OPENING SENTENCES

Opening Sentences that Sell
Georgina Laidlaw
2002-07-09

Ok, now that we've written our headline, let's develop the opening paragraph for our email communication.

As you'll recall, we're writing an email to a targeted audience -- customers of HealthyBods.com health club -- to sell them the spammiest product of all -- herbal Viagra. As we saw last week, to break through the email clutter and get a recipient's attention for a product like this is difficult -- but it can be done.

Today, we'll write our opening paragraph. To kick off, let's look at what we'll have to achieve with our opener. Then we'll look at some opening paragraphs from a few spam emails that have arrived in my inbox recently, and see what we think of them. Using the information we glean from this, we'll write our opener.

The Challenge: Usage Situation

The situation in which our user finds themselves when they open our email will be critical to how they receive the correspondence. The HealthyBods.com recipients might receive the email at work, at home, on their pda -- anywhere. A business-oriented mailer might be more convinced that their mailing list contained largely work email addresses, but HealthyBods.com could have either work or recreational addresses on their list.

This means that recipients could be under any number of pressures while they're wading through their inbox and (hopefully) reading the HealthyBods.com email:

• they might be about to go into an important meeting with their boss


• they could be researching late at night


• they might be emailing a friend


• they might be grocery shopping online

While we don't know what they'll be doing, we can be fairly sure that at least some recipients are likely to be multi-tasking online (as many people do when reading email).

This means one thing: our email opener has to have considerable power, and a giant hook, if it is to take the reader's attention away from everything else they're engaged with at that moment.

The power comes from the language we'll use and the structure of the communication itself.

The size and impact of the hook will depend on the benefit we base the communication upon, and how well we communicate the importance of this benefit to the HealthyBods.com clients.

Let's Try Some Spam

Let's look at a few openers from some spam I've received recently, and see how they shape up against the power and hook requirements we talked about above.