This is a guest post from Megan Wright at ChamberofCommerce.com.
Email marketing is a strategy that can yield an ROI of as high as $38 for every $1 spent and, thanks to the many tools available today, you can deliver an outstanding customer experience to boost conversion at a low cost.
However, our inboxes are overcrowded. As more brands are tapping into the power of email marketing, it’s not always easy to cut through the clutter and get people to open your emails or take action.
Cut through the clutter by learning to improve your email copy.
The key to email marketing success is to write high-converting copy that focuses on nurturing relationships with your audience, which can increase conversion.
Read on to learn how you can instantly improve your email copy.
1. Set your objectives.
Whether it’s making a sale or reading an article on your website, each email should focus on a single goal. Identify your objective and then decide on the one action you want readers to take.
Then, build the subject line and content around that goal to create a coherent narrative that’ll naturally lead to the CTA. Focusing on one objective also allows you to track metrics effectively, so you can increase the effectiveness of your email copy.
2. Define your audience.
Consumers expect useful and valuable information from brands. They’re much more likely to open and engage with your emails if the content is relevant to them. To understand your audiences’ challenges and desired outcomes, start by creating a series of buyer personas that document their demographic and psychographic information.
Interview your best customers to gather in-depth insights and use social listening tools to learn about the general sentiment. Pay attention to how your audience talks about their pain points and what they want to achieve, so you can adapt their language to write copy that resonates.
3. Segment your email list.
Did you know that marketers experience a 760% increase in revenue by segmenting email campaigns?
Based on buyer personas and customer data (e.g., purchase history, geographic location, preferences, how they interact with previous emails, etc.), you can implement a segmentation strategy to send the most relevant content and offers to each audience group.
Get the segmentation guide.
4. Send personalized content.
After you’ve set up audience segments, you can send personalized emails with targeted content to meet consumers’ expectations and increase your ROI.
For example, personalized email subject lines are found to generate an average of 50% higher open rates.
Also, incorporate email into your omnichannel marketing strategy by integrating your email platform with a centralized customer database. You can send the most relevant content and offers based on not only audience segments, but also the recipients’ interactions with your brand on other channels.
5. Write a killer subject line.
You can improve your email copy, but your copy won’t achieve anything if you can’t get recipients to open your emails! Given that 33% of recipients decide whether to open an email based on the subject line alone, you can’t afford to ignore this key component.
Find out what’ll entice your audience to open an email. Incorporate urgency, curiosity, mention of special offers, personalized content, relevance, and timeliness into your subject lines and track the open rates to see what makes your subscribers tick.
And if all else fails, consider implementing subject line formulas.
6. Optimize the preheader text.
The preheader text gives you an additional opportunity to tell recipients about the content of your email by expanding on the subject line, so they’re more likely to open your email.
Source: Campaign Monitor
Preview text is limited to 35 to 140 characters, depending on the email client and the device used to view the email.
To prevent key information from being truncated, put the most important content first and send out test emails to make sure the copy shows up properly on multiple platforms.
Learn preheader text best practices by watching the short video below.
7. Improve legibility.
You can’t get readers to take action if they don’t read through your email, so make sure the content is easy to read and digest.
Write in simple sentences and use short paragraphs. Structure the content logically, focus on one idea in each paragraph, and use white space to improve legibility. Use bullet points to enhance clarity and add images to increase engagement.
8. Use storytelling techniques.
Storytelling is an effective way to build intrigue and get recipients to read your emails. Stories not only entertain your readers, but they also trigger emotions and change brain chemistry.
You can use various storytelling techniques to create email copy that’ll spark the readers’ imagination, trigger emotional responses, and pique curiosity. Paint vivid pictures to engage your audience and build up the narrative to lead to the CTA.
9. Focus on the benefits.
If you want subscribers to read your emails, you need to do more than simply improve your email copy and diction. You also need convince them why it’s worth their while by showing “what’s in it for them” from the get-go.
Communicate how they can benefit from reading the email. For example, learning to overcome a challenge, getting the latest information on a topic they care about, or finding out how to take advantage of a special offer.
Easily optimize your CTAs.
10. Write conversationally.
To nurture relationships with your audience, write conversationally to make them feel like they’re talking to a friend. Don’t be boring and use humor, if appropriate, to make your content more engaging.
Address the readers directly as if you’re speaking to them one on one, eliminating any formalities to help your copy flow. Read your final copy out loud to see how it sounds when spoken. If you encounter a sentence that doesn’t flow well, adjust it until it does.
11. Build emotional connections.
Build brand loyalty and increase conversion by fostering emotional connections with your customers. For example, use language that resonates with your audience.
You can also tell a story to invoke a feeling, leverage relatable analogies to communicate a concept, paint vivid pictures with words to illustrate an idea, or use power words to elicit emotions or actions.
12. Add an appealing CTA.
To increase conversion rates, you need to prompt readers to take action by including an effective CTA in your email copy. The CTA should be clear, ask the recipients to take one simple action, and start with an action word (i.e., a verb).
Writing CTAs are an easy way to improve your email copy, as they need to be short, sweet, and easy-to-understand.
It doesn’t mean you’re hard-selling in every single email. You can ask readers to read an article on your site, share the email, or take a survey. This will help “train” your subscribers, so they’re more likely to take action when you send out an offer.
13. Leverage consumer psychology.
Increase the effectiveness of your email copy by tapping into consumer psychology, such as the fear of missing out (FOMO). For example, you can communicate scarcity and/or urgency (e.g., limited time or quantity) in your email copy to encourage subscribers to take action.
People look for social proof when making purchasing decisions, and you can increase conversion rates by featuring testimonials in your emails. Also, different colors evoke different emotions, so experiment with the designs of your email template and CTA button to optimize results.
14. Test your campaigns.
To find out what works for your business and what makes your audience tick, you need to track the results of your campaigns. Based on the data, you can set up a hypothesis on changes you can make to improve your conversion rates.
Then, use A/B testing to see what works better and make incremental improvements to your email copy. This method can be used to fine-tune your headlines, copy, CTAs, and more to help you find out what works best for your market.
Learn how to A/B test now.
Wrap up
Last but not least, remember that consistency builds trust and trust leads to conversion. Make sure you align everything in each email and the entire campaigns to deliver a consistent customer experience.
However, with the many moving parts involved in email marketing, it’s not always easy to keep track of each campaign and drip sequence. Setting up a system to track all the content can help you orchestrate a customer experience that builds trust and drives conversion.
To make sure that nothing falls through the cracks, you can use a “bullet journal,” which helps you create an index of all the tasks involved in each campaign, while breaking down a complex plan into daily and monthly action items.
No matter how you orchestrate your email marketing strategy, keep in mind that delivering seamless customer experience is the key to building trust and relationships that’ll drive conversions. So, as you’re learning to improve your email copy, be sure to improve your strategy overall.
Megan Wright is the Chief Editor for ChamberofCommerce.com. Chamber specializes in helping small businesses grow their business on the web while facilitating the connectivity between local businesses and more than 7,000 Chambers of Commerce worldwide.