When it comes to reaching customers, growing brand awareness, and ultimately driving more sales, email marketing is one of the most effective channels at your disposal. The medium for transmitting this is all well and good, but it most certainly is the message. Good copywriting is one of the most important elements in the success or failure of your email campaigns.
You can never know your audience too well. This is the information that allows you to structure messages that connect, resonate, build trust and drive action. This post is going to show you how to write email copy that gets attention, and sells prospects into customers.
Twelve solid tips on how to write better emails will be covered in the following sections. Supported with examples, these tactics will go a long way in helping you to have compelling subject lines, ensuring a consistent brand, utilizing personalization, delivering strong calls-to-action, and other such features of a winning report. By using these tactics, you can improve email marketing and get better results. Now, let’s set sail on a journey toward becoming copywriting rockstars for email!
Understanding the Basics of Copywriting
Copywriting is the craft of writing persuasive words with the intent of selling something, most commonly a product or a service, but sometimes you could be selling a whole business, a set of ideas, or even something else.
The power of email marketing copywriting is in expressing yourself in a way that resonates with your reader (it really is about them not you), so that you’re speaking to their emotional side, know what they need, want, what they’re struggling with, and deliver a solution to their problems that they perceive to be valuable. To achieve this, you have to appeal to your audience personally, creating a message that urges the action you want by leading them there through their own experiences — not yours.
1. Know Your Audience
Understanding your audience is the first step in a successful email marketing strategy. In your emails, personalize your content in a way that will speak to your target market’s wants, desires and pain points. For example, let’s look at the real-world case of Spotify. They are famous for their hyper personalized email campaigns. Spotify relies on the data about users’ music listening to personalize emails that recommend new music related to what users have been playing or announce the arrival of a new release from a favorite artist. They know all too well what their audience wants, and it has translated into high open rates and solid reader engagement.
2. Write a Compelling Subject Line
A subject line title of your email is the first thing a contact sees, and can decide whether or not they open. It’s a teaser designed to raise interest, create intrigue and communicate the benefit of opening the email. Here are a few tips:
- Short is sweet: A headline should be just a few words, so try to keep it at around 50 characters or fewer.
- Employing active language: This instills urgency and drives the reader to respond.
- Customise when you can: using the customer’s name or specific details grabs further attention.
For example, consider these two subject lines from the popular fitness app MyFitnessPal:
- Subject line 1: “Our Recent Blog Posts.”
- Subject Line 2: “Sarah, Get to Your Body Goals Even Quicker With These 86 Ways!”
The latter stands out. It’s personal, provides a clear benefit, and it motivates readers to open their emails to find out what tips will help them reach their fitness goals faster!
Source: Pexels
3. Create a Strong Opening
Your email subject line is your literary hook. If a compelling subject line gets them to open the email, an interesting opening line keeps them reading. Here’s how to do it:
- Go ahead and speak directly to the reader to produce that personal touch.
- Put the benefit, or value proposition in the front to hook interest.
- Ask a question or share an interesting statistic to create intrigue.
Take AirBnb, for example: “Discover a place you’ll love to live. New, one-of-a-kind homes go up for sale every day.” This lead embodies the reader’s quest for one of a kind experiences and whets the appetite for the new listings.
4. Write Concise and Clear Content
When it comes to email copywriting, here are a few more things you ought to know: Short and sweet When it comes to email, brevity indeed counts its meows. Here are some tips:
- Avoid jargon and complicated language. Use simple, everyday words.
- Chunk the text into short paragraphs or lists to make it easy to scan.
- Trim unnecessary words; stick to the facts.
Let’s consider an example for a before-and-after case to understand this more:
Before: “We are over the moon to share that our annual mega sale is here and this year, you get a cornucopia of exclusive discounts on our vast product line that you so adore.”
After: “Our annual sale is here! Get special discount for all items now.”
The new copy is crisp and clean and gets to the point so the reader will be entertained.
5. Use personalization
Email marketing personalization is more than just using a name when addressing recipients; it’s about serving them content that’s relevant to their personal tastes, interests and activities with your brand. Personalized emails can produce 6 times higher transaction rates, according to statistics. You can personalize email copy by dividing your audience based on their behaviour, interests and demographic data, and customise the message likewise.
For example, Amazon is great in personalization by giving product recommendation based on previous purchase or viewed items. A representative email would say, “John, given your visit with us recently, these might be interesting products for you …” It’s this level of finely targeted specificity that adds in part to Amazon’s incredible conversion rates.
6. Craft a Strong Call-to-Action (CTA)
Your CTA is probably the most important element of your email. It guides the reader to do what you want them to do, whether that is purchasing, signing up for a webinar, or downloading an e-book. Here are a few suggestions on how to write your own effective call to action:
Make it action-based: Strong verbs — Buy, Register, Download.
Inspire a sense of urgency: Words such as “Limited Time Offer” or “Register Now” can result in an immediate response.
Be brief, but clear: Your CTA should be short, but it should clearly clarify what the reader will get.
Take 2 CTAs from an imaginary email campaign for example:
CTA 1: “Click Here”
CTA 2: Download Your Free E-Book Now
CTA 2 is obviously working better. It is action-oriented, it instills a sense of urgency in the reader and it tells the reader what they will receive in explicit terms – all of which results in being much more likely to convert.
7. Utilize Storytelling
Marketing: Using the Power of Storytelling It has the power to play with readers’ emotions which can be a more effective technique of making readers remember, think and act on your message. Leverage case studies, client testimonials and anecdotes about your business to make your emails a compelling story. Remember, a story cannot be engaging unless it is applicable to the reader and its telling is genuine and humane.
One great example is TOMS, where for every pair of shoes they sell, they donate a pair to a child who needs them. Their emails often share stories about the people they’ve impacted, and that emotion added to their brand voice.
8. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice
A uniform brand voice is paramount in establishing recognition and trust among your audience. No matter if you are professional, friendly, quirky, or motivational in your brand voice, that should be the case with your emails as well. And thus you should do the same — with the words you use, the tone you adopt, the style in which you write, and the sorts of content you share.
One brand who does this very well is Mailchimp. Their company voice is fun, friendly, and just a little irreverent. Whether it’s in your email, your website copy, or on social media, you know the moment you read that content that it’s Mailchimp, meaning you’re creating a strong brand identity.
9. Leverage Social Proof
Social proof is such a powerful psychological trigger with the potential to skyrocket conversion rates. You want them to show off glowing reviews, testimonials, case studies, or how many happy customers they have. You can use social proof in your Email by showcasing Testimonials from customers, user generated content or achievements.
For instance, a brand NY-designed clothing brand Everlane promoted a feature of customer reviews with ratings for their best selling product in an email. It served to provide potential customers piece of mind about the quality of the product resulting in a large spike in click-through rates and conversions.
10. Use A/B Testing
A/B testing is just a process of comparing two versions of an email to see which one works best. It’s priceless in fine-tuning your email campaigns and ramping up your conversion rates. You can experiment with different parts of your email copy like subject lines, CTAs, personalization or how long your content is.
For instance, Obama’s 2012 presidential campaign raised an additional $60 million using A/B testing. They tested multiple elements of their email campaigns, including the subject line, the “from” field, and the content itself. One of their most successful subject lines, “Hey,” was a surprising result of these A/B tests. As we can see, there is the potential impact of regular testing and optimization in email marketing.
11. Ensure Mobile Friendliness
As the majority of emails are now read on mobile devices, it is incredibly important that your email copy be mobile-friendly. This is an optimisation that is technical in nature and that is also directly in the content itself. Here are a few tips:
- Use short sentences and keep paragraphs brief.
- Ensure your CTA buttons are large enough and easily tappable on a small screen.
- Make sure any links in your email are mobile-friendly as well.
For instance, an email from a fashion retailer would be aesthetically pleasing on a desktop, featuring neat paragraphs and eye-catching images that take up most of the screen. But it might also be the case that on mobile, the text became too small and the images loaded so slowly that the user experience (and, indirectly, conversions) were affected.
12. Optimize for SEO
Although SEO is most commonly a content strategy for websites, it can actually be beneficial for email marketing as well. Boost your odds of having your emails show up in web-based email searches when you fine tune your email copy with appropriate keywords. As a result, it will drive a more traffic and conversion. Plus, you could recycle your email content as blog posts, FAQs, or social media updates to maximize the SEO juice.
For example, a cooking classes company could focus its email newsletters on keywords like “online cooking classes,” “cooking tips” and “easy recipes.” They can then re-use this email content at a later date in the form of blog posts (helping with SEO too) that attract more website visits.
Conclusion
Done correctly, email marketing can be one of the most effective ways to engage your audience and drive conversions. But there are many ways you can ramp up the effectiveness of your email copy—knowing your audience, writing strong subject lines, producing engaging, pithy content, and employing strategies like personalization and storytelling and social proof.
Don’t forget to keep a consistent brand voice and make sure your emails are mobile-optimized to get a good experience for your readers. And don’t forget the importance of A/B testing and SEO to fine-tune your email strategy for an even greater return.
Use the examples and tips in this post as a reference as you write your own conversion driven email copy. Happy persuasive writing!
