More clients, more consistently, trailblazing women in advertising & copy resource of the week

Hello, my friend. Welcome to Issue #8 of The Subhead, a bi-weekly newsletter about copywriting, marketing & media, and a look at some of the women who make it great.

Here’s what’s on deck in today’s edition:

· Get More Clients, More Consistently with an Educational Email Course

· Trailblazing women in advertising: Jane Maas

· Copy Resource of the Week: 300+ Best Email Subject Lines' Collection to Increase Your Email Open Rates

· Mental Health Moment

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Welcome to 2024!

Did you survive the holidays?

As much as I enjoy down time and leisurely mornings to linger over coffee and read a good book, I’m thoroughly ready to get back into work mode.

Normally, I’d be putting the finishing touches on my 1Q 2024 plan right about now, but so far, I haven’t done much more than consider whether I even want to create a detailed plan … or a loose plan, or gasp … no plan at all.

Now, I am most definitely a planner, so the above waffling is highly unusual for me, but I do have some notes in the Notes app on my iPhone for this month at least … and that is the extent of it.

How about you? Are you a planner? A goal-and-benchmarks setter? Or more of a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants person when it comes to monthly/quarterly/yearly planning?

I wrote a little bit more about this on LinkedIn here if you want to check it out. Let’s connect there if we’re not already!

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More clients, more consistently: Here’s the tale of how I helped a service provider increase her monthly bookings with an educational email course.

In this blog post, I share the story of a client who hired me to write an email sequence, with the goal of getting more sessions booked, more consistently, for her photography business.

Spoiler alert: It worked!

But first we had to figure out what specific hesitations potential clients had to booking a session (and it wasn’t the normal stuff, like price), so these hesitations could be addressed persuasively in the email course.

Luckily, my client had collected lots of voice of customer data (something we should all do at every opportunity!), which we used to determine the beliefs that needed to be dispelled so that potential clients would be eager to move forward.

Read all about it here.

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Trailblazing women in advertising: Jane Maas

“Jane Maas, who, though neither mad nor a man, became a trailblazer in the testosterone-driven advertising industry of the 1960s and ’70s, died on Friday in Mount Pleasant, S.C. She was 86.”

That’s the first line of Jane Maas’ obituary from the New York Times in November 2018.

Though I’ve worked in two advertising agencies over the course of my career, somehow, I’d never heard of Jane Maas until a few years ago, after I hung out my shingle as a freelance copywriter.

It’s said that the character of Peggy Olson from the show Mad Men was based on Jane Maas.

(It’s also said that Peggy Olson was based on Mary Wells Lawrence, the first woman to lead her own ad agency in the Mad Men era, and also on copywriter, Shirley Polykoff, who came up with the Clairol tagline, “Does she…or doesn’t she? Hair color so natural only her hairdresser knows for sure.” Peggy Olson could have been based on any of these pioneers. But I digress.)

Career highlights

Maas started out as a junior copywriter at the famed Ogilvy and Mather in 1964, a well-known agency doing work for some of the most recognizable brands in the world to this day. She eventually became only the second woman to be promoted to vice president at the agency.

(You’ve probably heard of Ogilvy and Mather – one of the agency’s founders, David Ogilvy, is known as the “Father of Advertising,” and created the ultra-famous headline, "At 60 miles an hour the loudest noise in the new Rolls-Royce comes from the electric clock.”)

Over the course of her career, Maas was also a creative director at the agency Wells Rich & Greene, president at agency Earle Palmer Browne, and ran her own agency.

She was credited with shepherding the wildly successful tourism campaign, “I Love New York,” while at Wells Rich & Greene in the 1970s. The campaign featured an original song, tv commercials, bumper stickers, coffee mugs and more. (You can still find some of the original commercials on YouTube. Fun!)

Most of us have seen the iconic “I ♥New York” logo that was created as part of the campaign many times over (designed by graphic designer Milton Glaser in 1976).

What a trailblazer Maas was. Back in those days, female copywriters were few and far between, often working as one of only seven or eight total in an agency with dozens of male copywriters.

That was back when female copywriters were kept off liquor and automotive accounts, and relegated to food, detergent, coffee and other household categories. Yikes.

Which brings me to my favorite bit from the Times obituary:

“Interviewed by Advertising Age in 2014, Ms. Maas recalled creating one commercial in which an actress rhapsodizes about how much her husband enjoyed the coffee she had lovingly brewed for him. ‘I can’t believe I wrote that drivel,’ she said.”

Maas wrote about her career in two books, Adventures of an Advertising Woman (1986), and Mad Women: The Other Side of Life on Madison Avenue in the ‘60s and Beyond (2012). She also co-wrote How to Advertise: Building Brands and Businesses in the New Marketing World (1976), with Kenneth Roman, considered an industry classic.

If you’re interested in learning more about Jane Maas, you can check out three of the dozen or so articles I read to write the above, here, here, and here.

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Copy Resource of the Week

This week’s copy resource is all about email subject lines.

If you have an email list or newsletter, then you know how important subject lines are. Because if your subject line doesn’t grab your subscriber’s attention, the email won’t get opened, and it won’t matter how brilliant or life-altering the email body copy is. ☹

👉 And that means, getting good at writing email subject lines is one of the best copy skills to master.

This article from email service provider SendX can help you do just that. Check out all the high-converting email subject lines here, and use them as inspiration to start brainstorming your own masterpieces:

300+ Best Email Subject Lines' Collection to Increase Your Email Open Rates

It’s broken down by category, so whether you want to use a funny subject line, a question subject line, a curiosity-driven subject line, a social proof subject line or something else, you’re covered.

And you’ll see SLs from well-known brands here (many who, by the way, test their SLs, so if they’re using it, you know it works – at least for their audience).

Enjoy!

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Mental Health Moment

I know the term “self-help” may induce eye rolls, but this list of “15 Self-Help Books People Actually Swear By” shares some really great suggestions.

I’ve read five of the books on this list, and can recommend every one of the five. I won’t bore with which five those are, but if you want to know, hit reply and ask, and I’ll share. 😊

Check out the list here.

Okey doke, that’s all for this week, my friends.

I wish you a very Happy New Year!! ✨✨✨

Be well. Stay curious. See you again in two weeks, on January 28.

Warmly,

Kimberly