For some of us, it’s prehistoric, but email marketing is actually one of the most cost effective marketing tools of our era. A proper email campaign will earn more conversions in less time than other channels that get a lot more hype. But at the heart of any successful email marketing effort is top notch email copywriting.

What Is Email Marketing?

Email marketing is the entire process of convincing channel visitors to provide their email addresses, segmenting them, and sending them a calculated flow of messages. The goal of an email marketing campaign can be to sell products, promote events, provide discounts, distribute information, mention new stuff, and generally keep contacts aware of your brand and products. 

What Is Email Copywriting?

The content of messages – both subject lines and body – sent as part of an email marketing campaign is built through copywriting. The goal of any email campaign is to trigger conversion, so in this sense, email copywriting is closely related to conversion copywriting. Effective email copywriting is highly convincing, condensed, and focused on the CTA. 

Differences & Similarities of Email Marketing and Email Copywriting

Email marketing and copywriting share a few properties:

• Both need to convert the audience.
• They are continuous campaigns adjusted according to where the lead is located in the marketing funnel. 
• Both need to strike a balance between seeming persuasive to being annoying.

On the other hand, email marketing has a wider target than copywriting. Email marketing seeks to gather as many leads as possible. At that point, the messages, and therefore the copywriting, are customized to increase the chances of engagement.  

Email Best Practices 

In some ways, getting started on an email marketing campaign is the most difficult part. You need to obtain the consent of leads, decide what messages to send out, and get a good response. To maximize each of these steps, you should:

Optimize your sign-up process. This could mean experimenting with different form locations in your marketing channels and even on the screen itself, and trying out various messages. It can be a good idea to provide a ‘sweetener’, such as a product discount or an informative download. Definitely avoid purchased lists; they are against regulations like the GDPR and usually provide poor results. 

Segment subscribers. This is most practically done through some type of CRM platform. The most basic segmentation is location in the funnel – is this the first email contact with the lead, or the fifth, and have they made any purchases? Additional segments can include location, origin, and any potential information that is part of the sign-up form. 

Re-engage, but not forever. Subscribers who do not react after a first email can be contacted once or twice more. It can help to provide motivation such as “we’ve missed you” discounts. However, once these attempts are made, any non-responsive contact should be deleted so as to improve your open rate. 

How to Write Email Copy

Most ad copy is supported by an image, but with email copywriting, words are all you’ve got. There needs to be an exceptional amount of attention paid to the subject line and the CTA, which should relate to each other. The message should be short, simple, and valuable to the lead, because the reader won’t continue reading unless the copy is interesting. 

To make sure that your email is pulling all of these elements together, conduct a five second test. Send a draft of the email and subject line to a few associates and give them five seconds to read the email. Then, ask them about the point of the email and what the CTA was. If they don’t quite get it, back to the drawing board. 

How to Nail Your Email Marketing

If email marketing has a theme, it’s to get the audience to start reading all of that wonderful copy. One effective step to encourage this is to personalize emails. How? Do it by referring to the contact somewhere in the subject line or text. There are several tools that can help with personalization:

• The basic method of building email contact lists is the sign-up form. With the right sign-up form, you can also gather valuable details. For instance, by knowing a lead’s birthday, you can send them a personalized greeting card. The trick is to design the sign-up form in such a way as to convince the audience to provide as much information as possible – A/B testing to the rescue. 
• A social media analytics platform can give you an idea of which of your products and messages are creating the most engagement. With this data, you can send emails that mention what’s ‘hot’ at the moment. 
• Email lookup tools can find essential details about your contacts. This can include their actual name, server location, company, and social media profiles. For short lists, you can use this data to manually customize your emails. 

Email Copywriting Tips

With more audience information, you can enhance your copywriting. For example, subject lines are a major factor in opening rates, while personalization and a recent hot topic can also have an impact. Let’s say that you recently covered eco-friendly products in a social media post that was very popular. So put all of these ingredients together with a subject line that says, “Dear XXX, do you know that our product loves the environment?” Then follow through with copy that explains why you have a green product, and what the recipient can do right now to help the environment. The main message of the email and the CTA should both occur ‘above the fold’, i.e. in the first paragraph. Save the rest of the text for details and more proof of your claim. 

Email Marketing Tips

All kinds of minor adjustments can be made in email marketing campaigns that add up to a big advantage. 

For example, the time of day at which you send an email can affect the open rate. There have been various studies on this subject. And there are even services that can calculate the optimal timing for your brand. Generally, the best time to send emails is between 8:00 and 11:00 on the first three days of the work week. 

Maintaining a professional look is also important. Emails should feature the company logo and an email signature, which includes the contact details of an actual person. It’s also a good idea to customize the preview text that appears, for example, on mobile phones and in Gmail. 

Finally, if a specific email covers the same product as, or leads to, a landing page, then the landing page should display the same text. Arriving at a landing page that has information that is inconsistent with the email can be confusing and result in a loss of trust. 

Make the Most of Your Email Marketing Opportunities…

…with Anyword’s copywriting platform. In only minutes, and with just a bit of information about your email campaign, Anyword will generate numerous versions of subject lines and main texts with excellent conversion potential. 

The AI-based technology can compose cold emails from scratch or rewrite existing texts. You can even choose from a number of tones of voice to fit your audience personas and make your email copywriting efforts even more productive. 

Each line of copy comes along with Anyword’s unique Predictive Performance Score. This is produced by a data analytics engine that understands what type of messaging has the most conversion potential for your specific audience. The score makes it easier to optimize your email marketing campaigns and simplifies your A/B testing efforts.  Enjoy more efficiency and create more conversions through Anyword's AI copywriting assistant, starting with a 7-day free trial.