I had a revealing Zoom meeting with my elder daughter on Sunday. She was telling me about her recently single best friend whom she had been helping most of Saturday to pick a likely man from an internet dating site. It’s not my normal source of email marketing research, but it was revealing. She said that after the first 15 minutes they decided to ignore any picture where the chap was carrying a snowboard. She said this reduced the number of possibles to a manageable figure quite quickly.

She asked, “What is it with men that they think women are looking for someone covered in snow, in a hideous insulated jacket and baggy trousers, standing somewhere totally inhospitable.” I think I was able to answer her question, despite not frequenting dating sites. Honest. It gives a pointer to what often goes wrong in the way items are presented in email marketing campaigns.

You are, hopefully, rather excited by your latest product and you want to convey your emotions to your subscribers. If you are thrilled, surely they must be as well. This ignores the fact that it is probable that they are not quite so immersed in whatever it is you are selling as you are, and it is probable they want something different to you from the product. By all means tell them how hard it was to get the supply at the right price. That is if you want to bore them. What you need to do is to get them to want the product as it relates to them given your description and the image. We’re back to online dating.

The chaps my daughter’s friend was looking at were unsuspecting, approaching middle age and the most exciting aspect of their lives is the thrill they get going on the side of a mountain at speed on a plank of wood. Who wouldn’t be thrilled? It turns out that many women aren’t, or at least that includes my daughter and her friend. What all these possibles covered in frozen water were not doing was putting themselves in the place of the people they were trying to attract and describing why they were the men of their dreams.

You probably worked out in your mind the type of man my daughter’s friend was looking for, at least in her mind. It’s easy enough. Ask yourself if you always do the same when creating copy for any email marketing campaign. It’s even easier. You have all the data on specific groups that you need, certainly enough to work out what would excite them, as that’s what’s email marketing software is for.

The next time you’re wondering what type of image you need for your latest email marketing campaign, think of what your subscribers are looking for rather than what you would pick as its main selling point. You need to catch the eye. You need to excite in a second. Picking an image that your competitors would use, for whatever reason, is probably not the way to go.