Email marketing is effective and has an extremely high ROI. But it doesn’t mean any email that you write and send will work. Even if you send emails at the best time when it is most likely to be opened and clicked, it doesn’t mean your emails will always work. No, it all comes down to how you write a marketing email. If you know how to write a marketing email, it will work.
Else, you’ll struggle in terms of open rates, clicks, engagement, and ROI.
Let’s find out how you can write an effective marketing email.
How to Write a Marketing Email
Several things go into a well-written marketing email. This includes the subject line, purpose, word selection, CTA, and more. Having a systematic process for writing an email will ensure you give due attention to all the critical variables.
And don’t overlook any of them.
Here are the steps you need to follow to write killer marketing emails:
1. Purpose
The reason why most of the marketing emails underperform is that they don’t have a specific purpose. If you are sending an email just to say ‘Hi’ to your subscribers, it won’t work.
Your marketing email must have a purpose and it must stick with it. Here is an example of a marketing email purpose:
Once you have identified a purpose for your marketing email, you can then identify email segments, CTAs, and other variables that relate to the purpose.
For example, the purpose of your marketing email could be to promote an upsell and generate 500 sales. You can then segment customers based on purchase history so that the email is only sent to customers who have purchased the core product.
A marketing email campaign will eventually fail if it is purposeless.
2. Sender Name
The first thing that people see and read is the sender’s name. If the name seems familiar, only then subscribers will click and open your marketing email.
A study found that 45% of people open an email based on the sender information and 34% open it after reading the subject line:
The first step is to ensure that you are sending emails from a known name. Use a name that your recipients are familiar with. This doesn’t have to be your business name.
When you are using a person’s name, make sure your recipients know the person. For example, if you signed up with Ahrefs and you receive an email from Tim Soulo (CMO at Ahrefs) and you don’t know him. You are least likely to open such an email because you don’t know Tim.
The vice versa is also true.
If you know Tim Soulo but don’t know where he works. And you sign up on Ahrefs newsletter to receive articles from Tim, an email from Ahrefs might appear alien.
So, the first rule is to make sure you are sending emails from the correct sender. And this can be best done by using a name your recipients are familiar with.
3. Email Subject
After reading the sender’s name, the next thing your subscribers read is the email subject line. Research shows that 33% of consumers open an email merely based on its subject line.
It has to be catchy and descriptive. It should explain the purpose of the email and why subscribers should click and read it.
Here are a few best practices to write killer email subject lines:
- Using the recipient’s name in the subject line increase the open rate by 18.20%
- Having 6-10 words in the subject line boosts the open rate by 21%
- Personalized subject lines are 22.2% more likely to be opened
- Subject lines that use urgency have a 22% higher open rate
- Using “free” in the subject line increases the open rate by 10%
- Emails having “fw:” in the subject line have 17% less open rate than emails without
- Using the word “newsletter” in the subject line decrease the open rate by 18.7%
- Emails with no subject line have 8% more open rate than emails with a subject line.
4. Email Body
The crux of your email marketing is its body.
Having a high open rate doesn’t mean recipients will read your email too. A familiar sender name and a catchy subject line will persuade them to open your email, the content then has to play its role.
A poorly written email will have a low CTR and won’t be read.
Two key factors improve the readability of your email:
- Email design
- Email content.
Designing an email isn’t an issue as all the leading email marketing tools offer several responsive templates. Writing a persuasive email copy is the key.
Keep your email short. Ideally, your email should have less than 300 words. Shorter emails are easy-to-read and recipients don’t feel as if they have a task to do (as opposed to a long email that seems to be a burden to read):
Follow these techniques to improve email readability:
- Start your email with a powerful introduction
- State the purpose of the email in the first paragraph
- Add a CTA above the fold after the first paragraph so that those who don’t want to get into the details can click CTA right away
- Keep it personalized
- Write short sentences and paragraphs
- Use bullets and lists to make it reader-friendly
- Add descriptive subheadings with a focus on bold and underlined words and phrases
- Use a lot of white space as it improves readability and comprehension by 20%
- Avoid achieving too much with a single email. Keep it focused and stick with the purpose
- Add a CTA at the end of the email.
Effective Marketing Emails Require Testing
While these tips and techniques provide you with a great starting point to write an effective marketing email, it isn’t an absolute end. You need to do a lot of testing to improve open rate, CTR, conversion rate, and readability.
The best part: A/B testing subject lines, email content, and different variations of marketing emails is now a built-in feature in all the email marketing tools. You can easily do it without using any other tracking tool.
Testing is the only way to improve your marketing emails.
Featured Image: Pexels
