How to write the perfect email that converts? This Email Copywriting Tips will help you with everything from your subject line to the From line and everything in between, giving you plenty of helpful tips on how to write effective emails that get people to take action.
Here are 10 tips on writing the perfect email that converts.
1. How to Consider Your Email Copywriting To Recipients
Your reader is busy and doesn’t want a long email, so get right to it. Start with your value proposition, along with an action statement. Consider using bulleted lists, especially if you have more than two points you need to make.
Copywriting expert Joanna Wiebe recommends that emails contain no more than three call-to-action statements, otherwise your message will come across as overly salesy and push people away.
Don’t forget to proofread before hitting send! No one wants to read a poorly written email, even if they like what you’re selling.
And finally, always put yourself in your customers’ shoes by asking yourself how they would prefer receiving your marketing emails. This way, you’ll never give them reason not to open and click on another one of your emails again.
2. Keep Your Copy Short
Good copywriting is all about capturing your audience’s attention and keeping it for as long as possible. When writing an email, you have about five seconds before readers lose interest.
Make sure your message is short and snappy, so that you don’t waste their time. Tell them what they need to know right away, or they’ll just move on. You don’t want them to do that—you want them engaged in your brand! Keep things brief and only include information if it is absolutely necessary.
People are busy, after all; why make their lives any more complicated? If you can get your point across with a few well-chosen words, go for it.
Never let your email become too wordy, either; keep paragraphs relatively short (about three sentences) to keep people from getting bored or overwhelmed by unnecessary details.
Use subheadings: Headings help break up text and grab users’ attention without distracting from main points.
3. Use Email Copywriting Tips When Writing Subject Lines
Your subject line is a critical piece of your email copy. The number one way to make sure your email gets opened (and continues getting opened) is by writing an attention-grabbing subject line.
If you can entice readers into opening your emails, then you have won half of what it takes to convert them into customers or clients.
Here are 5 powerful tips for writing that attention-grabbing subject line:
- Identify the purpose of the email.
- Determine the call to action.
- Draft multiple subject lines.
- Get feedback.
- Test your subject line.
Another key thing to keep in mind when crafting your email’s subject line is you statements.
It isn’t just enough to say dinner deals at Joe’s Bar & Grill tonight! Instead, write something like You could save 50% on dinner tonight! It isn’t necessarily grammatically correct English but it’s also more attract and personable than dinner deals.
As always, everything in marketing comes down to sales so be sure to tell people exactly what they stand to gain from reading your email and where they need go if they do want those savings.
4. Personalize Your Messages
The most important parts of writing email copywriting that converts is making sure your message is customized and personalized.
Sending an email blast with a stock message (that you copied and pasted from 10 other blasts) won’t convert nearly as well as sending a personalized email message will.
So, think about what your recipient might be interested in – it could be their industry news or events, something you know they like or want more information on, etc., then share that information with them via an engaging email.
5. Use Power Words That Encourage Action
Action words are vital if you want your email to convert. According to a report by Eyetrack III, people simply don’t read emails as thoroughly as they do other types of content.
This means that you need to use compelling language that encourages recipients to act right away. Action verbs like act now, click here, or start today will be much more successful than vague statements about how your product can help people.
After all, no one is going to take action if they aren’t sure what it is! By incorporating phrases that show urgency and focus on immediate results, you’ll encourage readers to do just that: See 10 ways our app can change your life! instead of It’s easy to see why our app is so popular.
(Other common power words include Free!, New!, Today!, Best!, and Big Savings!) Make your call-to-action obvious: Another thing that makes emails seem less genuine is when there isn’t a clear action associated with them.
Sure, from an outsider’s perspective it might seem like things are laid out in a way where someone knows exactly what they’re supposed to do next…but not always.
6. Lead With The Most Important Point In Each Paragraph
Here’s why people use email: It’s convenient. It saves them time. And it works! Email marketing is, hands down, one of the most effective ways for a company to grow its revenue and get new clients/customers through their doors (whether that door is in a physical location or on an ecommerce site).
The question is: How do you write emails that converts? What are email copywriting best practices? What makes a great subject line, how many emails should you send out per day/week and how long should each message be?
While there are lots of different rules floating around when it comes to writing great emails, they all boil down to two things:
- Relevance
- Trust.
7. Reduce Clutter To Improve Readability
When writing your email, avoid using excessive characters. A/B testing has shown that emails with long paragraphs of text are less likely to be read by recipients. Instead, break down your copy into smaller chunks so it’s easier for people to read on their mobile devices.
Remember, only about 20% of people who receive an email open it, and even fewer (12%) will read all its content—if you want a higher conversion rate from your emails, make them easy to digest quickly.
Most-Read Email Content: If you really want to know what types of content perform best in email marketing campaigns, check out HubSpot’s most-read emails.
8. Remove Stuffing Words Like Just And Very
One of my favorite email copywriting tips for beginners is to cut down on words like just and very.
Both make your writing sound casual, which is good if you want your customers to feel like they’re talking with a friend (or how many other brands are making them feel).
However, if you want customers reading what you have to say, it might be time to take out these two common stuffing words.
In fact, whenever I edit one of my clients’ email copy, it’s almost always littered with instances of these two words – I always remind them that they’re there more often than not because they’re used when a writer doesn’t know what else should go in that spot.
9. Have Someone Else Proofread Your Email Copy Before You Send It Out
Your own eyeballs can’t be trusted. When you’re looking at your own words, it’s easy to gloss over mistakes or write yourself right out of a sale. Before hitting send, always have someone else proofread what you’ve written.
If you don’t have an extra set of hands available, try using a tool like Grammarly or Hemingway Editor that checks for misspellings and grammatical errors.
10. Review Different Approaches, Then Develop Your Own Style
When it comes to writing copy for your marketing emails, you’ll find a lot of advice online on how to write these things.
A lot of it will differ because everyone has their own style, and that’s okay – just keep in mind that there are some universal best practices that can help you refine your own writing.
The key is just to review what other people have written and develop your own approach from there.
A good rule of thumb is to make sure that whatever you put out into the world, whether through email or social media marketing or anything else, reads like something you would say if someone were right next to you.
It needs to be authentic and speak with a human voice; after all, humans want interactions with other humans when they interact with brands.
