sells papers.)

Online, it’s the first screen your vis­i­tors see when they hit your site. The deck copy is usu­ally the por­tion imme­di­ately fol­low­ing your head­line (also known as the “sub­head­line”), and the lead is the open­ing of your let­ter. (Usu­ally the first few para­graphs if not sen­tences of your body copy.)

There are many things you need to take into account when devel­op­ing your “above the fold” sec­tion. Adding a pic­ture, grab­bing atten­tion, per­haps even incor­po­rat­ing audio and video.

But for the pur­poses of this arti­cle, I want to explore the con­cept of com­mu­ni­cat­ing your core idea, ben­e­fit, claim or promise, and doing it in the most pow­er­ful, per­sua­sive, and pro­duc­tive way pos­si­ble, in that vital above-​​the-​​fold sec­tion. It’s called…

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A lot of peo­ple ask me how I write copy. I don’t mean the content-​​writing process (such as how I come up with head­lines, bul­lets, offers, etc), but how I tackle the actual task of com­pos­ing a new saleslet­ter from scratch.

Every­one is dif­fer­ent. My writ­ing process is one devel­oped over many years, and many peo­ple may adopt or dis­like the same tech­niques. But in the hope that know­ing my process may be help­ful to some writ­ers, I’d like to share it with you.

Of course, if I were to describe all of the steps, there would be way too much infor­ma­tion to squeeze into one arti­cle. But for now, I can offer you a basic look at my method­ol­ogy by giv­ing you a short list of the seven steps I take.

Here they are.

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