Insider Secrets to Writing Killer Email Copy
How can you dramatically improve the performance of your email copy? The following tips have been used for many years in print and are especially true when trying to get the attention of a busy online audience. Keep in mind that some people get upwards of 50 emails each day! It’s important to take the extra time necessary to tweak your copy and make the offer solid.
After you sell an audience with your subject line, they will open your message and – once again – you will need to sell them. In this sale, your audience will glance at your email copy and determine if they have time to read it now or… “save it for later.” I’m putting the words “save it for later” in quotes because the truth is, it doesn’t get saved for later. It either gets deleted immediately or it hangs around the inbox for a week, maybe two, and later gets tossed in an inbox cleaning session.
So how do you get the audience to make time now, to read your message?
This effort requires following two points…
Make it readable!
Make it easy for the recipient to take action now.
Write In Short Paragraphs Of Varying Length
Shorter paragraphs help improve the readability of an email. You can get more people to read two short paragraphs than you can to read one long one.
Focus on One Strong Call to Action!
There is great power when you deliver a focused email that has one strong call to action.
Emails that have too many different requests and calls to action tend to confuse the recipient. “What should I do with this?” By not guiding them with a singular call to action and copy that supports that one call you will find your email can fall short.
The best email messages I’ve seen have a single call to action that appeals strongly to the core audience. I see email all the time that confuses me about what the advertiser actually wants me to do. I don’t like being confused by advertisements.
Offer Something FREE
This has got to be one of the oldest tricks in the book, but it’s darn effective. Actually it’s an incredibly powerful tool to all advertisers in any medium. “FREE” is the most powerful word in advertising.
Offer something informational for free that is of great interest to your audience as an incentive to complete the desired action.
Sell with Benefits
This is one of the biggest selling strategies that people miss. You can give me a laundry list of features, but unless I’ve already been considering your solution, I may not be familiar with how those features will benefit me.
Benefits are not always obvious. Spell them out.
Are you promoting a seminar? Don’t just review the topics covered. What do the people stand to gain by learning this material? How will it make them better, more productive, wealthier?
Gain Trust or Go Bust: Ways to Establish Credibility
Credibility is key to getting trust online. Any skilled salesperson will tell you, trust is critical to generating sales.
Trust can take you a long way on the Internet and converts to better relationships and more sales. Make sure your email messages and your website have ample trust-builders. If you liked this article, I go into much greater detail with real life examples in my book, Killer Email Marketing.
Jason Lexell is the President of Digital Harvest Media and a Web marketing consultant with a passion for helping people. Jason has spent the last 10 years working with dozens of online marketing clients from Fortune 500 companies to mom and pop businesses teaching them to promote their products and services online. In his popular ebook Killer Email Marketing , Jason highlights dozens of proven strategies that have helped clients double their email marketing campaign results.
