With so many new marketing technologies out there, it’s easy to overlook the foundation of all marketing: great copywriting.
No matter what tools you use, if you don’t have some solid copywriting, your campaigns aren’t going to get very far.
Luckily, copywriting is a skill that can be learned and practiced. If you want to be effective, you should always be finetuning your skills and studying new ways to get better, no matter whether you’re a seasoned pro or a total beginner.
In this guide, we’re going to cover six essential tips for crafting high-converting emails. Plus, we’ll go over some of the theory behind them so that you can develop a structure in which to apply them.
What Makes a Great Email?
A sales or promotional email can usually be divided into three parts:
- The subject line
- The body text
- The call to action (CTA)
The subject line is your chance to reel in your audience and get them to open your email in the first place. Writing a great header is an art in itself, and we’ll go over a few ways to make them shine.
Your body text is the meat of your email, and it should be a development of the theme, topic, or question you proposed in your subject line.
Finally, your CTA is when you ask the recipient to take action. For example, you may ask them to visit your website, buy your product, or start a free trial.
Best Email Copywriting Tips
Now that we have some of the basics established, let’s take a look at how you can finesse them into an elegant sales email.
1. Know Your Audience
Everything starts with a knowledge of your audience. If you don’t know who you’re selling to, it’ll be impossible for you to connect with them. And if you can’t form a connection, it’s unlikely you’ll be able to persuade them to purchase your product.
Sometimes, your audience will be a single person – if you’re contacting a lead at a company, for example. In this case, the best strategy is to do some research on them and personalize the email for them specifically.
Other times, you’ll be sending out an email to your entire list. In this case, your job is to understand your audience in a broad sense and touch upon their interests and pain points in your email.
2. Maintain a Consistent Brand Voice
Keeping a consistent voice is part of what establishes your brand’s personality and makes you stick out from the crowd. Plus, it goes along with tip #1: if you know your audience, you’ll know what type of language to use with them.
Consistency is important when it comes to branding. If you’re constantly switching up your writing style, your audience will be confused as to who you are and what you stand for.
For example, if you send out a sophisticated email titled “Dear Patron, New Delicacies Introduced to Our Menu” and then follow it up with an email titled “YUM! Who’s ready for some #NOMS?” a week later, your audience will have a hard time even recognizing that it’s from the same business.
3. Ask a Question in the Subject Line
Phrasing your subject line as a question is an easy way to get extra clicks. Online media outlets have been doing this for ages. For example, the answer to the headline “Is a giant meteor about to crash into Earth?” is no. But quite a few people reading that will click just to make sure.
However, it’s important to be careful with this technique. If your subject line is too clickbaity, you’re just going to annoy your audience and hurt your conversion chances.
Ideally, you should ask a question that your audience will be interested in that also has an informative answer. So, a question like “How much money did the average forex trader make in 2020?” would work. Alternatively, you can ask open-ended questions to your readers as a sort of friendly challenge, like “How much weight will YOU lose in 2021?”
4. Make Sure You Don’t Come Across as Spammy
Following up on the warning in tip #3, make sure your copy isn’t overly spammy. If your copy is too salesy, not only is it more likely to get filtered into spam, but your reader is less likely to read it even if it does make it to their inbox.
So, what counts as spammy? Typically, spam emails make offers that sound too good to be true or use overly aggressive sales language. We’ve created a long list of trigger words to avoid that are known to trigger spam filters.
Some of the “forbidden” words and phrases include:
- $$$
- Stock alert
- Make $
- Be your own boss
- Meet singles
Avoiding these phrases won’t guarantee that your email doesn’t come across as spammy, but it’s a good start.
5. Break Up Your Paragraphs
No one wants to read War and Peace when they open up an email offering them a coupon code. While long and dense paragraphs may be welcome in an academic text, they’re not suitable for a sales email.
Luckily, the solution is pretty simple: break up your paragraphs. A good rule of thumb is to keep paragraphs to a maximum of two or three sentences. Of course, you’ll also want to ensure that your sentences are pretty short too – no run-ons allowed.
6. Don’t Forget About Split-Testing
Copywriting is an art, but there’s also a scientific aspect to it. To make your emails successful as possible, make sure you split test them.
Split testing is the process of sending out two versions of an email, each with a degree of variation. You monitor which one performs better, drop the poor performer, and repeat the process to continue improving on your emails.
Key Takeaways
Copywriting is a skill that is developed with time. There’s no secret formula that will turn you into a copywriting pro.
However, with a bit of sustained practice each and every day, you’ll continue down the path to copywriting and sales success.
