Writing emails is easy, for most people. You just say “Hi, h byow are you doing…lets get together”…or something like that. On the other hand writing an email for marketing purposes…and trying to gain the attention of a prospect and keep it is another story. You could find yourself stumbling over your words, wondering what you should say that will keep them from clicking away and deleting your email. Or you just might find yourself staring at an empty page wondering where to start to begin with.
Email writing for marketing purposes doesn’t have to be a painstaking chore. We’re going to talk about ways to make your email marketing writing easier in this post.
Emails are one of the most common forms of comunications with a potential customer because you begin forming a more personal relationship with your readers…along with you personally owning the email list you’ve created. Once you’ve created your list nobody can take it away from you.
When you write your emails, what you’re basically trying to do is convey an idea by expressing that idea through your emails. This can be difficult, especially if you’re a beginner.
But writing email after email doesn’t have to be hard. It’s a skill that can easily be learned. You’ll find that learning to communicate effectively through your emails will be the one of the most important skills you can master, when it comes to growing your business.
So let’s dive in to how to write emails easier…and one of the first topics we’re going to cover is…
Common Mistakes to Avoid When Writing Emails
Misspelled Words: If you send emails with a lot of misspelled words, you’ll appear untrustworthy as well as unintelligent. Misspelled words will take away your credibility. Trust is a very important factor in growing a sustainable business, so make sure you proof-read your message before you send it. If you have to use an online spell-checker, make sure you do so…there are many free ones you can use.
Extremely Long Email: There is nothing that will get an interested prospect to click off your email faster than an EXTREMELY long-winded email. In some cases-when you’re trying to educate the prospect- a long email is necessary. But even then, make sure every sentence is needed in the message you’re trying to convey.
Avoid unnecessary filler sentences that waste the time of the reader. You want to hold the attention of your reader throughout your message…shorter emails increase the chances of that happening.
Readability: Don’t complicate your emails with hard to understand words. You’re not writing to impress, you’re writing to express. Your reader shouldn’t need a master’s degree in English to read your message. Most people read at about the 6 or 7 grade level. Keep it simple and straight to the point. Use short sentences and paragraphs. Make sure you have wide spaces in your borders. If an interested reader opens your email and finds text that’s never-ending from border to border, I can almost guarantee they’ll click off to another site to find the information they’re looking for.
You also have readers who we call scrollers. They don’t read emails word for word until they find something peeks their interest. For these readers you should incorporate bullet points and subheads. There’s some free software that will show you the readability of your copy. Two I would like to mention is Hemingway App and Readable.io.
Sending too Many or Not Enough Emails: How many emails should an email marketer send? What constitutes as too many or too little.
Studies show 86% of consumers love emails if they’re interested in the company’s products or sevices…with 60% liking once a week and 15% one a day. Studies also show 35% of email marketers send 2 to 3 emails per month…21% send 4 to 5… and 19% sending only one per month. As for the rest, they don’t send emails at a consistent enough level to calculate a percentage.
So what do these studies tell us about how many emails should be sent? To be honest, I really can’t tell you. If you send too many, you stand the chances of irritating your reader. If you send too little your reader could completely forget about you. You see, the amount of emails you should send varies according to your situation…the product or service you’re promoting…or where your prospect is at in your sales funnel.
My suggestion is to determine where your prospect is in the sales funnel. If you have to educate them sending more emails might be the best thing. But if they’re on the cusp of buying maybe not as much. Once a week could be a good starting point and as you get better at knowing your audience and writing effective emails you can add on the consistency of your emails.
note: you can send hundreds even thousands of emails using a good email software.
Sending Emails Without Segmentation: The purpose of segmentation is to optimize the content of your email. In other words segmentation stops you from sending the same email to a long-time subscriber and someone who is new to your site. Sending targeted emails will give you a better response rate and also helps you avoid being a spam message. Think about it, how would you feel if you were a long-time paying customer and you opened up an email with the company you’ve been dealing with, only to find a message that’s introducing the company as if you’ve never heard of them. You would think the company was off it’s rocker. Or still worse, you would think you’re only a number to this company and they could care less about you.
Again a good autoresponder email software can help you in the segmentation of your email.
Bad Subject Lines: The subject line in your email is the first thing your audience will see when you send it. It determines if your email will get opened or not. Here is where you need to grab the attention of your prospect. If you don’t, guess what. Your message will get deleted. You’ll want to make your subject line as short and to the point as possible. I’ll get more info detail on this subject later in this post.
Not Having a Clear Call to Action: All content should have a clear call-to-action…whether it be a blog post, email, or sales page. Some writers feel that a call-to-action is being kind of pushy. But if you don’t have one in your email, your writing is all for naught because you’re basically leaving it all up to your reader to figure out what they should do. Leaving even just a little complication to your reader can cause them to go elsewhere to find the information they’re looking for.
When you write your call-to-action you should first determine if…
You want to move your reader to another location of content.
You want to create a sale.
You want to increase a subscription.
In other words, find out before you even begin to write the purpose of your email. Then you can write your call-to-action accordingly.
Give detailed instructions as to what your readers need to do…this not the time to be shy. Show them the benefits of taking that action(what’s in it for them). Make it simple for them to do…don’t complicate it.
With that being said, let’s go back to the topic discussed earlier.
Writing Subject Lines:
We’ve talked a little about subject lines earlier, and now we’re going to go a little deeper about them.
Here are four tips that will help you write better subject lines. You may not be able to incorporate them all in one subject line, but try and put as many of them as you can. The first tip in writing your subject line and getting your email opened is adding…
Urgency: You can add urgency in your subnet line in a number of ways. Here is a couple of them to get you started. Scarcity is one way to add urgency to the subject line. It could sound something like this: “purchase before we’re all out” or ” We’re only excepting the first 50 subscribers”.
Another way is through a Great Opportunity. It could sound something like this: ” This is the wave of the future, get in while the prices are low”.
If you do some research you can find many ways to incorporate urgency.
Curiosity: Curiosity is one of the strongest motivational factors that will get your email opened. People love mystery and if you can get the attention of your prospect without giving away what the message is going to say inside the email… it’s almost guaranteed your email will get opened. There are many ways you can go about achieving this. Here’s one example: “What insurance companies will never tell you, saves you thousand every year”. Do you thing a person looking for competitive rates for insurance will open the email? Of course they would. Here’s another which is in the form of a contradiction. ” Why you shouldn’t exercise everyday, this is much better”. Even if you’re an exercise buff, you can’t help but open this email to see what it says.
Personalization: Studies show that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened…along with delivering a 6x transaction date.
People like seeing their names, they also like hearing it. If you’ve ever done business, notice the difference it makes when you know your customers by their first name and when you don’t. Believe me it makes a whole world of difference.
You can personalize all of your emails through the automated process of an email autoresponder software. So if you were thinking “That’s a lot of emails I’ll have to write individually”, think again. A good email software will make the work easy.
Keep it Short as Possible: 77% of emails that are opened today are mobile. This is why your subject line should be no more than 50 characters or less. If your subject line is too long, it could get cut off in the mobile devices screen and your whole message won’t get read.
Go over your subject line and cut out any words that aren’t necessary…words like; update, the, newsletter and that. If you can convey your message clearly without using words like these, then don’t use them. Find what is important in your subject lines.
Before I end this post, I want to talk about other aspects to writing emails.
Writing Reminder Emails
A reminder email, is simply an email that reminds your readers of an action you want and they need to take-that they may have forgotten or not sure of.
When you write this kind of email, you want to first come across as being friendly. Be gentle but be straight to the point. Show them how you’re trying to help them through the benefits they’ll receive by taking a certain action.
Would you respond to an email that said…”YOU NEED TO SUBSCRIBE RIGHT NOW OR WE’RE GOING TO GIVE YOUR SPOT TO SOMEONE ELSE”! Of course not. That message comes across as being RUDE and overbearing. It also makes a customer feel as though something is being forced on them. Your email should go something like this: Important- a friendly reminder to send you information.
You also should find the right time to send it. You don’t want to appear desperate but at the same time you don’t want to be forgotten. A solution to that problem is to A/B test on delivery date and time using a software called Mailgen. Mailgen will help you narrow down a hat days and hours your readers are more likely to open and click on your email. From there you can decide when you should send a reminder email. A rule of thumb is the timing for sending this kind of email- just like stated earlier- will always vary.
For a red-hot prospect(Extremely Interested) 24 hours to 3 days.
If the lead is just positive(Likely Interested) 3 to 5 days.
If neither of the above 5 to 7 days.
These numbers aren’t written in stone, they’re just a guideline to help you in deciding.
Writing Follow-up Emails
Many times you’ll find yourself having to write a follow-up email. But one of the first things you’ll need to understand is, very few readers respond with a “Yes” on the first, second, third, even fourth time or more on a follow-up email. If this discourages you, don’t be, it’s part of the business. I can’t count the number of times I myself waited till the fourth or fifth time before responding to an email.
Here’s what statistics say:
18% respond to the first email sent…
13% to the fourth…
And an incredible 27% to the sixth…
As I said, this is the kind of business we are in. The quicker you understand that, the more patients you’ll have when formulating your email marketing sequence.
Once again, a good email autoresponder software will help you if you have hundreds of thousands of emails in your email list.
To Summarize
Email writing doesn’t have to be hard. Learn the skills that it takes to be an effective email marketing writer and you can just about write your own ticket in the business world.
If you benefited from reading this post and would like to read more, scroll down to the bottom of the site and click on the the Follow button. So until next time…be safe in these trying times, good success in your business venture, but most of all GOD BLESS!!!
The Affiliate Marketing Blog 