21 Tips How to Write Email Marketing Campaign

Wednesday, January 11, 2017

Are you writing email marketing copy that’s just not getting the conversions you need? Getting your email marketing strategy right is both an art and a science. Part of both is understanding how to create high-converting copy, How to Write Email Marketing Campaign?.

The good news is that by the time you’ve finished reading this guide, you’ll know the secrets of improving conversions from email marketing so that you can get more leads and sales.

How to Write Email Marketing Campaign

1. Write a Killer Subject Line

If you’re wondering how to do email marketing right, the best place to start is with the email subject line. Perfecting the subject line can be the difference between recipients opening your email, deleting it or, even worse, reporting it as spam.

People open your emails if they feel they will benefit, if they’re worried about missing out, or if you present compelling evidence about why they should. We’ll talk more about that in tip #8.

Sure, it’s a lot to ask from a single email subject line, but you can do it. Check out our list of the best email subject lines for inspiration.

2. Nail the Preview Text

With modern email clients, it’s not just the subject line that sells people on opening your email. It’s also the preview text. That’s the piece of text that tells subscribers more about the content of your email.

Often, this shows part of the first line of the email. That’s fine, as most email copywriters craft this carefully.

Email marketing preview

But if your preview text shows instructions on how to read the email online, or unclickable links to your social media profiles, then you’re wasting an opportunity. With email preview text ranging from 35 to 140 characters, depending on the client, this is an aspect of your email you can’t afford to neglect.

3. Write for the Web

Writing email marketing copy is similar to writing web copy. That means it’s important to:

Follow a logical structure.
Keep paragraphs short.
Include one main idea per paragraph.

Feel free to use bullets and subheadings to break up blocks of text and make your emails scannable.

teacup scannable email marketing copy

4. Don’t Shout; It’s Spammy

Avoid all caps and multiple exclamation marks in both the subject line and body of the email. Not only are all caps the equivalent of shouting online, but overusing them screams spammy email marketing. That’ll hurt your email open rate. And if enough subscribers report you, it could also hurt your email deliverability or even get you blacklisted by your email newsletter service.

5. Know Your Audience

Getting to know your audience so you can write email marketing copy that meets their needs is a great way to boost conversions.

Use what you know from web and social analytics and interactions with customers to build your buyer personas or customer avatars. When you know your customers, it’s easy to write email marketing copy that makes them want to click.

6. Write Email Marketing Copy for Readers

If you really want readers to click, then you have to sound like a real person. Avoid marketing speak and be conversational, as if you’re talking to someone who’s sitting across the table from you. The email below from Carbon Based Podcast is a good example.

Email marketing copy

Don’t be boring – there’s no rule that says that emails from a business have to be dry. Use your emails to stir readers’ imagination by sharing an insider’s view of your company, customer stories or even a personal anecdote. When your subscribers can imagine themselves in your shoes, you’ll start to build a relationship with them.

7. Choose the Right Words

When you look at the best email copy examples, one thing stands out. Word choice is crucial to make reading your email a great experience, and since most emails are short, every word counts.

If you want to stir readers’ imagination, appeal to their emotions and get them to take action, you’ve got to:

Use analogies and other literary techniques.

Seed your email marketing copy with sensory words to help them see and feel the picture you’re painting with your words. In an ideal world, you’ll evoke touch and taste, too.

Stir up your readers and convey action by using power words in your subject line, copy and call to action (CTA).

What you don’t say is also important for building trust. Avoid making false promises and other sleazy marketing tactics, or you risk losing subscribers forever.

8. Use Psychology in Email Marketing Strategy

As human beings, our brains are wired to react in predictable ways to certain types of input. That’s why using psychology can help you create more successful, high-converting email marketing copy.

Some of the factors that make readers read and click include:

Fear of missing out (FOMO), because we never want to lose anything. That’s why time-limited discounts work so well. Use scarcity and urgency in your email and more people will click. That applies to curiosity, too.
Color choice, since different colors elicit different reactions. You can use this effectively in CTA buttons, for example.
Pictures of faces can elicit the emotions shown on those faces or direct the gaze towards a CTA.
Social proof tells readers that people like them think you’re great, which makes them more inclined to read your emails.
There’s also personalization, which we’ll look at in tip #11.

Check out our guide to using psychology in email marketing for more help with this.

9. Be Relevant

Avoid generic marketing in favor of targeted marketing. Customer avatars give you broad segments you can focus on in copywriting, but within those there are also smaller segments. After all, you’re not going to send the same email to a new subscriber as to a repeat customer, are you?

Sending relevant email improves open and clickthrough rates, so segmentation is essential. Read our pro tips on email list segmentation to help with this.

10. Know Your Goal

Still on the subject of targeting, it’s best practice to have a single goal – the one thing you want to achieve – for each email. This will help you focus your marketing copy, which we’ll talk about more in the next tip. Remember, if you have multiple goals you don’t really have a goal, so when planning your emails focus on the key action you want readers to take and build your email copy around that.

Not every email needs to have the goal of selling something. Pro copywriter Barry Feldman says: “Where a web page is the terrain, the copywriter’s the tour guide, instructor, concierge, maître d’, and of course, sales clerk. If the copy can’t seal the deal, it must offer something compelling to start some sort of relationship.”

11. Get Personal with Your Email Marketing Campaign

Read any advice on writing email marketing copy that works, and it’ll include a tip about personalization. It’s true that using people’s names in subject lines and email marketing copy gets their attention, but there’s more to personalization than that.

We talked earlier about segmentation. Well, that affects personalization, too, because each segment is looking for something different from your emails. You can send different emails depending on the age, gender and location of your audience, whether they are looking for a personal or business purchase, etc.

12. Let Readers Get to Know You

Another aspect of personalization is letting subscribers know who you are. Most people like getting emails where they can see a picture of the sender and where there’s a personal rather than generic sender, as in the emails shown below.

email marketing personalization

When you take this approach, it’ll help subscribers form a connection with you, which is the first step in winning conversions.

By the way, you can also personalize your optin forms with OptinMonster’s Dynamic Text Replacement feature. Learn more about it in our page-level targeting guide.

13. Align Everything

With the best email marketing copy, everything’s aligned. Your copy delivers on the promise of the subject line, and your email delivers on the promise of the optin form and the landing page where subscribers signed up.

For example, if you’re delivering a lead magnet ebook, you’ll probably have a picture of the book on both the optin form and the landing page. When you send the confirmation email, you’ll likely include the title of the ebook and the same image again. And the copy will match, too. This reassures readers that they’re getting what they signed up for, which starts to build a trusting relationship.

14. Reward Your Readers

Any email marketing best practices guide will advise you to reward readers for opening your email. That process starts when they open the email and see what they expect after seeing your optin form, landing page or subject line.

But to cement this, you’ll need the copy to show both the benefits they get and proof of those benefits. Often emails will include some stats or will link to a case study that lets readers know they were right to subscribe, and gives them another reason to stay on your list. Or it could be as simple as providing an extra free gift to thank them for subscribing.

email marketing copy case study

15. Promote Action

Aside from the subject line, the CTA is the most important part of your email marketing campaign, because that’s what’ll get subscribers to convert, by taking the action you’d like them to take. All the tips we’ve listed above can also help you create the perfect call to action that subscribers find it almost impossible to resist.

16. Test and Split Test Email Marketing Campaigns

If you really want to boost conversions when writing email marketing copy, you’re going to need data. Before you send emails, check subject lines for effectiveness with the CoSchedule Headline Analyzer.

Next, collect data on email marketing performance from your email marketing service provider so you can figure out how you can improve performance.

Finally, it’s time to test. Start by split testing your optin forms, which is easy to do with OptinMonster, then test headlines, copy, CTAs and more till you come up with your best-performing email. Read our guide to split testing for help with improving email conversions.

There’s one last tip that’ll help you write emails that convert. Here it is:

17. Steal Great Ideas

Don’t worry; this kind of stealing is perfectly legal.

You can get inspiration for high converting emails by subscribing to your competitors’ email marketing newsletters – or any other newsletters that interest you – to see if they’re doing something that really gets attention. Add these to your own personal swipe file so you can adapt them to suit your own email marketing strategy.

Other places to find good ideas are sites like Quora, Reddit or Answer the Public, where you can check out the topics people are talking about or searching for. Use these as inspiration to craft emails that address key issues for your target audience.

Buzzsumo is another good research source because it highlights the most shared social content. And if people are sharing, then people are reading.

You can also use headline generators to come up with titles as a starting point for winning subject lines. Tools to try include:

Portent’s Idea Generator
Hubspot’s Blog Topic Generator
ImpactBND’s Blog Title Generator
SEOPressor’s Blog Title Generator
Tweak Your Biz Title Generator

(source: optinmonster.com)

Writing high performing email campaigns can be a challenge, but it’s critical to your success as a marketer.

So in this guide, we’ll teach you how to write a high-performing email campaign that your subscribers will open and click, and will subsequently drive sales and revenue for your business.

5 tips for How to writing a high-performing email campaign

1. Use a familiar from name

The From name is one of the most prominently displayed elements of your campaign when it arrives in your subscribers inbox.

On many desktop and mobile clients, it’s displayed with a larger text and heavier font to help people quickly identify who the email is from.

Topshop - Familiar From Name

Given its prominence, it’s probably not surprising that 68% of Americans say they base their decision to open an email on the From name.

So how do you optimize this critical part of your campaigns and help boost your open rates into the 30%+ range? The key is matching it up with your audience’s expectations.

For instance, imagine you subscribed to an email newsletter from the BuzzFeed website. Would you expect to receive emails from ‘BuzzFeed’ or from ‘Dan Oshinsky’? Given that you’ve signed up for these emails from the BuzzFeed website, chances are it’s the earlier, even though it’s actually Dan who is creating and sending their campaigns.

Buzzfeed - Familiar From Name

On top of matching the From name to subscribers expectations, it’s also important to consider the number of characters you include in your From Name as many mobile devices have a limit to how many they display.

Device Name Number of Characters Displayed

iPhone 6 32
iPhone 5 23
iPhone 4 23
Samsung Galaxy S4 32

*Results can vary based on your chosen copy as well individual user settings and preferences like font sizes and email clients. To get as close as possible to real-life results, we tested with the default email clients on each device, used Lorem Ipsum dummy text and had the device in portrait mode.

As you can see, although it varies based on device and screen orientation, keeping your From name under 23 characters will likely mean it will display in full regardless of the device or screen orientation the recipient is using.

2. Write a short, benefit focused subject line

After the From name, the subject line is the second most prominent element in the inbox when it comes to driving opens.

On most devices, the subject line is formatted with darker, heavier text in an attempt to make it stand out among the other details of the email.

Topshop - Focused Email Subject Line

Given its prominence in the inbox, it’s inevitable that it will have a significant effect on open rates. So how should you be optimizing your subject line to drive conversions?

The first thing to consider is length. Although research has shown that the length of subject lines doesn’t have a huge effect on open and click-through rates, it is advisable to keep them under 30 characters long so as to ensure they appear in full on both desktop and mobile devices.

Beyond length, there are a number of power words you can include in your email subject line to help improve open rates. These include:

First word: Open % Change Last word: Open % Change
[firstname,fallback=customer], what’s this? 14.68%
Invitation 9.45% 7.69%
Introducing 7.36%
We 5.87%
A 4.09%
Your/You/You! 4.07% 6.20%
Year, eg. 2014 3.89% 2.84%
Update 3.69%
New 3.26%
Month name, eg. June 3.25% 3.34%
Special/Specials 2.75% 2.08%
News 1.31% 2.22%
Sale/Sale! 2.40%
Events 1.97%
Offer/Offers 1.86%

As you can see from the above table, personalization (represented above by the dynamic tag ‘firstname,fallback=customer’) has the largest positive effect on open rates, while the inclusion of personal pronouns such as ‘Your/You/You’ shows that speaking directly to your subscribers is an effective way to increase open rates.

While it’s great to consider length and include proven power words, it’s important not to over-optimize your email subject lines to try and milk a few extra opens. Tricks like including ‘FWD:’ or ‘Re:’ in your email subject lines may get people to open your campaigns, but when they realize it isn’t a genuine forward or reply they’ll be disappointed and likely not read on and/or click-through, defeating the purpose of sending the campaign.

So make sure that, regardless of what optimizations you make to your email subject line, it’s still an accurate description of the content in your email or your subscribers will be left disappointed upon opening your email and likely not open another campaign from you again.

3. Write compelling preheader text

The preheader is the short summary text that follows the subject line when an email is viewed in the inbox.

Birchbox - Compelling Header Text

Pre-header text is a critical component your subscribers use to decide whether or not they open your campaign and engage with your content. So how can you optimize your preheader text for mobile devices?

Given that the preheader text appears next to the email subject line, the two need to work together to tell a cohesive story rather than be thought about as two separate parts of your email campaign.

Derek Halpern does a great job of this in the announcement campaign for his latest webinar.

Derek Halpern - Compelling Header Text

As you can see, the subject line talks to a very specific audience (people who don’t yet have 1,000 subscribers) and while it makes the email super appealing to those people, it does limit its appeal to others.

So he counters this by using the preheader text “Got more than 1000? Open anyway…” to address the other recipients who have more than 1000 subscribers already.

By using the subject line and preheader text together, Halpern makes the email appealing to a wider number of recipients and increases the chance they’ll open the email and click-through.

4. Write simple, compelling body content

With your well-thought-out From name, subject line and preheader text driving opens, it’s time to focus on click-through rates with quality body content.

There seems to be this perception among marketers that good writing is a magical art. As if professional writers know a whole bunch of words everyday marketers don’t that will magically turn prospects into customers.

The truth however, is quite the opposite. Good writing isn’t about using any particular magic words, but about getting your audience to understand your offering and the benefits it brings them in the simplest way possible, as that’s what drives people to purchase.

Take a look at this campaign from Campaign Monitor customer Freshbooks, announcing the launch of their new Fundbox Integration feature:

Freshbooks - Compelling Email Body Content

Freshbooks do a great job of making it crystal clear what the product does and what the benefits are for the user (get cash for unpaid invoices). There’s no jargon or buzzwords, just some simple content that makes it clear what the offer is.

While your product may be different, there are a number of formulas you can use to help you write great email content. The PAS, 4 P’s, and BAB formulas are all easy to follow frameworks that help marketers like you write high performing email campaigns by positioning your product or service as the solution to your customer’s pain points.

5. Optimize your button

The buttons you use in your email marketing campaigns are the final step towards getting someone to click-through from your campaign and visit your website, and the words you choose for them can play a big part in determining whether someone will click-through or not.

But what do you write to ensure your button gets clicked?

The key is to use the button to reinforce the benefit you promised your reader throughout the rest of the email.

A good example of this is the campaign for the premier of one of Showtime’s new television programs, Penny Dreadful.

Instead of using generic button copy, Showtime utilizes the button copy to reinforce the exclusivity of this event by reminding its readers this is not just any television episode – but a season premiere.

Showtime - Optimize CTA Button

Here at Campaign Monitor, we’ve done several A/B tests comparing benefit-focused copy to generic copy and each time the benefit-focused copy has increased click-through rates by about 10%.

On top of using your button copy to reinforce the benefit, it can also help to use it reduce perceived barriers. You can do this by removing friction words.

Friction words are those that imply your reader has to do something they don’t necessarily want to do.

Common friction words include:

Download
Apply
Order
Submit

Think about it for a second, nobody wants to spend time downloading or applying for something, they simply want the end benefit downloading or applying for the item brings.

So to reduce the perceived effort of your readers, replace these friction words with frictionless words like ‘Get’ or ‘Learn’ and follow them up with a benefit statement (I.e. Get your free account).

When Michael Aagaard at ContentVerve tested this, he saw a 14.79% increase in conversions just by changing one word.

ContentVerve - Increase Conversions - Optimize CTA Button

In conclusion

The steady growth in smartphone usage and the subsequent reduction in human’s attention span has meant that great writing in your email campaigns is more important than ever.

If you can’t write a killer subject line that captures people’s interest, then you’ll never get them to open your campaign. And if you can’t explain your offer quickly and easily, you’ll never get them to click-through and purchase your product.

So next time you’re creating an email campaign to announce your latest product or feature, use the 5 best practices mentioned above to help you write a high performing email campaigns that gets opened and clicked, and ultimately drives sales & revenue for your business. (source: campaignmonitor.com)

Now you know how the secrets of How to Write Email Marketing Campaign that converts, why not check out our other email marketing boosting guide for tips on creating your overall email marketing strategy.

Admin blog Wednesday, January 11, 2017

21 Tips How to Write Email Marketing Campaign