Saying, for instance, Northern France can be entrancing might influence a potential holiday maker, but how much better is it to have a Monet picture of his time in the area? ‘Water skiing is fun!’ is a bald statement of fact, but an image of a wave being pushed up by someone dressed in just a swimming costume will attract the eye and make the subscriber place themselves in the model’s position. That’s why we use images in email marketing.

However, you can show by words just as much as by pictures. An image will tend to stick in the mind longer than a particular word or phrase will, but, if designed correctly, copy can be more influential. They should work together.

In essence, images should be forgettable. We want a subscriber to move on to the important part of the marketing email; the click through. Your job is to pick words which generate an emotive response.

There can hardly be a writing course without an instructor saying, and more than once, ‘Show, don’t tell’. The same goes for email marketing copy. Instead of being bland by suggesting that your water skier is having fun, use a word which will entice by generating a response in the reader.

Work out what makes it fun and sum it up in a phrase or word. Thrilling, exciting, intoxicating, pumping, even arousing are all words which will inspire – actually inspiring is another good word – your subscriber to read on through the marketing email despite them explaining nothing at all. They are just words. But they create a response, and the reaction is subliminal, so extremely powerful, and difficult to combat using logic.

Although this comes with some difficulty from me as a writer; ignore grammatical norms. You are merely using a series of words to reinforce what the image is showing. If you dig out a thesaurus, you will find dozens of synonyms, some of which will be exactly what the subscribers in that particular split email marketing list will respond to. Don’t tell your readers how to feel, show them.