How to Write a Marketing Email

Marketing emails are an incredibly important part of any marketing strategy. That’s why it’s imperative that you’re writing marketing emails the right way. Doing it right often means that opportunities can be grabbed and benefited from, rather than wasted. For instance, according to the Creative Content Company, 59% of consumers say that marketing emails have influenced their purchasing decisions. 

As well as this, Statista claims that email marketing offers a 600 return on investment. So with this in mind, it’s difficult to see why companies wouldn’t harness the opportunity to use emails as an effective marketing method. But it can be problematic if you don’t know where to start or how to do it properly. In this article, we’re going to tell you how to write a marketing email that actually delivers results.

Start with a clear goal

Before writing anything, you need to decide what you want the email to achieve. Your email needs to be effective when it comes to drawing customers in, generating leads and securing sales. With this in mind, a marketing email should focus on one main objective and not multiple ones that are competing with each other. 

When trying to come up with a goal to focus on, you should ask yourself whether you want clicks, purchases, newsletter sign-ups or even replies, or whether you want the reader to do a different action, like sharing on social media or linking your company in blog posts, otherwise known as outreach link building. 

Know who your audience is

Effective emails feel personal and relevant. The more specific your audience is, the more effective your message will be. So keep this in mind when it comes to picking and identifying your audience. To make sure that you’re doing it correctly, consider who they are, including their interests, age and profession, think about the problem they have and what motivates them. There’s no point targeting your emails to generic people if you want to increase leads and sales. 

For instance, if you want to sell lawn mowers, you aren’t going to get any leads or sales by targeting emails at students. Think carefully about what it is you’re offering and who would be most likely to be interested in that. For example, if you’re providing holiday insurance for the over 50’s, then target emails at those who are over that age, have retired and who like to go away regularly abroad.

Write an attention-grabbing subject line

The subject line is what the receiver is going to see before anything else. They don’t even have to open the email to see what the subject line is. However, this can be both a help and a hindrance. While a subject line can be attention-grabbing, enticing people to open it to see what the contents are, it can also be boring and lack lustre, meaning that a receiver could simply delete it before even opening the email. 

If you want to get over the first hurdle, then make the subject line as compelling and as attention-grabbing as possible. You can do this by keeping it short, whipping up some curiosity or urgency and highlighting a benefit to opening the email. In addition, avoid using all capital letters, don’t use spam terminology (like FREE $$$ or £££) and completely avoid making misleading or incorrect claims. 

Do your research, make sure that what you’re offering is legitimate, realistic and achievable. Not only does this mean that you can retain a happy customer base, but it also protects your reputation. As such, email receivers are more likely to open emails from you again in the future. Either way, the simplest part of email marketing arguably holds the most value.

Use a strong opening line

So, you’ve generated a compelling subject line, and the receiver has clicked on the email that you’ve sent. Good job. The next thing you need to do is get them to actually read the email, rather than simply look at it. To make this part successful, you need to focus on having a strong opening line. The first sentence needs to hook the reader immediately. To achieve this, it’s a good idea to ask a question, address a pain point and/or make a bold statement that you can follow through on. 

Focus on the positives

Your email recipients need to see a benefit of clicking on your email and opening it to see what’s inside. Whether you include this in your subject line or the opening line, you need to focus on the benefits and not the features. This is because people care more about what’s in it for them. For example, instead of using a statement like “our software has advanced analytics”, say “see exactly what’s working – and boost your sales faster”. This sort of phraseology helps to translate features into real-world benefits. 

Keep the structure simple

30% of emails are viewed for less than two seconds. The same source also claims that a single user’s attention span is only around 10-15 seconds. With this in mind, your email should deliver the message quickly, clearly and simply. You only have a small window to get your message out there, and so the structure of it is paramount. Keep the entire structure, from beginning to end, as simple as possible. 

A good marketing email is easy to scan, and so follows a basic email structure, including: a hook, a problem, a solution to that problem, the benefits of the solution and the call to action (CTA). Avoid using long paragraphs or blocks of text. Instead, write short paragraphs, bullet points and include some form of white space.

Include a call to action (CTA)

Tell the email recipient exactly what needs to be done next. Use one main call to action, more commonly referred to as a CTA. As you’re only using one, you need to think about it carefully and make it stand out. If the recipient only picks out one thing from that email, it should, at the very least, be the CTA. Some examples of a shot, simple CTA are “shop now”, “download your guide”, “sign up to our newsletter”, “book your free demo”, “book your consultation today”, “browse our range”, etc. 

Make it personal

Personalisation increases engagement. With this in mind, you need to make sure that you’re personalising the emails that you’re sending out. You can do this by using the reader’s name, referencing their past behaviour (such as what they’ve left in their basket), and segmenting your email list accordingly. According to Salesforce, personalised marketing emails can drive six times more transactions when compared to instances where marketing emails aren’t utilised, so why wouldn’t you consider personalising the marketing emails that you’re writing and sending out?

Test & optimise

No matter how well-written your marketing emails are, they’re no good if they aren’t being received by your target audience. Ultimately, a great marketing email comes from rigorous, thorough testing. When it comes to A/B testing, focus on subject lines, CTAs, email length and send times. While doing that, track open rates, click-through rates and conversions. This will help you to highlight who and what’s worth tracking and targeting, and what isn’t.

Avoid some of the most common mistakes

A well-written email marketing campaign can be derailed quickly, especially without the experience and specialist knowledge. If you’ve never done it before, then make sure you avoid some of the most common email marketing mistakes, including writing like a robot, using AI to generate the content, overloading the email with information, not having a clear CTA, ignoring how it looks on a mobile device and sending emails far too frequently. The general rule of thumb is to send marketing emails no more than two or three times a week.

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