Five Email Words to Live By

E-mail marketing is cheap and quick and can offer you near-instant results. The problem is, everyone else — including your competitors — knows this too. So, with e-mail inboxes getting more and more cluttered these days, you’ve got to make it your business to create an e-mail simply too punchy to resist.

You can do that with PVBIT. You may not be able to pronounce it, but remember it. PVBIT stands for the five things that e-mail marketing must have for it to be successful.

1. Permission
2. Value
3. Brevity
4. Interactivity
5. Trackability


Permission

If you don't have permission to e-mail people, you're intruding. Chances are they'll slam the door in your face. Sure, messages can be blasted out to any e-mail address. That's called spam. And yes, if you throw enough of it against the wall, some will stick. But it's about 99.9% more likely to anger people than bring home the bacon.  By definition, this means that you send e-mails only to those from whom you have some sort of permission to do so.

Value

Even if you have permission to send e-mail, that e-mail needs to contain real value if it is to be read and acted upon and if you want future e-mails to be read. Newsletters had better have news, interesting articles and tips that will genuinely help recipients. Offers had better have something to offer. They need a hook. Is what you're offering new? Is the price great? Is time running out on it? And in the end, does the recipient care?

Brevity

 We all know the expression “short and sweet.” In e-mail marketing, short is sweet. People want to get through e-mail quickly. Sending a long message is like doing 20 in a 50-mph zone. Expect to be passed by at the first opportunity.
Interactivity: Boring is the one word that describes too many e-mail messages. Don’t bludgeon recipients with facts, figures and opinions. E-mail is a speed medium. Keep it quick. Tease with a little info and a link to the full story. Ask one-question polls. Get recipients clicking and interacting with your e-mail. Turn recipients into participants. 

Trackability

Don't send out e-mail the same way you would postal mail. Don't push it out and wait for somebody to contact you. One of the great benefits of smart e-mail is that you can tell who opens it, when they open it, what they click, what polls they answer and how they answer them. Then you can save that data in a profile and act on what it tells you.

If your e-mail marketing doesn't meet the PVBIT test, you're wasting your time.