What Is Email Copywriting & Why Does Your Business Need It?

On any given day, you probably open your email and see emails from businesses you’ve purchased products from. Maybe it’s the furniture website where you bought your new couch, or maybe it’s the monthly newsletter from your gym.

Do you open those emails? More importantly, do you find their content valuable? Do you click the links in the email?

If the answers to any of those questions was no, then the business might need to reconsider their email copywriting skills. After all, if the audience doesn’t read or interact (or god forbid, even open) the emails, then what’s the point?

There’s an art to email copywriting, and if done right, you can see improved open rates, click-through rates, and overall interaction.

Interested? Keep reading, it gets better.

Email Copywriting in a Nutshell

So. Email copywriting. What is there to know?

Well, let’s start with the goal of a good email. Are you:

·         Selling a product or service

·         Driving people to your site

·         Keeping them informed of important dates or events

The next step is to tailor your language to your goal. Selling a product is tricky if you haven’t established brand authority. You don’t want to come off like you’re making a sales pitch. You’ll instantly see a decrease in interaction, or worse – be sent straight to spam.

Email copywriting is all about driving your audience to the goal you want them to reach without losing them along the way.

How do you make that happen?

Email Copywriting Best Practices

There have been whole books written about best email copywriting practices, but obviously we don’t have that kind of time here.

This is a breakdown of what I think are the most important considerations to improve your email campaigns.

Be Relatable – Know your audience. Use slang they’ll understand, use gifs, memes, emojis, whatever will draw their attention.

Keep it Short – The average human attention span these days wavers right around 8 seconds. If your audience opens up your email and is immediately confronted with a block of text, they’ll click out. That’s a fact. Keep your sentences short, use images and video, and limit yourself to only the essential information.

Catch Your Readers at the Right Time – When emails aren’t sent at the optimal times, people often overlook them. The longer an email sits in an inbox, the chances it will be opened decrease. Catch your readers when they normally check their email. A solid baseline for your business is around lunchtime on a Tuesday or Wednesday. There have also been extensive studies done for each industry, so check those out too.

Your Business Needs Great Email Copy

Email has been around for a long time – considerably longer than social media, the other big marketing platform. It’s estimated that over 4 billion people worldwide use email, compared to just over 2 billion Facebook users. And that’s just the beginning.

It’s been recorded that 87% of business-to-business companies and 79% of business-to-consumer firms used email marketing campaigns in the past year. 

As you can see, there’s a lot of potential. But what the stats don’t tell us is how successful each firm’s email campaigns were. I’m sure a lot of them were unsuccessful. But the ones that did succeed absolutely used trained email copywriters.

The average return for an email campaign investment is around 400%, but that’s only if there’s a perfect mesh of email copy expertise, a good message, and a clear goal.

Does your business need an extra email boost in 2021?

I’ve been writing marketing emails for a long time and have a few tricks up my sleeve. Feel free to reach out and ask me your most pressing questions!