How to write amazing marketing emails

I know the feeling. You’ve got a new service or product, you’ve worked for months to get it ready to launch. You’ve spent ages working through every nuance of it and now you’re ready to present it to the world! And now here you are looking at a blank email thinking “where the heck to I start?”

Email marketing isn’t as easy as it should be. You should be able to just write about how amazing your product is, send the email out to your list of engaged prospects and bam, leads in your inbox! But we all know that isn’t the case.

Despite this, there are a few tricks that can help you create emails that are far more likely to get you the result that you want.

1.       The Subject Line

This is arguably the most important part of any email. This is the difference between someone opening it, or sending it to the bin. The amount of junk mail that we receive these days is insane. You need to be able to cut through the junk and create enough interest in one short sentence for someone to click on it.

I usually leave the subject line until last. Reason for this being, by the time you’ve spent ages whittling down your content to something concise and engaging, it’s likely the subject line may have become a bit more obvious to you.

If it hasn’t, here are some suggestions:

• Try and personalise it as much as possible. If you can add in a variable field and use their first name, company name or even industry – this is great.

• Keep it short! If you can have a subject line less than 10 words, you’re winning.

• Sometimes ambiguity is good. I don’t mean just writing ‘Open this for a surprise’, but some of the best subject lines I’ve seen have left me wanting to know more, therefore almost forcing me to open the email!

2.       The look & feel

I’m always banging on about brand, and the emails that you send out are no exception to this. Quite often, emails that you send out are one of the only insight people have into your business, especially if they haven’t engaged with you for a while. You need to make sure your brand image is represented entirely in everything that you put out into the world, so your email marketing is not something that should be rushed.

Make sure you spend time perfecting a few different templates which can be used for different messaging. Hire an expert to do this if you’re not confident! I highly recommend Paul Barlow if you’re not sure where to start.

3.       The content

The main thing when it comes to building your email is making sure that your key message comes across quickly. The % of people reading your email gets lower and lower the further down you have to scroll – so get to the point quickly! Add a title which states the purpose, a friendly intro explaining why you’re promoting, and then any supporting information further down.

One thing that people really struggle with is keeping things concise. When it’s your own product that you’ve worked on for ages, it can be really easy to get carried away going into a lot of detail about the ‘whats and whys’. But do your best to avoid this. If you manage to get people to click into your email, you really only have around 10 seconds of their attention at best – use it wisely!

4.       Your call to action

If you are promoting something which you want people to purchase or engage with, make it really obvious what they need to do. Don’t hide links at the bottom of the email, make buttons with very obvious calls to action included. Also, always remember to link through to the relevant pages on your website, as well as your social links.

So there you have it, those are my top tips to creating winning email content. But it’s also important to remember that things change rapidly in the marketing world! You should schedule reviews of your email in at least once a year – keep things fresh, keep implementing new ideas and find out what works for your audience. And never rush your email marketing