Sky Highlights

Sky Highlights is the weekly e-newsletter that goes out to all 3 million Sky TV customers in the UK and Republic of Ireland. It's their most-seen piece of communication - and since November 2010, I've been responsible for the words.

In keeping with the Sky brand, it's conversational and content-focussed. Recently, the main thrust has been to push Sky Atlantic, a new channel bringing the best US drama to a UK audience. But my copy's covered everything from Louie Spence's dance studio to Melvyn Bragg's arts show. It's a broad church alright.

The newsletter is produced by integrated agency Digital and Direct. I'll post an example as soon as I'm able, but chances are there's one lurking in an inbox near you...

Game and Sky - email optimisation

It's not glamorous, but optimising emails delivers demonstrable improvements to open rates and click-throughs. It's a great skill for a copywriter to have.

The best example I can give is from work I did as part of a Digital and Direct pitch to Game, the UK's leading specialist console game retailer. Their emails were in need of some TLC. I used my experience of producing high-volume, effective email campaigns to introduce a 'best practice' guide, covering:

• A personalised subject line
• Preloader copy for smart phones
• Getting a strong headline into email client preview panes
• Positioning the offer so it always sits above the fold
• Personalised body copy
• Integrated social media
• Introducing live text and alt text in case the reader has email images turned off
• Making sure every section presents a clickable call-to-action

We won the pitch - and I'll post the creative when it goes live.

I've also been part of the team responsible for developing new email templates for Sky - whatever message they want to convey, it'll hit your inbox in a pristine, perfectly crafted layout if nothing else.

PartyMarkets.com email campaign

When PartyGaming launched its financial trading platform PartyMarkets.com, I was given the job of writing an acquisition and conversion email campaign to attract new real-money traders.

It was a tough brief: the audience of extremely savvy traders was a hard-sell and the FSA's strict restrictions on marketing messages meant I had an extremely tight space to work in. But by making sure I communicated the brand values of trustworthiness and simplicity, I produced a strong set of emails which brought lots of new punters to the product.

The launch campaign also featured digital banners and a print brochure inserted into daily financial newspaper City AM.

Here's a taste of the campaign.

Acquisition mailer 1

More examples live below the fold.