You will pay a lot for copy for an email marketing campaign or blog, whether sourced externally or from Jean in HR who can produce a nifty phrase. It takes time, not so much for the typing as research and reading. Any copy that is worth paying for will be reassuringly expensive. It makes sense to get every last bit of value from it.

Let’s follow five thousand words you’ve produced for an internal case-study, perhaps research on how your latest product will be received. It will contain information that you wish to keep confidential, but much of it will be more general, even material that is available to anyone with the incentive to research.

Once its initial function has been fulfilled, it’s normally filed in a folder and later archived. It has served its purpose. All that work for its 15 minutes of fame. However, recycling is not only for empty wine bottles.

If the information is of interest to you, it might be the same for your customers. For instance, a revised version, with the confidential information removed, and targeted towards your subscribers, could go into the e-newsletter. Your readers will be grateful that they have not had to indulge in time-consuming research. What goes into an e-newsletter needs to be valuable as well as interesting. 

Then there’s content marketing calling. Your blog might benefit from a further revised, and shortened edition, with bullet points abounding, and brief explanations of each underneath. Mention that ‘A fuller, and more comprehensive version of this article was published in our e-newsletter. To subscribe, please click here.’, with a link to a landing page. This should contain a box for subscribing to your e-newsletter and a clearly delineated box for subscribing to your email marketing list. Just think of all those leads. 

Don’t forget the benefits of guest blogging.
 
These two published articles will, while subtly differing, have the same purposes; to get the readers to subscribe to an email marketing list. Yet has more or less written itself.

Now comes the drastic modification. Copy used in email marketing should not be just cut and pasted from a website. The two have different functions and further, we can, finally, indulge in precise targeting. With email marketing, you have specified the product. 

The fewer words used in a marketing email that can persuasively convey the information the better. Cutting back to that which is strictly necessary is a skilled craft. People will scan an email, and every word needs to be focused on encouraging completion.

Similarities in wording between the marketing email and the blog can be helpful in case a subscriber reads both, but these should be limited to a short phrase or even a specific word. Cutting and cutting again can reduce a paragraph to nonsense so take care. It is easier to write articles than email marketing copy.

If you go external for your copy, ensure that the provider was aware of what use you will make of it, and is compensated accordingly.