6 Tips for Writing More Effective Email Copy
In a fast-paced world, it’s important to make every decision count. The subject lines, headlines, content, and call to action of the emails you send out can have a serious impact on your marketing campaign.
In this article, you will learn six tips on creating better email campaigns. These tips will help you think about your options and figure out which ones would be most likely to lead you in the right direction.
In a nutshell, you will learn how to write a successful promotional email. How it is important to have the right balance of text and images. How you can use both of these elements strategically by placing your text where you want the reader to look first and then adding in your call-to-action button… And last, how you encourage them to read everything you have to say!
Email marketing is the most effective digital marketing campaign around because it allows you to engage customers. According to the Direct Marketing Association, email marketing is responsible for $67 billion of revenue every year.
Despite of the success of this type of digital promotion, an email with poor copy will fail. What makes good copy? The answer to this question depends on your brand messaging and target audience.
But to get your customers’ attention, it is important to use the content that will appeal to them. And the way to do it is by using best practices for writing email copy.
So, how can you improve your emails?
1. Keep things short and sweet
Studies have shown that people prefer brief content to long ones. As a rule of thumb, don’t use more than four sentences! And if you are struggling to convey your message in this small space, you have a problem with your message.
Instead of putting yourself in a tough spot, break things down into bullet points to create quick and easy content. Bullet points are great for highlighting the key points of your email that will encourage your customers to read everything from one sentence to two paragraphs!
2. Make it personal
One of the best ways to improve your email is to make it personal. Personalization is a powerful tool in marketing and sales because it addresses customers’ needs and makes them feel special.
Customer persona
In order to do this, you need to take into consideration your target audience and their interests and behaviors. Creating a customer/buyer persona can help you do this.
A customer persona is a fictional character created for your business. It encompasses everything that defines your target audience, including their demographics and psychographics. This includes everything from age to income level, education to hobbies, and interests/activities in their spare time.
Use the reader’s first name
Use the reader’s first name as a way of creating a personal connection between them and your company. You can use this as a title or as one of the first lines of the email. Create a bond by calling them by their name and signing off with your own.
Use emotion-laden language
Studies show that the use of specific words can have an emotional impact.
The language choice can affect the emotionality:
- emotion words need to be considered as a separate class of words in the mental lexicon
- conceptual representations: emotion concepts can vary across languages
- emotionality is an important feature of the bilingual lexicon, where different languages and word types display different levels of emotionality.
Examples of emotion-laden language:
- You will fall in love with our new product!
- Discover the shocking truth about what’s really going on here.
- Hurry before it all vanishes.
- Are you going to let this opportunity slip away?
Use data
Take a look at your data and the data of your readers. With the help of statistics and even heat maps, you will see where visitors are most likely to click on your campaign and what works best. Which call-to-actions are clicked most quickly, or which text they tend to read. This will give you an idea of what information they want and how it should be presented to give your email campaign the best shot and boost its ROI.
3. How to Use Text and Images Strategically for Your Email
In marketing, the key to a successful promotion is getting your readers’ attention. This can be done by using text and images strategically in your email. Just as you would place the most important information at the top of a page or write a catchy headline for an article, you want to catch the reader’s eye with well-placed appealing content.
You can use both of these elements strategically by placing your text where you want the reader to look first. If you put it above the fold, they are more likely to read all of what you have written and scroll down if necessary. This is one of the most common ways used to write emails as it ensures that your customers start off the email by reading your most important content.
The layout of an email can make or break its success, which is why it’s so important to be strategic with the order of images and text. To help you, there are many tools available online including Canva.com ‘s Image Library. They bought Pixabay, so they should have an image for about everything you can think of. This library offers a variety of free downloadable images that can give your email a little edge.
4. Write a Call-to-Action that fits the occasion
Email marketing is just like any other form of marketing in that it’s essential to include a call-to-action (CTA).
If you don’t include one, then the email will feel incomplete. So what exactly makes for a good CTA?
An effective custom call-to-action should be clear, concise, and easy to spot. Most professionals recommend creating a compelling CTA that entices your readers to click it while minimizing distractions so they read other parts of the email. It should also match the goal of your campaign.
Keep it interactive
Don’t just tell customers what you’re selling – give them a reason to buy! In addition, if your readers have any questions or concerns, address those as well. If they have questions about your product or services, you can use those as a call-to-action in your email. This will help guide them to the next step you want them to take, whether it’s purchasing your product or service, signing up for your newsletter or reading more on your blog.
Use Buttons
Use buttons rather than text links. It has been discovered that call-to-action buttons have an impact on the readers’ actions. If your CTA is text-based rather than a button, it’s less likely to be clicked.
Get to the Point
An effective email campaign will curl around the point you want to make and then bring you back to that point again toward the end of the message. Avoid making too many points or straying away from the main message.
5. How to Write Email Subject Lines that Get Opened
When writing an email subject line, it is important to keep in mind that every word counts. A successful marketing campaign must deliver an enticing subject line to encourage your customers to open the email and read its contents. Here are a few tips to help you brainstorm for that perfect subject line:
Use your recipient list
If you have a specific group of customers in mind, use data from your customer relationship management (CRM) system to find out which words they most commonly use or what interests them. This will help you tailor your email so it appeals to the right audience.
Eliminate unnecessary words
One of the most overlooked tips for writing subject lines is to keep your sentences as succinct as possible. Yes… Don’t use big words, but KISS it. Keep it short and simple.
ex: Rather than write, “Open the attached file to view the new product catalogue” , it’s more effective to simply say: “Check out our new products”.
Mention specific words like ‘New’, ‘Special’, ‘Offer’ and ‘FREE’
Advertising guru David Ogilvy once said that the best time to use the word ‘free’ is in conjunction with ‘offer.’ This is because most people assume something is free when it really isn’t. A simple word like ‘offer’ will get your subject line across without creating any misunderstandings with the customer.
Be Personal
Personalizing your subject lines can be effective in reaping more opens. Some companies achieved up to a 20% increase in personalized email campaigns compared to no personalization at all. Although you are sending out an email message on behalf of your company, you can make it seem like this is not the case by using a salutation such as ‘Hey’ or ‘Hi’ and even the first name in the subject.
6. Test Your Emails
Your email copy should be tested before it goes out to your list of contacts. You can do this by creating an A/B test, which includes establishing two different messages and distributing them to a subset of your recipients. Then you can compare how each subject line performs – which gets the higher open rate, for example. Ultimately, you’re testing your email copy to see if it is optimized enough to get more clicks and conversions.
After running many tests on my own emails (before I understood what I was doing), I found that direct phrasing like “How to…” or “Are You Ready?” or “Do this to…” work so well if you are not an established brand.
Sometimes, The Headline Is All You Need
The most important aspect of your email copy might actually be the headline, which tells the recipient what they will be reading about. If you intrigue them right away with a compelling headline, there is no need to include much more text. You can even consider including one sentence as your headline and then attaching useful resources to the end of the email that will give them more information on what you’re writing about.
So if you are on a timeline and need to pick what to test, you should focus on the subject and headlines.
Concluding…
Email marketing is a great way to get your business in front of potential customers. However, if you’re not careful about how you word your subject line or what content you include, then all that hard work might go to waste.
Luckily for you, we’ve outlined the 6 best practices for writing email copy so it converts well and gets more opens without too much effort!
We hope these tips will help make sure your next campaign goes off without a hitch.
And don’t forget: If you want some extra guidance on how to optimize your emails even further, our team would love take care of everything from start-to-finish while helping drive traffic into the funnel with SEO optimization tactics like keyword research and link building strategies. Which one of these six
