10 Strategies to Design Email Copy that Converts

If there’s a marketing strategy that can yield an ROI of as high as 3,800%, wouldn’t you want to make the most of it?

This strategy is email marketing. However, our inboxes are overcrowded.

Your email copy become one of the most important aspects of your email’s ability to get recipients to take action.

1. Set Your Objectives

Whether it’s making a sale or reading an article on your website, each email should focus on a single goal like the recipient exploring irish luck at casino.com or checking out your new line of swimwear. Once you’ve specified the emails focus then identify your objective and then decide on specify the single action you want the person to take.

Then, you can create a subject line that is in line with that goal and the content the recipient can expect when they open the email.  

2. Define Your Audience

Consumers expect useful and valuable information from brands. Relevancy is key when engaging with your audience. Before you can know what’s relevant you will want to start by creating buyer personas of each of your customer types. This should include things like sex, geographic location, interested, socioeconomic status, etc.

Pay attention to how your audience talks about their pain points and what they want to achieve, so you can adapt their language to write copy that resonates.

3. Segment Your Email List

Did you know that marketers experience a 760% increase in revenue by segmenting email campaigns?

Your list segmentation should be focused around your buyer personas. Who they are, what’s important to them and their ability to purchase are all great placed to start. Use the data you already have about customers to segment them into buckets.

4. Send Personalized Content

After you have set up audience segments, you can send personalized emails with targeted content to meet consumers’ expectations and increase your ROI. For example, personalized email subject lines are found to generate an average of 50% higher open rates.

5. Write a Killer Subject Line

Your email copy won’t achieve anything if you can’t get recipients to open your emails! Most people choose to open an email primarily based on the subject line. Did you get their attention or was it irrelevant?

Find out what will entice your audience to open an email.

6. Optimize the Preview Text

The preview text gives you an additional opportunity to tell recipients about the content of your email by expanding on the subject line so they’re more likely to open your email.

Since you only have a certain amount of characters allowed in the subject line before the message is cut off (depending on the device being used), make the subject line short and to the point. Make sure you view what the subject line will look like in different device types before you send it.

8. Use Storytelling Techniques

Telling has been shown to be a great way to keep readers engaged with your email. You can use various storytelling techniques to create email copy that will spark the readers’ imagination, trigger emotional responses, and pique curiosity.

9. Focus On the Benefits

If you want subscribers to read your emails, you need to convince them why it’s worth their while by showing “what’s in it for them” from the get-go.

For example, providing internal information about how you solved a difficult problem. This is especially effective if the problem is one faced by most businesses like “how to drive more sales.”

10. Don’t Be Spammy

All caps and multiple exclamation marks in the subject line and email body are the equivalents of shouting at people online. Not to mention, they scream “spam” to both the recipients and the email clients’ filter.

With many email clients (e.g., Outlook, Gmail) tightening up their spam filter, a spammy subject line could impact your open rates. Not to mention, your deliverability will suffer if enough people report your emails as spam and you may even get blacklisted by your email service!