Don’t Believe the Hype: Email marketing, style guides & useful-ish advice

Abstract

Email marketing style guides are examples of professionals talking to professionals. The guides both promote and proscribe writing in a certain way. This article uses a corpus of email marketing texts to research how close actual email marketing texts adhere to the advice of style guides. The research shows that the style guides offer some advice that simply cannot be followed, such as avoiding adjectives and adverbs. On the other hand, the guides also offer advice which email marketers can adapt to suit their audience, such as being concise and conversational. Finally, the style guides offer guidance on “power words”, which, although meant to be helpful, is too vague to be useful to marketers. This advice instead works to promote the author of the style guide. The research in this article offers a practical approach that marketers can take when they are presented with advice on how to write better.