Direct Marketing

I’ve written a lot of DM, both B2B and B2C. A discipline that started as letters and mail packs is now almost exclusively e-DMs, and I write many of these. A few years back, I did a project in a pure digital agency, and was surprised by something I heard a planner say to her colleague: “You know what I’d really like to get? A real letter on paper.”  It made me realise that there’s an opportunity for marketers to stand out by sending old-school paper DM.

Anyway, let’s start with emails. They’ve changed rapidly over the past decade. Increasingly, we read them on our smartphones, so the copy needs to be short and punchy to suit the mobile format.

Getting readers to open your email is a challenge, so I think it’s good to include a pre-header to work with your subject line, and then test different line options.