10 Essential Tips for Writing Effective Marketing Emails
Emails are one of the most important aspects of digital marketing. Emails have proven to be surprisingly long-lasting for a medium that has been around since the 1950s. Nowadays, they are used for promoting new products and services, sales and discounts, and even pure information.
E-commerce stores use email marketing to entice people into buying products, returning to abandoned carts, or informing them of upcoming sales and deals. Other businesses use emails to provide newsletters and premium content to their subscribers.
The point is that emails are very important for marketing, creating and converting leads. However, many people do not get to reap the benefits of email marketing because of poorly written emails.
In this article, we will teach you 10 essential tips that will help you enhance the efficacy of your marketing emails.
10 Tips for Writing Marketing Emails for Engagement and Conversions
These tips will help you write better emails. They include not only writing tips but other things you can do to improve your content. Let’s check them out.
- Research Your Audience (helps with personalization)
First things first, you need to learn more about your audience. The more you know them, the better you will be at writing emails that appeal to them. So, how can you start researching your audience?
There are various ways of doing that.
- Find out the demographic that you cater to. What is the age, gender, and geographical location of the people you cater to?
- Go online and do keyword research. What are the keywords related to your business? Which areas and what kind of people are searching for them?
- Ask your salesmen what kind of people approach your store. Who are the people that buy from your brand?
These are just some basic things you can do to find out more about your audience. With this information, you can create an audience persona and write emails that are more likely to resonate with it.
Audience research is the pathway to personalization. According to Campaign Monitor, personalized emails have an open rate of 29% and a click-through rate of 41%. That is an impressive rate and should be motivation enough to start doing audience research.
- Write an Enticing Subject Line
Your subject lines are the most important aspect of your emails. They determine whether your audience will open the email or not.
Here, a common mistake most writers make is using clickbait titles. They use bombastic statements that attract a reader’s attention and compel them to open the email. Yet, their content does not match the subject line.
This jarring contrast is not good for the reader and you. They will fall for it a few times but then they will stop opening your emails completely. So, you might get short-term results, but you will lose in the long term.
That’s why ensure that your subject line is related to your content. This way, while you may not get as high as an open rate, the people who do open your emails will likely stay for more.
This will result in better conversions in the long term. So, always try to be honest and keep your subject relevant to the content.
- Refer to Your Reader with 2nd Person Pronouns
One benefit of emails is that you can be more personal with the recipient than other methods. Pronouns like “You”, and “Your” go a long way in building rapport with your recipient.
You should avoid making the email about yourself. Too often, email marketers fall into a habit of touting “our company” and “our product” which is not appreciated by the readers. They feel as if you are talking ‘at’ them rather than ‘to’ them.
The use of 2nd person pronouns rectifies that problem and makes the email read more like a dialogue instead of a monologue. However, be wary as to not appear too friendly and clingy as that can also be really jarring.
Strike a good balance and you will find success with your marketing emails.
- Write Concisely
Emails are not a medium for long-form content. If you want to write long prose, then your chosen medium should be blogs and eBooks. Emails are defined by their conciseness. So write with brevity.
If you write too much content, your readers will have problems discerning the real message you sent to them. This can result in poor conversions and click-through rates as most people don’t have the time to read long emails. Staying concise ensures that people actually read your emails.
The sad thing is that people can accidentally go overboard when writing. They sometimes
have too much information to give. This can be tricky to do in an email where you have to keep things concise.
But there is an easy trick you can do; use an online tool. There are numerous AI-powered tools out there that can summarize any text. All you have to do is run your email draft through a summarizer to make it concise.
The benefit of using a summarizer is that it is fast and accurate, and its output requires minimal editing to be usable. So, use such tools to your advantage and make your emails more effective.
- Optimize the Layout for Mobile
Mobile devices are the most convenient devices for reading emails. This is supported by the fact that 41.6% of emails are opened on mobile clients compared to a measly 16.2% on desktop clients.
What this means is that you must keep design choices that aid reading on mobile in mind. On mobile devices, people often have to scroll through emails. However, most people won’t do that unless your email content catches their attention.
So, what you need to do is write the most important part of your email “above the fold,” which is just a fancy way of saying “above the scroll point.” This ensures that your readers do not abandon your email.
Other things you need to keep in mind are given below.
- Do not write long sentences that go too far to the right. Use line breaks to keep the width short enough for mobile devices.
- Keep paragraphs short. Don’t write more than three lines per paragraph.
- Add a visible space between paragraphs to make them discernible from each other.
This will help improve readability on mobile devices. Remember, as a marketer, show all the consideration you can to your prospective customer. Good customer service is what sells products, not just marketing.
- Use Images to Attract the Reader
Images are great for engagement. Images are faster in view compared to reading text. So, if you want to quickly engage your audience, add an image to your email.
Of course, the image needs to be highly relevant to your content and subject matter. You cannot add just any image and expect it to do the magic.
Something like a chart or infographic is great for emails where the goal is purely to inform. Other emails that aim to convert can use images that implore the reader to sign up or visit the website.
- Highlight Benefits For the Reader Instead of Features
When writing emails, marketers often make the mistake of highlighting features of their products/services instead of benefits.
Aside from hobbyists, most people only want to buy something if it can benefit them in any way. This means that your promotional email content should be tailored to emphasize the unique benefits your customers will get from your product/service.
Your audience research will come in handy here, as it will provide you with a lot of data. This data can be used to discern what benefits appeal the most to your audience. You can leverage the specific benefits to ensure the audience gets hooked on your proposition and becomes more likely to avail themselves of your services.
- Add a Clear Call to Action (CTA) to Boost Conversions
The human psyche makes it such that humans are more open to doing something if asked to do it. This is why you will see many influencers specifically ask you to like and subscribe. That is a clear call to action.
What a CTA does is that it lays down exactly what you want your reader to do. This clear-cut directive makes it easy for the reader to understand what the email wants them to do. As such, they are more likely to do it.
Consider this scenario. You want people to go to your website and sign up for a free service or something similar. However, in your email, you only encourage them to visit your website and don’t say anything else.
This creates a problem where even if the reader visits the site, they won’t necessarily sign up. They won’t know what they are supposed to do (unless the website design and content tell them).
But in the same situation, if you explicitly ask them to sign up, they will most likely do just that. That’s why adding clear CTAs in your emails is necessary as it dramatically improves their effectiveness.
- Do A/B Testing with Content and Subject Lines
A/B testing is the method of using multiple approaches to achieve a single objective. In email marketing, A/B testing can refer to the following:
- Using different content for emails
- Using different designs
- Experimenting with different tones, styles, and subject lines.
Of course, you can’t use the different versions on one person. What you can do is use different versions for similar people and gauge their reactions. This is more resource-intensive as you have to create multiple copies of a single email. However, this has the advantage of finding out which style resonates more with your audience, and that is always a good thing.
- Always Proofread and Ensure There are Minimal Errors
Finally, the one tip that any writer should know, and practice is proofreading. You can always make your write-up better and the only way to do that is to proofread it.
Many small mistakes and errors that are otherwise forgotten or overlooked are caught during proofreading. Small grammar errors, missing punctuation, and even sentences that don’t sound right can be found and corrected.
Mistakes like these are bad for the effectiveness of an email because
You can use the help of editors and tools to make this task easier. Just make sure to never neglect it. Sit on email if you have to. Sometimes a person is just too tired to proofread their work immediately. So take a breather and come back to it later.
Then when you are fresh, proofread your email and you will definitely improve it.
Conclusion
So, there you have it, 10 tips for writing effective emails. With these tips in your arsenal, no email will be difficult to write, and no client will be too difficult to handle. Your click-through rates and conversions will soar and your return on investment in email marketing will be positive.
All that is required from you is persistence and consistency. Do that and you will be set.
