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Narrative:

Context

During my summer 2021 Social Media/Marketing Internship with Discover Books, each of the three interns took one turn writing an email newsletter for the company using the program SendinBlue. My supervisor taught all of us to write in a variety of styles throughout the internship, but since the email campaign has the largest audience and is therefore the most important for driving sales, we were taught this genre of marketing communication last, after we had become comfortable with press releases and blog posts. Each of Discover Books’ email campaigns has a book-related theme that features in the body of the message and a related coupon code. For my theme, I chose to use my blog post from earlier that same week in order to direct traffic to the blog, in addition to helping with sales for the books that I featured.

Rhetorical Decisions

    The most important part of the writing process for my email campaign was that I had to condense the information in my blog post and change my style of writing from informative to persuasive to get people to engage with the entire message. My blog post simply told readers what each book was about and what each author’s life had entailed before, during, and after they wrote their most famous works. However, in order to gain traction with my coupon code, I had to tell readers why the books and authors I featured would interest them. I strategically titled the campaign “Discover Books by Authors with July Birthdays” to reflect both the company as a whole and the blog post. I used SendInBlue’s programming to put the benefit of the coupon code in a place where recipients would see it, but they would have to open the email to access the code itself. I wrote in a more casual tone than I did with my blog post to entice more people to read the message and included many hyperlinks to products that people could click on and shop throughout the body copy. I established pathos by including the facts I thought were most exciting or surprising about each author, created consistency by using the same opening image in the campaign as I did in the blog post, and used kairos to my advantage by sending the email two days after the publication of the blog post.

Reflection

    When my supervisor reviewed the analytics of the campaign with me at the end of the week, we discovered that my email’s open rate was about average for campaigns by Discover Books, but the click rate for my hyperlinks was higher than usual, and books by the authors that I mentioned sold especially well in the 48 hours after I sent the email. Therefore, we concluded that the email campaign, and the persuasive writing of the message in particular, was effective. I also enjoyed the process of converting a descriptive/informative piece of writing into a persuasive one, and I feel more prepared to write email campaigns in the future as many communications/professional writing jobs involve sending marketing emails.