Writing an email newsletter or marketing email is different from writing a blog post or any other type of content. And to run effective email campaigns, you need to understand how to write great emails that your customers will actually want to open. So whether or not you’re a digital marketing expert, Australian Internet Advertising is here with a few tips for writing better marketing emails.
In this blog, we’ll primarily focus on how to actually write email content – rather than on details like how to manage your email marketing campaigns, optimize their designs, and other such topics. If you’ve ever had trouble writing great, effective email content for your business, you’re in the right place.
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1. Start With The Email Subject Line – It’s What Captures Customer Interest
First things first. The email subject line is the first thing a potential customer will see when they open up their inbox and see your email. And it’s really important to write an eye-catching, appealing, and attractive email subject line that will draw in a customer and get them to click the email – revealing the rest of its content.
Most of the time, we recommend that you keep the subject line to about 6-10 words, though some marketers will go up to 11-15 words. The longer your subject line is, the more likely it is to be cut off by certain email clients, so we’d advise you to keep things short.
How can you write great email subject lines? Here are a few tips.
- Write multiple subject lines, and pick the one that you think is the most appealing
- Be as clear and concise as possible
- Use limited-time offers – 50% off sale today only – to get customers to take action
- Incorporate numbers and lists to inspire curiosity
- Use personalization to improve subject lines
- Avoid using caps
2. Use A Scannable, Web-Friendly Content Layout
Just like a blog post or another piece of online content, you should use a web-friendly layout that incorporates small chunks of text, bullet points, images, and other strategies to “break up” the text and make it easy-to-scan.
If a customer opens an email and sees a few big paragraphs, they’ll probably skim it then close the email. But an email that’s laid out in an engaging, easily-digestible way is more likely to capture their attention – and get them to click on your CTA.
In addition to using an appealing, easy-to-scan layout for your email, you should make sure it works on mobile devices, too. More people than ever are opening emails on phones and tablets, so you need to make sure that your email will look good on devices of all types.
3. Provide Valuable And Interesting Content & Special Offers To The Reader
If you open up an email that’s been sent to your inbox and it’s boring, doesn’t offer you anything for reading it, or otherwise doesn’t provide value, are you going to read the whole thing?
The answer is “no.” And your customers and potential customers will feel the same way. If they’re going to spend time reading an email that’s been sent to them, they’ll want to get some kind of value out of it, such as:
- A special offer
- Useful or valuable information
- Details about a new product or service that may be right for them
Write with this in mind. When composing an email, ask yourself what the reader is going to get out of it – and why it’s worth their time. And if you can’t answer that question, you need to scrap the email and start over, or at least make some major changes.
4. Understand Your Audience & Write Accordingly
Whenever you’re writing any kind of content, it’s important to know your audience and how they will respond to what you’re writing – and to adjust your tone and style of writing accordingly.
For example, if you run an accounting service, you’d use a much more professional tone when writing marketing emails compared to someone who owns a hair salon or nail salon – they may use a more fun, quirky, and laid-back tone.
So think about who your audience is, and what type of writing style they’ll respond to. This can help guide your overall content direction and ensure you write effective, appropriate emails.
5. Know How Your Email Will Look On Different Email Clients
Depending on the inbox or client your customers are using – Outlook, Gmail, or Yahoo, for example – your emails can look very different. This can cause issues when trying to format your emails.
For example, different clients will cut subject lines off at different points – some may only show 60 characters, while others will show 80.
One great way to make sure your email looks good and is clear on all popular email clients is to use an email preview tool. You can find a list of the top 10 email preview tools on HubSpot.
These tools let you enter your email content and “send” it to a variety of different email clients so that you can see how they will look in your customer’s inbox when they’re opening your email, which can help you optimize the subject line, content, CTAs, and more.
6. Understand & Include Calls-To-Action (CTAs)
CTAs – Calls To Action – are a very important concept in digital marketing. To boil things down, a CTA is an element in your email that’s trying to get your customer to take a certain action, such as:
- Signing up for an appointment
- Viewing sale items
- Buying an item
- Scheduling a consultation
- Signing up for a coupon
- Leaving a review
Or another such action. To write a great email, you need to start with a CTA – and then work backward. Keep the CTA in mind, and create an email that will convince your customer to take that action.
7. Write Landing Pages To Improve The Effectiveness Of CTAs
Writing great marketing emails and CTAs is only part of the puzzle. To maximize the effectiveness of your marketing emails, you also need to design and write effective landing pages.
A landing page is, basically, a special website page that’s specifically tied to a certain CTA. For example, if you send an email encouraging a customer to sign up for a free webinar, the landing page would be a website page that’s optimized to get them to enter their contact information and sign up.
Effective landing pages are absolutely essential for maximizing the effectiveness of CTAs in emails. We don’t have the time to get into the details about how to write great landing pages in this guide – but luckily for you, HubSpot has put together a fantastic guide you can use if you want to learn more and improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns.
8. Run Your Emails Through A Grammar Checker
This is a simple step, but an important one. Everyone makes mistakes, and even if you’re a great writer, chances are that you’ll enter a few typos, miss some punctuation, or make some other simple grammatical errors when writing your marketing emails.
For that reason, we highly recommend using an online grammar checker like Grammar.ly when you’re finished writing an email. You can quickly scan the text to look for obvious errors and issues – and catching these before you send out an email helps your company look more professional and reputable.
Need Help Writing Emails? Contact Australian Internet Advertising Today
If you’re not a digital marketing expert, and you’d prefer to leave marketing strategy to the experts while you focus on running your small business in Australia, Australian Internet Advertising is here to help.
We specialise in email marketing, SEO, social marketing, and content marketing, and serve customers throughout Australia. If you’re tired of writing emails and want to leave it to the pros, we’re here to help – and we can manage your entire digital marketing strategy for you.
With Australian Internet Advertising, you can spend more time focusing on your business – and less time sending emails to customers. To learn more about our services, how we can help you, and why you should choose AIAD, just contact us online or give us a ring at 1300 304 640 to learn more about our services.
