Copywriting for email marketing
We’ve written a lot about web copywriting here on the Green Notes blog over the last couple of years, mainly covering copy for search engine optimisation and the best way to write effective website content. One web copy theme that we’ve only briefly touched upon, despite it being part of all our lives on a daily basis, is copy for email marketing.
Email marketing copy is an incredibly wide-ranging concept, and like every other area of web copy the quality of everyday examples varies wildly from the sublime to the sub-ridiculous. Email marketing itself, when executed properly, remains a phenomenally effective advertising medium, however there’s a fine balance in getting it right and wrong. Take a look through your inbox and the email marketing flyers that you’ve received today – how many of them have you responded to so far? Chances are not many, if any at all.
We’ve been creating email marketing at Green Media for nearly ten years, and have seen the industry grow from simple plain text snippets into interactive visual showcase mailers that have more in common with high-end websites. The recipient type has evolved just as significantly, from lone network administrators receiving a few mails a day on behalf of their company, into super-demanding web users that mercilessly cull hundreds of emails from their inbox without as much as a second glance every single day.
Here are a few email marketing copy tips that we’ve found useful over the years, covering some of the issues that should always be prioritised in copywriting for this medium.
Imagine the recipient
Put yourself in the recipient’s shoes. If your data list is refined then you’ll have a pretty clear idea of who it is you’re marketing to, and the copy should be written accordingly. Selling Xbox360 games to teenagers clearly requires a different approach to marketing £100,000 Bentley cars to company directors in their 50′s. Imagine the recipient. Imagine what they’re likely to respond to. Imagine what they’re likely to be turned off by. Once you’ve done your first mailing to any list, for any product, check out the click-through and response rates to see what worked and what didn’t.
Is the call-to-action sufficient?
The call-to-action (CTA) copy is effectively the most important part of any email marketing. Without a carefully crafted CTA the reader won’t follow-up on the message, and the whole exercise will be wasted.
Again, the requirements of a CTA naturally vary, depending on what you’re actually attempting to get the reader to do. If you’re offering a freebie that you know they’re interested in, then the CTA will need nothing more than a straight-forward line and link. If you’re presenting something completely new to the reader, or selling a high-value product, then the CTA will need to be suitably detailed.
Don’t accidentally disguise your email as spam
With so much unsolicited spam email these days it’s rare to find a company junk mail filter that isn’t anything less than rigorous. These filters are on the lookout for any number of indications that an email is spam, some of which can be found in the most innocent marketing mailers. Characters such as “£” and “!” are typical examples of spam triggers, along with terms like “Sale”, superlatives like “Best” and anything vaguely sensational. So, it’s important to avoid these in your email marketing copy – especially in subject lines – or face the prospect of your e-flyer heading straight into a virtual bin.
Get in touch with Green Media for more information on effective email marketing.
Tags: e-marketing, Email Marketing, email marketing newcastle