7 Tips to Owning Your Email Copywriting

Email copywriting is a game changer in the marketing world. Its ROI is incredibly high, with a proven £31 return on every single £1 spent. And with almost 100% of people with email addresses checking their inboxes once a day, it’s a prime market for any company looking to further engage with their audience. That’s where our reliable email copywriting tips come in handy.

After all, an email inbox is always open and will be checked for enticing subject lines on a regular basis, making this one of the most effective marketing channels you’ll ever come across. Use this to your advantage when trying to market your business; if your email clearly has something to offer, the end user is going to click on it!

But putting together this kind of content can be tricky. So if you’re wondering how to write copy that engages, it’s time to really own your email copywriting with these 7 tips that’ll help you to score the conversion rate you’ve always dreamed of.

What is email copywriting?

As any email copywriting agency will tell you, email copy is there to generate sales and provide a direct link to your audience. If you’ve got their email address, you’ve essentially got a peek into their world and you need to be able to relate to that. And that’s done using your email copy itself – at its core, email copy is a sales pitch.

You’re writing for someone who’s either bought from you before, or could buy from you in the future. In both situations you’re looking to convert them. In order to do that, you have to think about who you’re writing for and what they need in their lives, and how you can offer something enticing enough for them to click through to your offer page.

How to write an effective marketing email

No matter what industry you’re in, and no matter the marketing campaign you’re running, it’s the email copy itself that’s going to sell. It’s what you need to focus on to engage your customers and pad out that mailing list with actionable leads. Because of this, you need to know how to write email copy and put together an email template capable of converting the reader into a customer.

And if you’re struggling with writing a marketing email of your own, it’s worth it to look into an email copywriting service to craft the content for you. A professional email copywriter can work with you to determine your conversion needs and create the kind of copy that captures a reader’s attention within the first second.

But it’s always a good idea to learn how to craft interesting copy on your own. So, here are our top 7 email copywriting tips. Use them to help you redefine your marketing email outline and create copy that’s really going to sell.

1. Know your goal

You can’t write good email copy if you don’t know what you’re writing for. You need to know who your audience are, what you want out of them, and what KPIs to track as you go (more on that later).

Without knowing all of these things, you won’t know how successful your emails have been. You’ll simply be shooting them off into the dark, which is a waste of marketing investment.

So ask yourself: What do you want out of this campaign? And how can you be sure your email copy will help you get it?

2. Know your brand

Your emails represent your brand. And in an email that’s the face of your marketing efforts, you wouldn’t want your brand to come across as shoddy and poor, with no real knowledge of your audience base. This means you’ll need to write within the lines of your brand’s tone of voice.

What kind of company are you? How do you want your customers to perceive you? Are you writing in a recognisably-you kind of way? But if you’re not sure how you want your brand to sound, write up a few different tone templates, and go with the one that fits the best.

3. Take time with the subject line – really key!

Your subject line is the first impression of your business – for potential customers that is. It’s your first (and sometimes only) chance to get your reader’s attention to read your email. Take your time. When your reader reads your subject line, you really want them to be like, “tell me more!”. It’s hard to achieve, but you’ve got to appeal to their needs and really speak to them directly.

Cut out miscellaneous words to prevent confusion and use inviting language depending on your email’s purpose. For example, someone wanting to follow a high intensity fitness routine won’t respond to a subject line that isn’t similarly high energy and health focused.

4. Adjust your email copy for different audiences

You’ll always have a customer base filled with various purposes and you’ll need to write for all of them. Segmentation of your audience is key for targeting your copy to each group individually, usually via demographic. In the email marketing world, one size definitely does not fit all.

Similarly, with over 85% of email users checking their inbox via smartphone, you’ll want to adjust your copy for your mobile audience. More than ever you need to focus on your subject line and preview text to make that push notification incredibly attractive. But let’s face it, this is just good practice all round!

5. Write short and sweet

Over 120 business emails are received every single day per person. If you want to stand out from the noise, don’t waffle on with your copy. Keep it short and sweet for your potential customer’s convenience and do yourself a favour – the faster you get to the point, the less time they have to click out and delete the email.

6. Hook them with a good call to action

This is the most important part of your email copy. Your call to action is the final reminder that you’ve got something to offer, and it’s there to finally push the reader over the edge and make them decide to click through and spend money on your product. Use emotional language here to fire up their motivation or tug on their heart strings, and once again keep it brief. If you’ve got a discount for them, just tell them!

7. Never forget to edit!

Once you’re all finished with your copy draft, you’re going to have to go back through and edit. Your email needs to make sense and first drafts very rarely do! Most of all, a badly written email will often be classed as spam; always reread your copy and check for punctuation, grammar, and sentence structure.

Typos in emails are the worst – we’ve all seen them:

“- Email subject line here -”

“Hello <first-name>,”

“Brest regards”

“Have a lovely eeek”

The best email KPIs to set

The last of our email copywriting tips for you – setting your Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) to help you see if your copy is working. With some monitored KPIs, it’s easier to reach the sales goal you’ve set for your email marketing campaign simply because you know what’s working and where you’re going wrong.

Here are our top 3:

Click-through rate

The most basic KPI you can follow but still one of the best to track to see how notable your emails are in the first place. Your email subject line will be to thank for how high or low your click-through rate is.

Your click-through rate is incredibly easy to calculate:

• The number of addressees who click on the link in the email divided by the number of emails you sent out, multiplied by 100.

A good click-through rate is usually between 5% and 15%. The more personalised you make your copy, the higher this number tends to read – as long as you appeal to your audience correctly.

List growth rate

This is a good KPI for lead management as it simply tells you how fast you’re growing. It’s another easy one to calculate:

• Number of new subscribers minus the amount of unsubscribed addresses divided by the overall number of email addresses on your list multiplied by 100.

Don’t panic if you’ve got more unsubscribes than new subscribers. Mailing lists will always decay by about 20% each year, so you’ll always need to push your email marketing hard. This simple fact makes good email copy the most important thing to focus on for attracting new sign-ups.

Overall ROI

This KPI truly proves how valuable your email copywriting has turned out to be. First figure out what you’ve spent on your email copy and the total marketing campaign. Then work out how many leads you’ve gotten from these emails and how much profit each lead has made you. And then you can use this calculation to get your ROI figure:

• Money made in sales minus money invested in the email marketing campaign divided by money invested.

As we noted above, email marketing tends to have a high ROI. Once you’ve worked out this figure for your campaign, you’ll have a lot more ammunition to work with in crafting email copy in the future.

Do you need help with your email copywriting?

If you want to step up your email copy to bring in more leads, our email copywriting service is perfect for you! Work with our team of talented copywriters and we can help you influence your audience via a tailored email marketing campaign. We’ll make nailing that personalised email angle easy; just take us up on this offer by getting in touch!