This is a guest post from Adriana Veasey.
Email marketing has long been known as one on the most cost-efficient and effective marketing methods out there. Furthermore, all the advances in the field aren’t essential to a strong email marketing campaign. A well-penned plain text copy can often be much more efficient than some of the campaigns enhanced by high-tech functionalities.
This is not to say that it’s unreasonable to make your emails visually appealing, but it’s safe to assume that a strong copy is the primary driver of a campaign. Don’t forget to clean your mailing list with email checker tools, as it helps you remove invalid emails from the list for better deliverability and help your campaign be more successful.
So, how does one improve their email marketing efforts by writing better? There are a few age-old tricks that writers have been using to captivate their readers and build strong relationships with their customers. Let’s take a look, shall we?
1. Enhance clarity
It’s important to mention that emails aren’t really a place to showcase our writing abilities from a stylistic viewpoint, we should instead view them as a medium to convey a message as succinctly as possible. Therefore, it’s crucial to use straightforward and actionable language.
Trying to impress your potential customer with a long-form email will pretty much defeat the purpose of convincing them in doing business with you.
Think of it this way — do you usually read every word in an email you receive from a person you don’t know? Chances are you don’t. By writing fewer words and boiling down your message to a sweet 70-100 words, you’ll allow your recipients to scan through the email, without missing on any essential information you wanted to share.
Similarly, to enhance the clarity of your message, try avoiding passive voice. Very often, passive voice sounds, well, very passive, which is problematic when you’re trying to convince someone to do something they weren’t planning on doing in the first place.
And lastly, for your email to be clear and convincing, you need to make sure it’s free of grammatical errors and punctuation mistakes. So read them aloud multiple times or, to use a fresh pair of eyes, ask someone else to do this for you.
2. Storytelling works wonders
Storytelling is the secret component of a successful marketing text. Consumers are very passionate about personal accounts and narratives. When you’re working on a series of emails, try delivering the message so that it resembles a story.
Structure your email marketing campaign as a story, where a protagonist is a person that shares a broad spectrum of qualities and concerns with your audience.
So why is storytelling efficient? Why do we find personal accounts so compelling? An American neuroeconomist, Paul J. Zak recently published a research paper on the effects stories have on our brains. It appears that exciting stories can spike oxytocin levels in our bodies, which is one of the “feel good” hormones our brains release during physical interactions like hugs, handshakes, and so forth.
3. Make use of cognitive biases
We, humans, like to think that we have the world “figured out,” but that’s nothing short of an illusion. The way we perceive reality is incredibly distorted because we’re subject to a large set of cognitive and logical biases, which incidentally happen to be a very popular tool in the marketing world.
There are over 200 documented biases, many of which can be used to create a high-converting email marketing copy. Here are a few biases you can look into:
- Loss aversion — many businesses have been using this technique for quite a while. Your aim is to create an image in your customer’s mind that if they miss out on the opportunity you’re providing them with, they will most likely lose something as a result.
- Zero-risk bias — a person is more likely to buy a product if they feel that there’s no risk associated with the purchase. If a product is marketed as very durable or very long-lasting, customers see little risk associated with it, which helps drive sales.
- FOMO (Fear of Missing Out) — people are afraid of losing a potentially beneficial opportunity. Chances are this is an evolutionary feature people have developed, which allowed them to find food in times of scarcity. Marketers create scarcity artificially to entice their customers to use their services or products. To use FOMO efficiently, you need to convey the fact that many people are happily using a product, and that product is very limited.
There is a myriad of biases you can make use of in your email marketing efforts. Check the cognitive bias codex for reference. There are many writing services like WoWGrade.net that have incorporated a whole set of cognitive biases into their ad copywriting.
4. Put some effort into CTA’s
Try to recall the emails you received from the companies behind your favorite services or products. What was it that compelled you to get back to them or become their customer?
Chances are their emails had captivating and vivacious images, or maybe they featured attractive discounts or offers. Whatever it was, none of that would work if there wasn’t a strong CTA in place.
Here are a few tips that will help you craft high-converting calls-to-action that will drive sales on your email marketing efforts:
- Try to recreate your potential customer’s intention. For instance, if you’re offering free WordPress templates, write your call-to-action in first-person singular, for example — “Send me those templates!”
- Another option would be opting for a string of words, which doesn’t necessarily resemble a well-formed sentence. For instance, rather than using something bland like “Buy Now,” and so forth, try conveying a more complex message that would entice the customer to convert, like “Add to Cart Today — And Save 50%.”
5. Nail your subject line
The subject line is a critical piece of text, which demands mastery. If your subject line isn’t exciting, your open rates will be low, which poses a problem for your campaign.
- Keep them short and sweet. A recently published study suggests that the optimal length ranges between 6 and 10 words.
- No fluff. Cut unnecessary words and keep it actionable and exciting.
- Personalize it. Make it about them and how they will benefit from your services or products.
6. Write for your audience
An essential component of a successful email marketing strategy is a relevant voice and tone. Different groups of people have different peculiarities when it comes to the terminology, the expressions, and the colloquialisms they use.
If you’re running a website whose central audience is, say, young mothers, it’s essential to have a tone that’s relevant to your customers.
7. As human as humanly possible
We’re living in a period when consumers have little trust for corporations and marketers. This is why businesses need to invest extra time and effort into the humanization of their brand, especially when it comes to interaction with their customers. Whatever tone you choose to go with, make sure that your message isn’t written in a dry, bland, and corporate English.
To further make your brand more “human” — don’t hesitate to showcase your employees. Allow your customers to sense that your company is a group of people with feelings and a sense of humor.
Humanizing your brand will eventually lead to building stronger relationships with your customers.
Bonus tip: Clean your list!
Lastly, make sure you communicate with real, engaged people by using an email list scrubbing service every once in a while.
Oftentimes, marketers focus on writing the most compelling content, but don’t pay enough attention to the quality of their databases. When your list starts acquiring bad data – such as misspelled, disposable or abuse email addresses your email marketing is at risk. Instead of landing in people’s inboxes, you land in their Spam folder, and who bothers to read Spam?
So, especially before sending out an important email, run your list through a reliable email verifier. It’s well worth the effort.
Conclusion
Email marketing is complicated. However, if you take your time to calibrate your writing to your audience, you’ll see a considerable improvement in your open rates and conversions.
Good luck!
About the author: Adriana Veasey is a passionate writer, dedicated to writing and teaching people how to market their services on the internet. She is currently an editor for Study Ton.