Email Marketing That Doesn't Suck: Have Fun Writing Emails Your Subscribers Will Want to Read (and That Will Actually Make You Money!)

by Bobby Klinck

Overview

Email marketing sucks...at least the way most marketers do it. Conventional advice tells you to always be selling—or at least always be going for the click— but chances are, you hate writing emails, your audience hates reading them, and they aren't making you any money. But what if email didn't suck? What if you enjoyed writing emails that your audience would binge-read like they watch Netflix? What if email actually made you money? In Email Marketing That Doesn't Suck, Harvard Law–grad-turned-online-entrepreneur Bobby Klinck uses his lawyering skills to convince you that the old-school rules for email marketing are just plain dumb. He shows you how to do email right, teaching you the five phases of email marketing and how to infuse purpose into your message. You'll learn how to tell a really good story that people want to read. But fair warning, if you're a conversion copywriter, you're an online marketing guru, or you have a serious problem with laughing at yourself, you probably should not read this book. If the occasional curse word makes you cringe, then you DEFINITELY should not read this book. Consider yourself warned.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781544527383
Publisher:	Lioncrest Publishing
Publication date:	05/03/2022
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	266
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Sometimes you need an outsider to shake things up-Bobby Klinck definitely fits this bill. He's not classically trained as a copywriter, and no one has paid him to trick out a funnel. Since reimagining his approach to email marketing in 2018, Bobby's weekly emails have become cult favorites. Even when selling the most boring thing ever (legal templates), people begged for his promotional emails. Bobby lives in Washington, DC, where he spends his days annoying his business team and his nights and weekends annoying his wife and daughter.

Editorial Reviews

★ 2022-06-15
A plan to transform newsletter emails from annoying to alluring.

For his nonfiction debut, lawyer and entrepreneur Klinck sets himself a seemingly impossible task: to change marketing and business-related mass emails from an unpleasant part of a person’s workday to something that will actually generate results—and maybe even prompt a smile. The author, an entrepreneur and Harvard Law School graduate, wants to remodel his readers’ email marketing habits in order to teach them “how to find and cultivate raving fans, the kind of fans who will buy anything you have to sell.” The key understanding, according to Klinck, is that email marketing is just like any other kind of marketing, which explains the author’s decision to spend time on explaining the basics of that field before applying those basics to a new medium. One problem with the conventional wisdom surrounding email marketing, the author claims, is that the people offering it don’t understand the difference between marketing and selling. He describes marketing as “offering the right product to the right person at the right time, with the right message.” Selling isn’t about the customer’s needs, he asserts, whereas marketing is “relentlessly interested in the needs of the buyer.” After clarifying this key difference, Klinck dispenses practical tips; for instance, although he grants that an email marketer’s goal is to generate responses, he advises that one shouldn’t track reply statistics, so as to avoid becoming obsessed with such numbers. In short chapters, enlivened by occasional black-and-white personal photos to make specific points, he presents many insights into the new world of marketing.The author’s main point is that email marketing practices can only be effectively improved by infusing routine business emails with genuine personality, even if it means expressing opinions that part of your audience may not share. Klinck presents positive feedback for his approach that he’s received from others, but the best possible illustrations of his main point are the readability and approachability of this book. The author is a funny, vigorous writer, always ready with a cultural reference (with the movie The Princess Bride an apparent favorite), a joke, or a self-deprecating aside drawn from his own past. His core message is one of clear communication, and several of his sharpest points involve finding a personal voice for all kinds of marketing emails. “If you talk like Hemingway, write like Hemingway,” he writes. “If you talk like James Joyce…there’s something wrong with you. Knock it off.” (“Don’t write like the Queen of England,” he adds. “Unless you are the Queen of England.”) His advice on this score is often invaluable, as when he invites readers to record some of their own conversation, transcribe it, and look at “the cadence of how you actually talk when you’re talking to a friend. Try to adopt that in your writing.” Readers involved in any kind of marketing will also appreciate Klinck’s breezy optimism and insistence on viewing email recipients as real human beings: “They’re your friends, the people you serve.”

A book of lively and relatable marketing advice.

Kirkus Reviews