How to write killer marketing emails

• Are your email open rates low?
• Do you keep losing subscribers?
• Do you never get replies from customers?

Writing email newsletters to your customers can be tough when you aren’t sure what to write about. You want to win more clients, attain more sales and grow your business. But if you really want to connect with your customers, you HAVE to make your emails about service rather than selling. 
Why?
Because once you start educating, entertaining and inspiring your readers – it’ll be 1000% easier to work with them in a paid capacity.
Here are 4 email marketing tips to follow to increase your conversions:

1. Write what your audience wants to read

The truth is, you’ll never really know until you ask.
If you don’t already have an excruciatingly detailed profile of your ideal customer, my question to you would be:
When was the last time you asked your audience their number 1 biggest problem?
It’s crucial that are you consistently collecting answers to this question in order to understand the type of content you should be creating. And this is exactly what you should be looking to answer in your emails!
Here’s a brilliant step-by-step example putting this theory into practice:
The team at Copyhackers, embedded a Typeform survey in the thank-you page for signing up to their Copy School course (via Unbounce) asking the simple question:

“What was going on in your life that brought you to sign up with CopyHackers today?”

and the answers alluded to an important keyword:

The word “confidence” was an important reason why people were signing up to their course, and so they modified their sales email copy to include their customer’s exact words and themes:
This tactic ultimately resulted in higher email engagement rates, better quality leads and sales. And by using their customer’s exact words they were able to sell the customer to themselves – not their products.

2. Spark a reaction 

Having a relevant email list, offer and copy is the bare minimum when it comes to email marketing in the age of GDPR.
The best way to coax a conversation with your emails is to prime your audience into making them feel an intended emotion.
Robert Plutchik’s famous “wheel of emotions” shows just some of the well known emotional layers:

If you’re writing emails to drive conversions, shares and engagement, you need to be using powerful and emotional language.
According to a study by Fractl, emotions related to happiness make up the top drivers of viral content:

So how can you invoke amusement, interest, surprise and happiness within your email copy, without overly hyping your products?

1. Imagine you’re having a conversation with the recipient face-to-face – adding personalisation will ensure your monotonous “email voice” isn’t boring the recipient.
2. Throw in word pictures and pop-cultural references – this will spark intrigue and add an element of excitement and trust.
3. Write with feeling! (edit without) – the more passionate you are in understanding your customer’s exact problems, the easier they will be able to connect with your email copy.

3. Don’t worry about length 

All too many failed email marketing campaigns begin with the sentence “we’ve tried that length before, it didn’t work”. You should NEVER let length get in the way to writing engaging content. If anything, it should be at the least of your worries.
There are hundreds of studies that suggest the optimum length for email conversion copywriting, but following these guidelines could actually be hurting your strategy. As long as your marketing emails tick these boxes, you shouldn’t be worrying about length.
Does it:

1. Provoke urgency: will the user want to click through your email?
2. Spark curiosity: does it leave the reader with important questions you’ll be able to answer?
3. Offer something interesting: is there something in it for the reader?
4. Sound personalised: are you using your customer’s exact language?

4. Don’t assume you’re a nuisance! 

If you think you are being a nuisance by sending out your emails, you either have:

1. A poor target list
2. A poor offer
3. Poor copy

In order to obtain new customers, improve loyalty, build brand awareness to ultimately generate sales – you need to ensure that you show up intentionally, and only send out emails when there’s a reason to. Checking your recipient data to ensure that your emails are correctly segmented also pays dividends to a successful email campaign.
Finally, it is important you continue to follow up and improve your email campaigns. Make sure that once a campaign is over, you are consistently monitoring the results and looking at ways to improve it for next time.
Email marketing is an essential tactic that marketers often underestimate due its decreasing interest amidst the growth of more exciting marketing channels like social media and video marketing. But let’s get one thing straight – email marketing is not dead; in fact, it is consistently growing and evolving.
As marketers, we need to be consistently testing ways to better improve our email conversion copywriting to benefit our brand and our clients. By following this email marketing checklist, you can ensure your email marketing campaigns are consistently engaging to your recipient.
If you’d like some help with your email marketing campaigns, get in touch with our email marketing team today.