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Email Copywriting Techniques for Marketers
Do you feel distracted?
Is your Email copywriting effective?
Attention spans are getting shorter. You need to use good email copywriting techniques to grab your readers’ attention.
According to a recent report by Econsultancy, the average attention span is just eight seconds.
In that time, you must capture the attention and imagination of the reader. Ultimately, the reader must take action for your Campaign to be successful.
The email copy can make or break your campaign and it is imperative that you get it right.
The purpose of your email copy is to compel your reader to act. Writing email copy isn’t easy but in this blog post we will offer some effective email copywriting techniques to improve your campaigns.
Email Components
If you’re an email marketer, you will know just how much effort goes into creating a campaign from scratch.
Emails take a lot of work to create and even longer if you want to make them top notch. Different elements that you need to consider include:
- Email Copy
- Subject Line
- Preview Text
- Images
- Visuals – GIFs and Videos
- Call To Action
As you’re already aware, creating these elements in a hurry is unlikely to lead to great results.
It is tempting to rush through the email creation process at times in the hope that it will do.
The truth is that your results are a product of the effort that you put in to email creation. Low quality email content won’t produce amazing results. It never does.
Of these elements, the email copy is the most time consuming and challenging to create. Marketers stress over the details, wondering whether their message is convincing enough. Added pressure comes as the reader is likely to make a decision on your email based on your email copy.
You have to get your message across in a clear and effective way. Your customers don’t have time to work out what they need to do. It needs to be obvious from the outset.
Preview text and subject lines are also important.
An email may contain well-written, entertaining and appealing copy but your contact will never see your copy unless they open the email first.
Read our guide to preview text to find out how to optimise emails in the inbox.
Persuasive Email Copywriting
Although copywriting might seem like a daunting task, the good news is that you can improve your style and content with some simple advice.
When writing an email marketing campaign, highlight your main message first. The best emails are those that have a clear focus from the outset, respect the readers’ time and deliver on their promise with a strong call to action.
Your recipients are likely to be over-faced by the number of marketing messages they receive. According to the Radicati Group:
The average person receives 121 emails per day
Your copy needs to stand out in the crowd. Be clear and concise and don’t leave anything to chance.
Take the opportunity to solve your contact’s problems. Demonstrate how you can help your contact in the email to nudge them towards taking action.
Telling the reader what to do without giving them a reason or benefit of taking action means they are unlikely to click through from your email.
Make your email flow by seamlessly progressing from one point to the next. An email which flows naturally is more easy to follow for the reader. If it feels like the reader is being taken on a journey from problem to solution they are more likely to read your email copy in full.
In a time of scan-read emails, the ability to convince your reader with well structured copy is priceless.
Use The Right Tone
People love content that speaks to them on their level. But how do you find out what ‘level’ your audience is on?
The answer lies in your customer data. You can dig in to a wealth of information which will indicate how your contacts are likely to react to different kinds of content. One approach is to analyse the performance of previous email campaigns.
Look into your campaign metrics to gain insights into campaign performance
What metrics can I look at? Well, your email click through rate and unsubscribe rates are the key indicators of whether your message is striking the right chord. No single metric is going to give you the right answer. Look at how your emails are performing overall and consider what you want to get out of the campaign results.
Even then, there might be room for improvement. Split test your campaigns and experiment over time to discover your best approach.
The Importance of Tone
The tone of your emails is important.
It’s the difference between converting your customers and being marked as spam!
Get it right and the possibilities are endless, get it wrong and your reader will delete your email in an instant.
Your content is a great chance to show off the personality of your brand, giving your contacts extra reasons to love you. Even better, email marketing is a proven way to retain your customers for a long period at a high return on your investment.
Use simple language that is easy to follow and stick to one main message.
Outline the benefits of your product or service. This is the most important thing to get across to the reader. Although you may have a product with a number of powerful features, focusing on what those features can offer the reader is much more appealing than offering a detailed spec!
Yet, the act of sending an email on a regular basis is not enough. How you come across is even more important than what you are saying.
Be Friendly
As the saying goes, being friendly costs nothing!
After all, you want them to take actions that are going to benefit your business. Show your customers how much you value them, increasing your levels of familiarity and personalisation as your relationship blossoms.
Don't distance yourself from your reader with unnecessary use of 'you' and 'I'. Focus on what you have in common and the benefits you can offer.
Click To Tweet
Although you may feel that your brand is too corporate to take a friendly approach, everybody is human. It might just be worth a try.
Be Consistent
If your website uses Queen’s English, slang would look out of place in an email campaign.
Make sure that each member of your marketing team understands the language they should use when creating emails. Use a tone that matches your overall brand but don’t be afraid to experiment.
Being consistent with your email sends goes some way to creating a positive customer experience.
Be Approachable
Start a conversation with your contacts.
Find out what they really think of you and use this as an opportunity to improve in the future. The more engaged you are with your contacts, the more likely they are to see your brand in a positive light.
Liquor use a friendly copywriting approach to empathise with the reader
In this example, the opening phrase ‘Shopping for spirit lovers can be tough’ shows empathy with email recipients. This shows that the company are on the same level as the people they are writing for forming a closer bond between writer and reader.
Remember, even though a contact does not click through your email they may convert because they have seen your email land in the inbox. This is known as the ‘Halo Effect’ where if a contact has a strong opinion about your brand, they are more likely to take action regardless of the specifics of your email campaign.
Be Emotive
Consumers make 90% of their decisions based on emotions. Tapping into these emotions every time you write an email is sure to get your contacts primed for action.
When we talk about emotions, we don’t just mean making your contacts cry. You can leverage any number of emotions to prompt your customers into action.
Tell the customer how they can expect to feel if they interact with your campaign. Describe the relief that your solution can bring or the elation somebody will feel when they make money from your product or service. Some emotions that marketers commonly play on include:
- Fear
- Anger
- Elation
- Excitement
- Enthusiasm
Swearing isn’t out of the question. Although it is good practice to write good English, shocking your contacts might just make a difference to the way they react. Be careful. Swearing is risque and should only be done if you are confident of how your contact will react.
Emails are a gateway, not a standalone part, of the conversion funnel. An email alone can only get somebody to take action that will move them down the conversion funnel, they cannot convert alone. Experiment with your copy to see how you can pull at the heartstrings to make your contacts react in the right way.
Be Assertive
People are more likely to believe in your message if you sound confident with what you are saying. Give your recipients a convincing reason to act.
Being assertive isn’t the only way to drive your contacts to click from your email campaigns but it is good practice.
Think about somebody giving a speech about a new business project. Would you be more likely to support somebody who presented their ideas clearly, without hesitations and with confidence flowing from their body or somebody who appeared unsure, hesitant and timid about the suggestions they were making?
We think we know the answer, most people would support the confident presenter, even if both speakers had the same idea. Wouldn’t you?
When presenting ideas, use a confident tone in your copy
Your emails are an extension of your brand and if you seem to know what you are talking about, are clear on your message and deliver it with style, this translates to better customer perception too.
A Comment on Technical Email Copy
Although including technical language or jargon may seem like a good idea, it is best avoided. Jargon can be confusing and leads to misunderstandings for the reader.
Besides, unless your readers will understand and really benefit from knowing all the technical details of your product, using technical jargon may backfire.
Also consider that your emails may be forwarded from their original recipients. Although you may know that your recipients understand what you are trying to say, the eventual recipient may not.
If appropriate, include facts and figures in the email copy. Facts and figures referenced from other sources validate the claims that you are making about your product or service or can verify that a problem actually exists.
Showing that you are aware of how your product or service will impact the wider environment demonstrates a deeper understanding and responsibility in your industry.
Email Campaign Length
Cramming too many points into one email is a common mistake.
Brevity is crucial.
According to research published on email length, 20 lines of text is optimum for an email marketing campaign
For the best results, split test your email campaigns to find the right length for you. Although the statistics indicate that short emails result in better click through rates, your business may need to experiment to find the best campaign length.
A clear and concise email is more likely to retain the attention of the recipient. Link to a landing page if you need to explain the benefits of your product or service in more detail. This has two main benefits: Making your content more digestible and saving your readers time.
Email recipients place a high value on their time – this example from Spotify is succinct, easy to read and gives a clear call to action. The reader spends just seconds reading the email and can benefit from the call to action in one easy step:
Spotify use very succinct email copy to drive clicks from their email campaign
Linking to additional resources provides additional value to your readers and shortens your email copy in the process. Use copy to encourage them to click through to a resource on a website or landing page.
Why you should consider using a P.S
Although keeping your email copy as short as possible is generally a good idea, adding a P.S at the bottom of your email is an effective way to catch the eye of your reader before they navigate away from your campaign.
It’s the last chance you have to convince your readers. Let’s face it, they are unlikely to return to your email once they have closed it.
What do you have to lose? Well, overusing post-script comments at the bottom of your campaign might seem a bit desperate to your readers and might see your emails slide into the ‘Spam’ folder before long.
The P.S. in this email campaign gives extra value to the readers
On the plus side, if you use them sparingly to give a really strong reason to take action, they might just result in another conversion or two. Add a different angle to your email copy and to give the reader one last reason to take action.
Formatting Your Email
Once you have written your killer email copy, you need to make sure that it stands out on the page. Although the formatting of your email might not seem like something a copywriter should have to worry about, it can have a big impact on the way that an email performs.
Where you can, use bullet points to highlight the key elements of your email send. Bullet points also help readers scan through your email quickly. Check out our post on the F-shaped reading pattern to find out how readers scan twice horizontally, then vertically through email campaigns.
Structure your email clearly. Break up your copy with images that are relevant to your email’s purpose.
Are images a bad thing in emails? After all, they break up the flow of your email campaign to deliver a visual cue which should be redundant anyway if your content is convincing enough.
The statistics suggest otherwise. Email recipients prefer image heavy campaigns. The average human takes up to 90% of the information they receive in a visual format. To get the best results for your campaigns, including an image or two is the best way forward.
Don’t overdo it. Using too many images in your campaign may trigger spam traps. Images also take time to load and make your email less mobile friendly. The optimum text to image ratio is 60:40, use more images than text and you run the risk of poor campaign performance.
This example from Pixologic demonstrates how images can be used to compliment the email copy. Each of the different sections give the user a new visual cue to keep them scrolling down the email.
Each colour gradient that is used signals the start of a new section. This is a great way to make the reader take note of all the email content which neatly fits around the ZBrush Magic Wheelchair Contest.
Formatting such as bold, italics or underlining text can be used to emphasise individual elements of your email. Use these formatting options scarcely as overusing these options detract from their effect.
Getting the format of your email right helps your message stand out. If the message is easy to read and digest, your contacts are more likely to click through the email campaign to take action resulting in higher conversion rates and ultimately a higher return on investment for the email marketing channel.
Writing a Killer Call To Action
Advice on how to write an effective call to action calls for a blog post in itself. We’re just going to scrape the surface here.
No matter how good your email copy is, or how strong your arguments are, your email will not perform if your recipients don’t know what to do.
Tell your reader what they can expect and they will be more likely to take action. The most important thing about your call to action is to leave your recipients in no doubt to what they have to do.
Instead of ‘Click Here’, try ‘Book your place at today’s event’
‘Book your place at today’s event’ specifically states the action that the reader is expected to take once they have finished reading the email. Although ‘Click Here’ gives the reader an action to take, they do not know why they are expected to click.
In our experience, using a more specific call to action results in a higher click through rate from email campaigns. Your email is a vehicle for your overall marketing campaign. It can’t covert by itself and must result in the reader taking action once they have read the campaign, often monitored with the email’s click through rate.
Summary
Make every word count.
If a word does not contribute to the purpose of the email send, cut it out. Structure your email copy to present the most pertinent points where the email recipient is likely to notice them.
By following the advice in this blog post, you will be able to create an email campaign which persuades and convinces your email contacts every time.
Share your favourite email copywriting techniques in the comments. We’d love to hear what you’ve been up to.
The post Email Copywriting Techniques For Marketing Success appeared first on Wired Plus Marketing Hub.
This post first appeared on Wired Plus Email Marketing Platform, please read the originial post: here
