Our Tips & Tricks for Stand-Out Email Copywriting

If you’re reading this, you’re undoubtedly familiar with email marketing. Most of us are subscribed to more mailing lists than we can count on one (or two) hands. Every time we make a purchase online or enter our email for a fantastic introductory deal (who else has a file full of 10% discount codes?), we are likely signing up to receive email marketing campaigns from that particular business. They notify us when there is a sale, a new product or a hot collaboration that they think we’d enjoy. And more often than not, they get results.

The Data and Marketing Association has reported that two-thirds of customers have made a purchase due to an email marketing message. So, with 4.3 billion email users worldwide, it’s no surprise businesses are cashing in on this epic way of connecting with their customers. And you can, too – keep reading for our tips and tricks to achieve standout email copywriting.

But first, what exactly is email marketing?

It’s pretty self-explanatory—email marketing is a form of digital marketing in which a brand sends promotional information to a list of subscribers via email. The goal of such marketing can vary between organisations, but for most, it’s to drive sales, increase brand awareness, and nurture audience relationships. 

Email marketing is by no means new or innovative. Marketing professionals have been using this means of communication for almost as long as they’ve been using the web. The first email marketing campaign, sent by a marketing manager at Digital Equipment Corporation, was published in 1978 and generated $13 million in sales. 

And why is email marketing important?

Email marketing is an effective way to build audience relations and get results. It’s personal and intimate; email marketing is a direct line of communication with people already interested in your brand enough to offer their personal information. If you’re not convinced already, here are five stats that may encourage you over the edge: 

1. 60% of consumers prefer to be contacted by the brand through email. 
2. 88% of email users check their inbox multiple times a day. 
3. 320% more revenue is driven from automated emails – more on this later. 
4. 50% of B2B marketers say email marketing is the most impactful channel. 
5. 59% of consumers say marketing emails influence their purchasing decisions. 

When to use email marketing

Email marketing is a great tool that can be used to: 

• Build relationships
• Boost brand awareness
• Promote your content, such as blogs
• Generate leads, 
• Market your products
• Re-market products
• Share behind-the-scenes updates

But before you decide when or how you may use email marketing, there are a few things you need to consider:

Know your email marketing goals

Before you pour your heart and soul into nailing your email copywriting, it’s essential that you define your goals. What do you want to achieve with your email marketing strategy? You may want to build connections with your customers through personalised engagement, boost your brand awareness or market your products and services. Whatever the reason, make sure it’s clear – you’ll want to craft your copy and marketing strategy with this in mind.

Pinpoint your target audience

Identify your target audience and understand their preferences, behaviours, and needs. Determine if email is a preferred communication channel for your audience and if they are likely to engage with your content. To find your audience, you should: 

• Conduct thorough market research to identify the demographics, interests, and behaviours of potential customers.
• Use surveys to gather insights directly from your existing customer base, including demographics, preferences, and pain points.
• Analyse social media platforms to understand audience demographics, engagement patterns, and conversations related to your industry or niche.
• Study your competitors to identify their target audience, messaging strategies, and areas where you can differentiate and capture market share.
• Use analytics tools to track website visitors, analyse traffic sources, and identify audience characteristics such as geographic location, device usage, and referral sources.

Consider your content

Good email copywriting is first about assessing the type of content you want to deliver to users via email. Email marketing is effective for sharing promotions, news, updates, educational content, and more, but not everything fits the bill. Evaluate if your content can be effectively communicated through email and if it provides value to your audience. For example, while the latest product discounts work well, content that may not transfer as well to an email marketing campaign includes: 

• Long-form articles: share links to these as opposed to copying and pasting the entire article into the body of the email. 
• Complex infographics: intricate infographics with small text or intricate details may not render well in email clients or may be difficult to view on mobile devices.
• Heavy multimedia files: large video or audio files may be a little glitchy if sent in an email marketing campaign. 
• Irrelevant or loosely related content: sending content that is not relevant to the recipient’s interests or needs may result in disengagement and damage the sender’s credibility.

Finding email subscribers

If you haven’t already got a definite list of email subscribers, the first thing you need to do is build one. Once you start building your email list, it is something you’ll need to keep working on every day, week or month that follows. This is because your email list will degrade over time. 

For example, say we start with 1000 subscribers. In the beginning, these 1000 people may be pretty engaged. But in a few months, some users who signed up to the list with their work emails may change jobs. Those who have are now rendered inactive. Then, there are those who signed up for a particular deal on a specific product. They’ve brought that product now, they’re no longer interested, and they unsubscribe. The point is that the numbers will steadily dwindle if you don’t actively grow your email list. 

To find and grow your email marketing subscribers, you can: 

1. Create and promote unique email content
2. Encourage subscribers to share or forward your emails
3. Segment your email list and share personalised offers
4. Create a new lead generation offer (i.e., like our free SEO checklist)
5. Create a free resource that requires a sign-up to access it
6. Promote exclusive or time-sensitive content
7. Share your newsletter on social media
8. Share your newsletter on high-traffic web pages on your site
9. Use a pop-up banner on your website
10. Publish links to gated offers on social media

A note on GDPR

For companies operating in Europe, when building your email marketing list, you need to consider GDPR or risk getting yourself or your brand in trouble. Handling personal data is no laughing matter. In brief, you must not send marketing emails to individuals without specific consent. For more information on the nitty-gritty of GDPR and email marketing, this guide is a pretty good read.  

Getting into it: creating your email marketing campaign

Your email marketing campaign consists of multiple features you need to get right for the campaign to succeed. Here are our top tips:

Think about design

The design and layout of your emails are fundamental. Nobody wants to read a huge block of text – as much as they don’t want to engage with a hard-to-navigate email message. You’ve got to think of your customer’s user experience. Keep paragraphs small, choose a clean font and use images to break up text and add structure. Use bullet points and text boxes to pull out important information and utilise buttons for a standout call to action.

Mailchimp suggests “laying out all the elements for your campaign in a hierarchy, putting your most important information or the main takeaway toward the top so people can quickly scan your email if they’re short on time.” You want to make your emails as easy to read as possible. And a good design will encourage your customers to engage with your carefully crafted email copy.

But if you’re stuck for ideas and need inspiration, head to Really Good Emails to look at the best email copywriting examples in circulation right now.

Speak to the right audience 

As with any piece of copywriting, knowing your audience is a crucial part of email copywriting. Refer back to your buyer personas. You’ve got to deeply understand what makes them tick to persuade them to take action. And we’re not just talking about tone of voice. Segmenting your larger audience into smaller groups is an excellent way to effectively engage with your audience and send the right emails to the right people.

You can label these smaller groups based on their buying behaviour, interests, or other information such as location, age, or gender. No customer is the same, and it’s virtually essential to create an experience as personalised as possible. For a little more detail on the topic, check out Neil Patel’s article on using email segmentation to increase your conversion rate.

The Content Marketing Institute notes that “providing an email message that resonates with a subscriber increases the likelihood that the recipient will do something with that content, such as sharing it or taking another specific action.” Working with and tailoring your emails to these smaller segments of your audience will pay off—your content will be more direct, more relevant, and more likely to encourage click-through.

Nail the subject line

Your email’s subject line will be the difference between a customer opening your email and throwing it straight in the trash. It’s an essential part of email copywriting and should never be an afterthought that you add just before hitting send. Business Insider has some great tips on what you need to do:

• Write it first: if you conquer your email subject line first, you’ll write the rest of your email with intent. Know what message you are trying to get across and live up to the promises you make in your subject line.
• Keep it short: when the typical inbox only reveals 60 characters of a subject line, with mobile phones showing as little as 30, you’ve got about 6-8 words to hit the nail on the head.
• Think about keywords and know where to place them: with such a small space to get your point across, you’ll want to ensure all the essential words and information are at the beginning. Eliminate pointless filler words and think about searchability and filtering when you write, too. You want your email to be easy to find if a customer wishes to go looking.
• And finally, keep it simple and focused: one action. That’s all you need. Don’t confuse your customer with a million different places to go. Set one goal and show them the path to get there.

Nail the preview text

The sister to the subject line, your email preview text is just as important. This line acts as a peephole into the rest of your email, but it should work in partnership with your subject line. Your preview text should: 

• Provide key details. If your subject line introduces a summer sale, your preview text may say something like, “Sarah, do you want 60% off?”
• Tease an incentive
• Elaborate or expand on a curiosity-building subject line
• Ask a question
• Include a call to action or an instruction. For example, while your subject line may say “50% off on all trousers”, your preview text may say, “Open this email to claim your code”

Personalise your emails

Yes, you may be sending the same email to two hundred people on your list, but your subscribers don’t need to know that. Personalising your emails is email copywriting best practice. Your customers will appreciate your time gathering and processing the data required to address them correctly. Research backs this up, too. According to a study by HubSpot, personalised emails have 26% higher open rates and an improved click-through rate of 14%. That’s a big difference for a bit of extra work.

Exclusivity wins the race

You’re ready to write your email message, but what do you actually write about? Email marketing works well when there’s exclusivity in the mix. Consider revealing details about a new product ahead of its launch, offering a discount code just for subscribers, or launching an early-bird pre-sale for an upcoming event just for those signed up. Treat your subscribers like VIPs, and they’ll look forward to your emails and the exclusive content they contain.

Avoid industry jargon

It’s pretty simple – don’t overcomplicate things. The chances are your customers aren’t going to be experts in the field just like you – so don’t talk to them like they are. Avoid using industry jargon, long, boring sentences and phrases that make your email copy sound like a research paper. Your customers want to be informed, possibly entertained and driven down the almighty sales funnel. You don’t want to send them to sleep.

It’s useful to be useful

“What makes you want to open an email? Our guess is a piece of information you don’t already have,” says Mailchimp. And they’re right. You subscribe to a brand’s mailing list to discover something you don’t already know – something exclusive, as we mentioned previously. And this will be a significant factor in determining whether your emails are read or discarded.

Send your readers new, hot-off-the-press information that’s useful to them. If you’re in B2C, it might be something like a new collab, an upcoming product launch, or, for online learning, a new course or tips and tricks that the recipient can action immediately.

That last point is equally effective for B2B email copywriting—give your reader something they can do straight away to improve their business. It could be a highly pertinent nugget of information or a checklist that they can apply to improve a vital business process. Our experience is that don’t be shy about giving away really valuable information—that’s the stuff that converts.

Optimise your email campaign for mobile devices

You need to optimise your email marketing campaigns for mobile, and that’s because you can expect up to 78% of your emails to be opened on a mobile device. To optimise your email marketing campaigns for mobile, you should: 

1. Use a responsive design: Ensure your email template is responsive, meaning it adapts to different screen sizes and resolutions. 
2. Keep it concise: Mobile users have limited screen space, so keep your email content concise and focused. Use short paragraphs, bullet points, and clear headings to improve readability.
3. Large, tappable buttons: Make any call-to-action buttons large enough to be easily tapped with a finger on a touchscreen device. Leave enough space around buttons to prevent accidental clicks.
4. Optimise images: Compress images to reduce file size and improve loading times on mobile devices. Use alt text to describe images in case they don’t load properly.
5. Single-column layout: Stick to a single-column layout for better readability on smaller screens. Avoid complex, multi-column designs that can be difficult to navigate on mobile.
6. Readable font sizes: Use a font size of at least 14px for body text and 22px or larger for headings to ensure readability on mobile devices without zooming.
7. Test across devices: Test your emails across various mobile devices and email clients to ensure they display correctly and are functional on different platforms.

Length is important

Your subscribers will head to your blog if they want long-form content or to social media if they want a quick, witty tweet. The email copywriting sweet spot sits at 50 to 125 words. And research backs this up. Emails within this range resulted in a consistent response rate of over 50%. Avoid long descriptive sentences and pointless filler words. Your copy should be clear, concise and straight to the point. If it’s not, your response rate is proven to decrease dramatically.

Include a simple call to action

A clear, signposted call to action is paramount in persuading your customers to click and take the next step. Why promote a sale if you don’t have a link to shop? Why talk about an exclusive event if it’s hard to find where to buy the tickets? A call to action eliminates the tricky path a customer may take searching for what they want and, instead, directs them straight to the money.

Implementing automated email sequences

Automated email sequences are a great way of keeping new and old subscribers engaged from the get-go. An automated email sequence will: 

• Save you time and effort
• Ensure consistent communication
• Enforce personalisation at the scale
• Help you nurture leads
• Increase conversions
• And deliver more data-driven insights

An automated email marketing sequence can be beneficial at multiple points of the customer journey, but here’s a list of times when implementing automated email sequences can be particularly advantageous: 

1. Welcome emails: Automated welcome sequences are perfect for greeting new subscribers or customers. They set the tone for your relationship with them and provide valuable information about your brand, products, or services.
2. Onboarding sequences: For SaaS companies, online courses, or subscription services, automated onboarding sequences help users get acquainted with your platform or offerings. They guide users through key features, encourage product adoption, and reduce churn.
3. Lead nurturing: Automated lead nurturing sequences are ideal for guiding prospects through the sales funnel. By delivering targeted content and offers based on their interests and behaviour, you can build trust, educate them about your products or services, and ultimately increase conversion rates.
4. Abandoned cart recovery: Automated sequences targeting users who abandon their carts can help recapture lost sales. By sending reminder emails or offering incentives, you can encourage them to complete their purchase and reduce cart abandonment rates.
5. Re-engagement campaigns: For dormant or inactive subscribers, automated re-engagement sequences can help reignite their interest in your brand. By sending targeted content, special offers, or incentives, you can encourage them to become active again.
6. Post-purchase follow-up: Automated post-purchase sequences thank customers for their purchase, provide order details, and offer additional products or services that complement their purchase. They also encourage customers to leave reviews or provide feedback, which can help improve customer satisfaction and loyalty.

Testing your campaigns

You’ve written your email and have fine-tuned your email copywriting skills, but what’s next? The answer is simple – testing. We can’t stress enough how important it is to test your campaign. You’re not going to get it bang on straight away. A/B testing is a great way to plan a campaign around this trial and error – it can help you confirm or rethink your ideas and strategies while experimenting with different versions. Record and measure your results as you go and review accordingly to get the most out of your email marketing.

Need a helping hand?

The right email copywriting can ensure your emails cut through inbox clutter, engage your customers and ultimately drive sales. It’s a powerful tool, and whatever your aim, we’ve got the subject lines and content to achieve it. To find out more about our email copywriting service, get in touch.