Background

I have been on Mark Firth’s email list for a little under a year. He is a well-respected B2B marketing consultant. However, his emails do land in my Promo tab time and again. But all is not lost. His emails have a lot of going for them and it’ll be fun to critique them—as much as I can—here. He obviously knows what he’s doing marketing-wise and copy-wise. But let’s have some fun with this email anyway.

Here is an email I received from Mark about ten hours ago on November 12, 2024.

Strengths

• Mark starts off the email in a personal way by inserting my first name in the greeting.

• He also starts off with a personal story from his life: This weekend we watched a movie…

• The tone is conversational throughout which helps the reader connect and amps up the readability.

• He connects the story of watching the movie to the current issue at hand in the email—the importance of family and finding time to spend with them and building a business which allows him to have that family time.

• He draws on the pain point of many business owners—following conventional advice but not getting the desired results.

• He gives detailed examples of the advice the business owners may be hearing and following that’s just plain not working—posting constantly on LinkedIn or spending a surplus of hours working.

• He introduces his solution to this common conundrum—his Strategic Visibility System.

• He uses specific, detailed numbers to show the benefits of his system—he’s made over $3.5 million using it.

• He mentions the famous name—Tony Robbins—to add credibility to his offer.

• Mark uses FOMO (fear of missing out) to present his offer—there are limited seats available, it’s a first-time offer, and early-bird access is available right now.

• Mark makes the offer extra special by stating that the LinkedIn templates are previously ‘unreleased.’

• He has a clear CTA—”Register here.’

• And he signs it with his first name, Mark.

Weaknesses

• Well, Mark is a marketing expert, so this section will be unsurprisingly short.

• I’d like to see a closer tie in to the subject line with the body of the email. He could connect the two ideas of getting Tony’s attention with his strategic visibility system in a more powerful way.

• I’d also like to see more specific benefits of his system to entice the reader to want to know more.

• Mark isn’t making use of an interesting, inviting or moving favicon in front of his sender name. (For example, my favicon is a GIF of waves rolling onto a beach—very eye catching in someone’s overly cluttered inbox)

• I’m going to be picky about his (lack of) use of periods at the end of his sentences. I get that this is the latest trend in email. However, I’m not buying into it. I suggest we don’t go to that extent of informality in our emails and we keep ending punctuation. For all that’s good in the world, let’s keep periods. Period.

If you’re a business owner and have an email list with over 1,000 subscribers, contact me at nancy@nancybushagency.com if you’d like help avoiding the email mistakes you read about here.