Could indenting make subject lines stand out?

I spent part of this morning working on an article about best practices for responsive emails in the pharmaceutical industry, a sort of 101 for pharma marketers. One section dealt with optimizing headlines. Then I saw this in my inbox:

The indented subject line really stood out in the list of emails, and I thought, how clever! But then I clicked on the email and realized that it wasn't a clever indent, it was emojis from which Gmail was apparently saving me. After having "read" the email, the emojis appeared in the subject line.

My spam folder shows me that emails with emoji in the subject line are usually screened, but I must have told Gmail that Ads of the World mail isn't junk. It made me wonder, though, about actually just using spaces in the subject line to indent it and make it stand out. As soon as I get my MailChimp account set up, I'm going to give it a try.

Verbiage need not apply.

I love the word "verbiage" because I'm a bit off and I tend to like confusing things.

"Verbiage" is often misused. My coworkers might say "maybe Heidi can just write some verbiage," but they don't want me to craft "writing that contains too many words or that uses words that are more difficult than necessary" (thanks, Merriam-Webster). They actually mean "maybe Heidi can just write a short, concise blurb."

And, "verbiage" sounds like something it's not. The word isn't related to verbs at all; Merriam-Webster gives its origin as being from the Middle French verbier, "to chatter," and further back, from the Old French werbler, "to trill."

I also like it because it always brings to mind "roughage" and "foliage," so I get a mental image of a chewy, leafy word-wad. It's just fun.

Better in Absentia

More than I love the word, I love that verbiage appears (in name or fact) absolutely nowhere on Zuli's lovely website.

What does appear here are verbs--a lot of them. In the hero copy alone, including the CTA, we have five verbs out of 27 words total. Yes, 18.5% of the copy is verbs. That's effective.

They're great verbs, too: simple and imperative. Meet. Connect. Control. Enable. Shop. If you just read the verbs (and I believe they resonate more with readers than other words), you already get the message. Now, that's doing it right.

Selling to zombies.

Is it wise to imply your customers, or their teams, are dead?

The people even look like zombies--well, except for the robot. This headline doesn't mean much, unless the customer's team IS, in fact, dead. It's a waste of words. "Bring your team together," although equally un-snappy, is so much stronger.

The Subhead Is Dead, Long Live the Subhead

The subhead is as dead as the team here. It's not a complete sentence, so why does it get a period? It's not a complete sentence because it doesn't contain any verbs, but verbs are what sell. How about this:

"Chat in groups or privately. Share files. Work seamlessly."

Bam.

Selling ash with a story.

I learned about storytelling as an integral part of marketing the summer after Mt. St. Helens blew. My little brother and I were in Michigan visiting our grandparents, and somehow we wound up with a little stand in front of a Baskin-Robbins, selling little vials of ash for a dollar each.

When a man accused us of tipping our parents’ ashtrays into the vials in lieu of real volcanic ash, I was outraged. By the time I finished telling about the sky-ripping crack we’d heard all the way to the Oregon Coast and the ash-covered Jungle Gym in our back yard, the man had become a customer—and we’d gathered a crowd. We sold out of ash and I learned two things about storytelling: that it’s an incredibly powerful means of product marketing, and that I wanted to do it.

(The third thing about storytelling, which I learned much later, is that it’s a clichéd term. But like any of Shakespeare’s famous quips, it’s become cliché because it’s an accurate descriptor.)

A product’s story, or the story of the brand behind it, creates a connection. For the doubting Thomas in front of that Ann Arbor Baskin-Robbins, the detail and emotion of my recollections validated the authenticity of the ash. For a housewife buying laundry detergent, a product or brand story can be equally important. Its purpose isn’t to convince her there’s actual detergent in the jug; it’s to convince her that the detergent will work and is the right choice for her family.

Brands go about telling their stories, and their products’ stories, in very different ways with varying degrees of effectiveness. A large part of the story is big-picture: big concepts, like integrity, or quality, or comfort. But a large part of storytelling is in the details, from design decisions to word choice. To be truly effective, marketing must not only choose the right concepts but also make sure that the details back up and pay off those concepts.

Taglines: a punctuation parable.

“I was working on the proof of one of my poems all the morning, and took out a comma. In the afternoon I put it back again.”--Oscar Wilde

Punctuation is important. Grandma, especially, thinks so.

I started out writing a post about Whirlpool’s brilliantly-punctuated new tagline: the beauty of the comma placement; the deliberate lack of period that gives the phrase a double meaning.

Three choices make this phrase wonderful. 

1. The choice to make "every day" two words, rather than one, makes "every" an adjective that modifies "day," rather than "everyday" an adjective that modifies "care." It's deliberately not "everyday care."
2. The choice to use a comma puts this phrase in the imperative mood, making "care" a commanding action verb. (Linguistics Girl has a great post explaining this.)
3. The choice not to use a period, which goes a long way toward reversing the grammatical effect of the first two choices, giving the phrase two meanings at once. Without a period, the tagline isn't wholly a statement. It can do double duty, conveying both "everyday care" and "every day, care." If it had a period, the imperative mood would be much stronger, leaving the "everyday care" message in the dust.

The new campaign is about the everyday care that families give one another, and also implies the kind of care Whirlpool appliances give to our laundry and dishes. (Whirlpool's new Every Day Care Project web page and supporting assets do a wonderful job of conveying this sense.) The double meaning of the tagline is brilliant. It reminds me of another tagline's precise word and punctuation choices.

Grammar Girl has a great discussion of the grammatical implications of the use of "different," rather than "differently," in this famous Apple slogan. The use of "different" allows the phrase to mean both "think about different kinds of computers" and "think in a different way." 

A colon punctuating this phrase, "Think: different" would have emphasized the first meaning, "think about different computers." Without the period at the end, the slogan would lose some of the weight of the imperative mood; it wouldn't be as strong a command. As it is, the phrase conveys both meanings beautifully.

It was my intention to praise Whirlpool, and their agency, for this carefully-wrought phrase, perfectly punctuated to pack in double meaning.

But when I went on Whirlpool's web site to take a screen shot of the tagline, I found it used WITH A PERIOD.

Come on, Whirlpool. Make up your mind. Every day, care ... about punctuation. 

Let's Eat, Grandma image thanks to Modern Austen.


There are other ways to make taglines work harder. See How to Make Words Do More Work.

Don't do it! How to avoid link soup & ice cream bars.

Ever go to the grocery store when you're hungry? If you're like me, you wind up spending a fortune and taking home more food than you can eat, plus not fewer than three calorie-laden impulse-buy snacks.

Basically, you want it all.

Your only choice, as you careen out of the parking lot with your trunkful of groceries, is to snarf down the chocolate, go home, and flounder around in misery because you still don't have anything for dinner.*

Guess who else wants it all? 

Results-starved marketing managers. Look, when you're hungry, stay away from the grocery store.** When you're desperate for results, stay away from writing creative briefs for landing pages. Stay away from evaluating first-round landing page designs. Stay away from the phrase "can we add a link here?" Avoid that phrase like the plague.

Just as it's not particularly helpful, when you just need one simple meal, to have a trunk full of Trader Joe's Bite-Size Everything Crackers and the family-pack of ribs and two whole chickens and a dozen pears and a watermelon and a mini-wheel of Président Brie and some Haagen-Das bars, it's likewise not real helpful to wind up with a landing page containing half a dozen links.

You want results, but users want to know what to do. When faced with buttons here, buttons there, and a few text links thrown in "just in case they want to register for the site right now," they're likely to panic.

Users do not want link soup. They want one single, perfect, delicious link to click. Do yourself a favor and give it to them.

*P.S. You also forgot the coffee and your spouse is going to be pissed.

**Check out The Oatmeal's cartoon about the "minor differences" between grocery shopping when full and grocery shopping when hungry.

Astute Alliteration is Always Apropos

I had a nice lunch with my husband at our favorite dive bar, The Grand Avenue Alehouse. The plucky barkeep, Pootie (don't ask), she of the outrageously loud and contagious laugh, served my Manny's Pale Ale on a Fat Tire coaster.

Collateral materials such as beer-branded coasters are a great way to get your brand's name in front of consumers at the exact right time, and this Fat Tire coaster was one of the best I've ever seen.

This is a great line of copy, for a number of reasons:

• It's brief and therefore easy to remember. 
• It uses both alliteration and consonance* so that it rolls off the tongue. (By design or happy accident--I'd guess a combination of both--these poetic devices are repeated in ever other phrase appearing on this coaster: tire and amber are consonant; amber and ale are alliterative; etc.)
• It pokes a little fun of wine pairing, emphasizing the simplicity and sociability of beer.

You may have noticed that this coaster isn't square or circular, as most are. That's because it's not just a coaster; it doubles as a postcard.

There; that's what this annoyingly alliterative, copiously consonant copywriter calls marvelous marketing.



*Whereas alliteration is a repeated sound at the beginning of two or more words, such as pairs and people, well and with, consonance is a repeated consonant sound within a word (called an interior sound), such as the L sound in well and people. (FYI, assonance is a repeated interior vowel sound, such as the long A in rain, Spain, main, and plain.)