Step By Step on How to Write Powerful Headlines For Emails

by Alan Cheng

Published on this site: April 7th, 2005 - See more articles from this month...

Email marketing is one of the main techniques to market your online business and/or affiliate programs. Let's assume your email is powerful and effective in persuading the reader to buy your product, opt in to your email list or to join your affiliate program. It's completely useless if your email does not get opened, or your sales copy is not read. Therefore the headline of your salescopy or email is as important as yoursales message. You must intrigue the reader to read your copy and this is all via headlines.

This article is an addition to my other article "How to Write Articles To Advertise Your Online Business". To receive this article, send a blank email to:

mailto:[email protected]

Below are tips which I personally use to write headlines. It'll be worthwhile for you to write a checklist based on these tips when writing your own headlines so that your copy has more chance of being read.

Tips on writing powerful, intriguing headlines:

1. Your Headline Must Be Properly Capitalized. Don't put all your headlines into block capital letters. This is rude and it also screams, "I'm an advertisement and I'm hear to sell you something". It also sets off the spam filters so that your email will never get delivered.
   
   
2. Personalize Your Headlines If Possible so that the recipient will feel the email is addressed to them only. A person's name is the most powerful word that will get him to notice something. You will pay more attention to a discussion if your name is mentioned during the talk. This is human nature. Everyone cares about themselves and wants to know more about what relates to them.
   
   
3. What Is the Benefit of Reading Your Email? Always tell the reader with your headline what benefit your are offering. People do not treat email messages as something special. We have so many email nowadays and many of them are junk, we will try and delete everything that we consider as junk. If your email captures the readers' interests then your email will be one of the ones which will be opened. All people care about is 'What's in it for me?". Make sure your headline tells them that.
   
   
4. Solving Problems. One of the most powerful benefits a reader will notice is if the headline tells them that there is a chance their problems will be solved. For example, take the headline for this article. People will want to know how to write powerful headlines so that they can increase their sales and get their ad copy read.
   
   
5. Holding the Reader By the Hand. I hate to tell you this but even if you are offering the reader advice, reports or useful information, that does not guarantee the reader will read the ad copy. This is because they have probably seen a lot of the information already since they are interested in the topic. So to further persuade the reader to read your sales message, you must tell them that you are explaining what they need to know in simple terms and that you are basically "holding them by the hand".
   
   People like information and like to read things which are easy to understand. Telling them that the information you are offering is a "Step by Step.." or a "How to..' will increase the response rate of reading further on. People in general are lazy. They like to be told how to do things and not figure it out by themselves.
   
   
6. Read Your Junk Emails. Treat your junk emails as good educational material. Instead of deleting the emails, create a folder and place all the junk emails which you have received and have opened to this folder.
   
   Just imagine, you now have a folder of emails with effective headlines. They are effective because either you did not know they are junk or they are junk but you opened them anyway. Study this folder of headlines and learn what made those headlines so effective that you continued to read them.
   
   
7. Maintain a Swipe File. This is a file which contains all headlines which you think are brilliant and can use in the future. A lot of the times, we are stuck for ideas. Go back to this file and browse and choose the one which you think is most appropriate for your situation. Most professional copywriters have a swipe file. So you need one as well.

I hope you will use this advice as a checklist everytime you write headlines. Remember with a bad headline, you might as well have no sales copy, because no one is going to read beyond your headline.

Alan Cheng, is the owner of http://www.onlinemoneymachine.com/?6
the membership site with everything to help beginners setup a profitable online business website. You can contact Alan at:
mailto:[email protected]