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Email marketing copy is a key element of successful email campaigns. This blog discusses email copywriting tips, best practices, and real-world examples of effective email marketing content.
The success of your email campaigns depends on a number of factors including email marketing content, send times, target audience, personalization, and more. Email copywriting is a critical process that directly impacts key email marketing metrics such as open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates.
Email copywriting is the process of crafting email copy, including the subject line, body of the email, and call to action, to achieve marketing goals. These goals could be anything from creating brand awareness, making product recommendations, and offering exclusive content, to gathering customer feedback and beyond.
To effectively nail email copywriting, you need to consider three things:
Although there are a number of marketing channels available today, including SMS, push notification, WhatsApp, and others, email marketing continues to be the most dominant and effective customer outreach channel. This is evidenced by email marketing’s high ROI of $42 for every $1 spent, according to the Data & Marketing Association (DMA).
When done right, email marketing can be an effective tool that can elevate your overall marketing efforts. Effective email copywriting is foundational to a successful email marketing program. Every element of an email – subject line, body of the email, and CTA – should be carefully crafted to make it relevant for the recipient:
In email copywriting, personalization is key in fueling your leads pipeline and driving sales and revenue. A personalized approach to writing email marketing content can make a huge difference in the performance of the email campaigns and your outreach efforts.
But don’t just take our word for it. Here are a few statistics that underscore the power of personalization in email copywriting:
Here are the key email copywriting tips for creating effective email marketing content that can improve your outreach and engagement efforts.
Sending email blasts to the entire subscriber list doesn’t work as the generic messaging doesn’t resonate with what the subscribers are looking for. For crafting email marketing copy that is tailored to the audience’s needs, preferences, interests, and behavior, you need to first understand your target audience.
Not just email marketing, but understanding your ideal customer profile, buyer persona, and target audience is central to an effective marketing strategy. You can use email list segmentation to classify your target audience into distinct segments based on their demographic, geographical, behavioral, and psychographic attributes. Leveraging this information helps amp up your email copywriting efforts and send personalized messages that resonate with the target audience.
A strong, compelling subject line directly results in a good open rate. Here are a few key considerations to keep in mind while writing a subject line:
Here are some examples of good subject lines:
After a strong subject line drives recipients to open your email, the focus is on the body of the email to drive a good click-through rate. A well-thought-out email body content that conveys your offering and its benefits in an easy-to-understand manner can do wonders in converting prospects into customers.
Here are a few key considerations for crafting quality email marketing content:
An effective call to action, or CTA, is essential for the recipients to take the intended action and ensure the success of your email campaign. Here are a few tips to ensure the CTA serves its intended purpose effectively:
Modern email clients show recipients a “preview text” along with the subject line in their inbox. This preview text acts like a hook by providing contextual information about the email. A relevant and effective preview text can significantly help improve the email open rate.
When an email marketer plans a campaign, the first step is to define a specific goal to be achieved through the campaign, such as announcing a new offering, a cart abandonment email, a feedback survey, product recommendations, and so on. Your email copywriting process – crafting the email subject line, the body of the email, and the CTA – should be aligned with that goal.
Along these lines, think of the value proposition for the recipient – What does your email mean for the recipient and why should they care?
As a company, you might want to highlight all the features you’ve added to a product in the email campaign content. However, you should focus on how it will make a difference for the end user – the benefits they can expect. And for your email, this value proposition should be conveyed effectively in the subject line and the email body.
Using conversational language can make your email more earnest and engaging by making the recipient feel that you are having a conversation with them. Here are a few tips for writing in a conversational tone:
Here are the email copy best practices that can help you craft compelling email content.
Coherence is one of the key tenets of effective email copywriting. Usually, the email content is broken down into two or three short paragraphs or sections for easy scannability. These paragraphs should be coherent – the central theme or messaging should flow from one section to another in a logical manner.
Ensuring your email marketing copy adheres to your brand guidelines helps build a strong brand reputation over time. You can do this by ensuring consistent language, tone, and style throughout your emails. This includes:
For example, a B2B company generally uses a formal tone, while a B2C company uses a casual and humorous tone.
Given the soaring number of people using mobile devices, such as smartphones and tablets, for checking their emails, optimizing email campaigns for mobile is an absolute must. According to Litmus, mobile devices account for 41.6% of all email opens.
Here are a few best practices for optimizing your email for mobile devices:
A/B testing is a powerful tool that helps you identify what’s resonating the most with your audience, enabling you to achieve your campaign goals. It involves creating two versions of an email and testing them with the target audience.
To identify the element that is working the best, create the two versions by changing only one element out of three – the subject line, email copy, and the CTA. Then, send one version to one-half of the target audience, and the other to the other half. Compare the performance results of both versions using key performance indicators, such as open rate, click-through rates, conversion rates, and others, to identify which one worked better.
Creating a sense of urgency and FOMO is a highly effective strategy for emails offering some discount to the recipient for a limited time. A timely email can encourage recipients to make impulse purchases to benefit from the discount offers.
Regardless of the industry you operate in, you should avoid technical jargon in your emails as much as possible. Use easy words and simple language to explain your offering.
Instead of using technical terms to demonstrate your industry knowledge, you should focus on customer pain points and challenges and try to address them in a lucid and comprehensible manner.
Social proof, such as ratings, reviews, customer testimonials, and case studies, is a strong validation for your offering and helps build trust and credibility with the target audience. Including it in your email marketing strategy can significantly improve the click-through and conversion rates.
To collect social proof, you can:
Let’s look at some high-quality email copywriting examples that can help you craft your emails effectively.
Welcome emails are auto-generated emails that are sent when a customer successfully creates their account for the first time on an app or website. They present a huge opportunity for marketers to showcase your brand’s value proposition and the benefits the customers can expect.
Promotional emails are those that help create brand awareness by announcing new products, services, events, and more. They are generally sent out to the entire email list.
Survey emails help you collect customer feedback and gain insights into their expectations, which you can leverage to improve your products and services. The CTA in these emails is usually a link that redirects the recipient to a survey landing page.
An effective email marketing copywriting strategy is essential to ensure the success of your email campaigns and achieve marketing and business goals. It requires a comprehensive approach to understand the target audience, identify their needs, preferences, behavior, and pain points, and determine how to address these.
Furthermore, as customer needs continue to evolve, you need to keep refining your email copywriting strategy to ensure it is aligned with what the recipients are looking for. A continuous approach to testing subject lines, email body, CTA, tonality, and other factors can help you understand what your target audience wants, thereby enabling you to build meaningful connections and drive business growth.
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