Sell Like Crazy

part of its success. I mean, honestly... How often do you get an email from

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the president, just saying ‘Hey’? And the better question is, who wouldn’t
open it?
That wasn’t the only unusual email that played an integral role in Obama
winning re-election. Other subject lines included, ‘Join me for dinner?’ ‘It’s
officially over’, ‘It doesn’t have to be this way’, or just ‘Wow’.
All very personal, and they relied heavily on curiosity and intrigue to get
the open. The Obama campaign raised $690 million online. The majority of
it came from the fundraising emails that peppered inboxes for a two-year
period. They employed a team of 20 writers and a sophisticated analytics
system to measure and improve their effectiveness.
The campaign would test multiple drafts and subject lines – often as many
as 18 variations – before picking a winner to send out to tens of millions of
subscribers.
The lessons from Obama’s master email marketing campaigns aren’t just a
recipe for politics or making money, but for winning eyeballs in the brutal
death match to grab your attention in the inbox.
Compare that to all those commercial messages, coupons, and sales emails
you get. How many of those do you open? One out of every ten? Or worse,
do they just sit and rot in your spam folder?
What’s the difference? And how can you write emails that always get
opened? That’s what we’re covering in this section.
Think about your email inbox for a moment. When you fire it up for the
first time every day, what do you do?
Check, check, check, check, check... Delete!
You delete everything that appears to be promotional or commercial and
that you know is safe to delete. Why is it safe to delete those emails?
Because you know, from reading them in the past, that they are
promotional, commercial, and generally speaking, a complete waste of your
time.

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Based on years of experience, it’s my contention that everybody scans their
inbox categorising emails into two distinct groups: