I Wrote a Long-Form Email for a Startup!
I’ve been doing a lot of copywriting recently. I’ve done everything from blogs to email sequences to web copy! It has been way more fun than I expected. There was other type of copywriting that I wanted to try before I moved on to other aspects of marketing for a couple weeks.
In my interview with Ryan Healy, he talked about his experience as a freelance copywriter and exactly what he did. In his own words; “junk mail”. Companies pay him to write several pages of cold copy intended to be sent out in emails and snail-mail. This intrigued me, because I don’t have any experience with physical mail. I decided to take a crack at it.
The end result was… interesting.
Hello!
We’re on video calls a lot these days. We’re all familiar with online meetings, and how much of an energy suck they can be. We’re just not used to being a virtual head-in-a-box. But mmhmm wants to flip the script.
mmhmm is a video-enhancing app that transforms zoom fatigue into zoom fun. Born of necessity, built for enjoyment, mmhmm believes down to its core that the best way through uncertain times is finding small ways to make your life and the life of those around you better. And mmhmm’s creator, Phil, decided that one thing that he could change was zoom meetings.
He took many of the video enhancing abilities we already had, and made plenty of his own, and combined them into one app.
Zoom’s screen-sharing option is serviceable, but we can do so much better. Thus, mmhmm’s “over your shoulder” content sharing ability. Your face and your computer (or phone) screen can visible at the same time. It makes presenting and emphasizing points so much easier.
The fact that you can move your face around just makes all of this so much better. Not only that, you can make your face more or less transparent, as well as change your color. If your mind works like ours do, you’ll be role-playing a Star Wars Jedi ghost.
Of course, all of these features need an awesome backdrop. Don’t worry, we’ve got you covered. mmhmm has dozens of built-in backgrounds, some of them even move and loop! And compared to zooms glitchy backgrounds, mmhmm backgrounds glitch out much less frequently, leading to a better-focused audience.
We know all of this sounds awesome, but what if we told you that you could do all of this side-by-side with another person? Enter stage multi-player! mmhmm allows two people to control the same screen at the same time! No more worries about trying to keep the slides synced!
Now we don’t want to blow your brain completely, but one more feature that mmhmm offers is the ability for people to control a recording that you make with mmhmm. That’s right. Your recordings are now interactive, long past live. There’s a demo on mmhmm’s website that showcases that feature! You can skip around to different parts of the video with a click of a button, make the presenter semi-transparent, and move around the slides. Seriously, check it out.
We at mmhmm believe that everyone’s a performer. We all perform, and way more often than we sometimes realize. Let us help you perform at your very best.
If you’re interested in looking into what mmhmm has to offer, you can sign up for a walkthrough here. We’re tired of the mundane, and we bet you are too.
See you in the future.
Ben, Head Marketer
I’ve mentioned before that I sometimes struggle writing emails. This definitely held true. In the past when I’ve drafted cold copy, its difficult to start, and then the rest of it all comes to me in a rush. This project was tough from start to finish. And the first draft was in all honesty, bad. I’m not going to beat around the bush, it wasn’t good. But that’s why drafts exist. After I finished it, I took a break, got around to other work, and came back the next day.
I’ve recently found that one of the best ways to find mistakes is to read what you’ve written out loud. It brutally reveals your ugly errors, so you can fix them, and read it again. After a couple rounds of that, I opened up the doc for peer review.
I’m not a dramatic person, but peer review is God’s gift for writers. It genuinely levels up your work. After resolving a couple of comments, it was ready to be published.
Final Notes
The email isn’t perfect. No matter how I phrased things, it was a challenge to keep it engaging. However, the goal of this project wasn’t to make the ideal long-form email. The goal of this project was to experiment with other forms of marketing and see what I could create. I personally believe that snail-mail and long email marketing are dying out, but that didn’t keep me from using this opportunity to hone and sharpen my writing skills.
Sometimes, things don’t work out the way we wanted at first. But that’s the real world. And the real world is what separates the beginner from the pro. A beginner runs into trouble and gives up. A pro smiles when he hits obstacles and failures, because they know that always being perfect at something means you aren’t growing. And hooooo boy did I grow from this one!
So don’t give up. Get up, go for a walk, then sit right back down and keep creating. Find where you can grow, and rocket towards the sky. I’ll make sure to give you a friendly wave on the way up!
