7 Tips for Writing Killer Marketing Emails
Many business owners either fear writing marketing emails, or don’t know where to start. Our advice? Let emails and marketing be fun.
There’s a phrase we stick to that encompasses the way we do our marketing here at Trusty Oak: “Market like a human.” This concept has produced wonderful opportunities for our brand.
These days, the only emails consumers don’t automatically delete are ones that can capture our attention and provide value. So how do you provide value and keep your consumers reading your content? Here are seven tips to write killer marketing emails.
1. “Market Like a Human”
Recently, a friend made the statement that “people buy the person, not the product.”
Don’t use intimidating terms in order to sound professional or write an email that begs your customers to continue doing business with you. Take your business owner hat off for just a moment and consider what YOU would want to read about as a consumer in order to connect with your audience.
2. Provide Value
Many people’s inboxes are flooded with content offers and companies trying to influence us to buy more of their products. We’ve already bought your product, please kindly leave our inbox alone, am I right?
So what are you doing that’s different? Why should past customers or website visitors open your emails? You can answer both by understanding your buyers journey, the three stages of the buying process that it takes for a potential client to arrive at your product.
- What situations do your customers face that make them realize they have a problem that needs solving?
- What options will they consider when deciding how to fix their problem?
- What makes your product the right solution to their problem?
Consider building some of your emails around some of these questions. “5 Reasons You Should Be Doing This,” “How-to-do-this in 5 Easy Steps,” and “7 Ways You Shouldn’t Do This” are great formats for marketing emails that capture attention and showcase value.
3. Create Engaging Subject Lines and Preview Text
You may run a serious business, but that doesn’t mean your email subject lines have to be. Funny, engaging subject lines have the most success and highest open rates in 2018. In your preview text, explain what sort of content is included in the email. But, again, give it flair.
Let’s use a mom and pop plumbing company for example:
Your subject line could read: “Uh oh, did it happen again?” with a preview text reading something along the lines of “So your 4-year-old put their G.I. Joe down the toilet for the third time this week? Here are 5 ways to unclog that toilet without having to hire the pros.”
It makes the consumer chuckle (and possibly relate) while also describing ways that they can avoid spending money when a clogged toilet problem arises (no pun intended).
Need more inspiration? Check out these 19 Tips For Writing Catchy Subject Lines
4. Include Video
Consider videos a “summary” of your newsletter or email. In the year 2018, we’re all looking for a shortcut. We quickly scroll and skim to ingest the information we need to know and we move on. A video is a great way to create engaging content that consumers will often opt to view when in a hurry. It also creates a relationship by connecting you, the business owner, to your audience with a personal message tailored just for their viewing. It’s a chance to showcase your personality, your company values, and offer a personal insight into what you want your audience to know within your newsletter if they don’t have the time to read the fine print below.
Our Trusty Oak CEO, Amber Gray, loves using Loom in our Trusty Oak internal newsletters.
5. Include a Call-to-Action… or Two
A no-pressure, informative email that provides value is great, but ultimately you want your readers to take an action. After all, a marketing newsletter should be a piece of content that helps further your company efforts and goals. A call-to-action can be a simple hyperlink such as “Click Here For More Information on This Topic” or a nice, formatted image that says “Need Us? We’re Here for You!” underneath your video.
Positioning is also important because let’s face it, we don’t all make it to the end of our emails. By placing a call-to-action after the first or second paragraph, your customers are more likely they are to engage and take the action that you’ve prompted them to take. It’s also a great way to break up text in order to keep your audience interested and your emails looking like more than a monologue. Which brings us to our next tip…
Here are 75 calls-to-action you can use in your next email
6. Use White Space and Bullet Points
Consumers find it hard to read long, drawn out paragraphs… and honestly, it can be overwhelming to think we’re being asked to read a book report in between cups of coffee and our daily commute. Breaking your content into shorter paragraphs and utilizing bullet points can be a great way to keep the readers scrolling through your content with ease.
7. Timing is Everything
When do you take the time to read your personal emails? Often it’s when you first wake up and check your phone, or maybe at lunch time while you’re sitting in the drive-thru, or maybe when you get home from work. Open rates and click-through rates will be noticeably higher when your audience has the time to read your emails.
Make sure to also consider the time zones of your audience if you’re running a company that can market and deliver to out of town buyers. If you have a real estate company in Idaho, but want to send a newsletter to potential buyers in California, simply remember that their lunch hour is an hour behind yours.
Surprise! Here’s a Bonus Tip For Reading This Far…
Did you know your company has an email domain reputation? A reputation is something that is communicated from domain to domain in order to “evaluate” your content and determine if your email will be delivered to the inbox or the junk folder. That’s right, not all of your emails are being delivered the way you wish they were.
Email domains like Gmail, Yahoo!, and MSN want to ensure they’re respecting their email clients by delivering content that isn’t being flagged as SPAM by other users.
So what does this mean? The more time your audience takes reading your email, the better your reputation. If the majority of your customers are leaving your emails unread, or deleting them, or marking them as SPAM – your emails will reach less people in the future.
With these seven tips for writing killer marketing emails, you’re on your way to sending engaging emails of quality that will boost your company’s reputation and increase your web traffic.
Now go on, open your email platform and be the champion marketer we know you can be!
