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Email marketing is a great way for you to connect with your customers.
Emails help establish a personal connection with your subscribers at scale — helping you to build trust and credibility while also reminding your subscribers of your existence. Though we receive an average of 88 emails a day, email is still widely regarded as one of the most effective marketing tools at our disposal — and for good reason.
The average click-through rate for email marketing in the Asia Pacific region is 3%. That means you can expect to drive approximately four visits to your site for every 100 emails sent. Compare that to average click-through rates of 1.91% on Google’s search network and 0.35% on its display network, and an average CTR of 0.9% for a Facebook ad.
Then factor in the cost of sending an email and you can see why email marketing is rated so highly for its return on investment (ROI). Of course, seeing a decent ROI from your email marketing assumes the content is something its recipients actually want to read.
Subscribers have shown interest in you and your business by signing up to join your email list. They’ve told you explicitly that they want to hear from you. But all it takes is one click from them to unsubscribe. So what should you put in your email newsletters to keep their attention and build the relationship?
Unfortunately, bad email newsletters are a dime a dozen.
Whether it’s the design, copy, or the marketing message itself, if your recipients aren’t reading and being swayed to act, you’re not going to see much, if any, return on investment.
Think about your inbox…
You probably get a mix of emails from brands you admire and others that you’ve just been too lazy to unsubscribe from, but never open. Think about the email newsletters you read religiously. Right now, I’m a big fan of Jill Wise because everything she shares feels like it’s written directly for me and for years I’ve been a Really Good Emails fangirl so I can stay up to date with the latest in email marketing.
So, how can you create email newsletter copywriting and design that your customers actually want to read and look forward to receiving?
5 ways to improve your email newsletter copywriting and design
1. No one likes a hot mess
Too many newsletters are a mess of information.
You know the ones. The newsletters that are packed to the brim with so much content that you don’t know where to look or how the content is supposed to help you. You probably spend milliseconds scanning the email before trashing it or you might delete it immediately upon sight.
Email newsletters can all too easily become a dumping ground for general business information — for new hires, new offers, new blogs, new podcast episodes, upcoming events, etc — and they serve as cluttered and unfocused marketing efforts as a result.
In contrast, good email newsletter copywriting has a common thread. The focus is on a specific topic.
So, instead of creating email newsletters about your business in general, get more specific.
An example of a great email newsletter is BuzzFeed’s “This Week in Cats“.
Though BuzzFeed writes about pretty much everything under the sun, they write this specific newsletter for people who love reading about cats and drive more engagement to their content on this specific topic as a result.
If you’re a cat lover, would you prefer to receive an email newsletter about cats or a generic roundup of all sorts of Buzzfeed articles?
Your newsletter shouldn’t be for everybody. It’s much more valuable to have a clear concept that appeals to a specific audience than trying to be everything to everyone.
In short? Pick a theme for your newsletter. It will allow you to better tailor your email content to your audience and will avoid reader confusion.
Subscribers love consistency and knowing what they can look forward to. By picking a theme and determining what frequency you can consistently commit to, you’re laying strong foundations for email engagement and conversions.
Now and then, you might want to switch things up, but keep your audience and their expectations in mind. If you plan to stray from your usual timing, frequency or topic, let them know in advance.
2. Don’t rush your email subject lines
Even if new subscribers are consistently signing up for your emails, there’s no guarantee that they will open your emails once they receive them.
This is what makes your subject line so important.
We all judge a book by its cover. Even when we know we shouldn’t, we do it anyway.
As advertising great, David Ogilvy said: “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar.”
Subject line tips
- Make sure your subject line is fifty characters or fewer so that will be displayed in full in the majority of inboxes.
- Generally, subject lines that are formatted in sentence case (rather than all caps or capitalising the start of every word) get opened more because they’re easier to read.
- Don’t use the same subject line again and again. Using a generic “March Newsletter” subject line is a huge waste of inbox real estate. Instead, keep your subject lines original.
- Create a sense of urgency (if it’s applicable).
- Inspire curiosity by trying to pique your readers’ interest about what’s inside — for example, ask a question or tease an impressive stat.
- Have some fun! Use puns, humour and personality to stand out.
3. Make the most of your preview text
Preview text, also known as a pre-header, is the little snippet of text right after your subject line.
Think of it as a sneak peek into what’s inside your email. It’s essentially your second chance to convince your subscriber to open your email.
You might want to highlight your most popular piece of content or the most surprising fact, statement or question in your email, or highlight a special offer. If you’re stuck between two subject line ideas, use the preview text as your opportunity to get both in there!
There’s also an industry trick to getting your preview text to format correctly, without also previewing the rest of your email content in a long and unappealing string of words and characters.
4. Keep it simple
If you follow just one piece of advice I’m sharing in this blog, make it this one.
Subscribers won’t read everything. To go back to that David Ogilvy quote: “On average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy.”
This means a few things for your emails:
- Make it skimmable — if I’m scanning down the page in a second or two I should be able to grasp the more important content.
- Put the most important content first. It’s more valuable real estate.
- Use short sentences and easy-to-understand words to improve readability.
Newsletters that are 250 words or less are also more likely to be read all the way through.
If you need a hand simplifying your email newsletter copywriting, The Hemingway App is a great free tool for getting practical tips on improving your copy. If you want to include longer content, consider putting an intro to the content in the newsletter with a link that the reader can navigate to if they want to read more.
But don’t give yourself free rein to add as many links as possible to your email newsletters. The more links you have, the more competition you’re creating in your own email. If you want successful click-through rates, I’d highly recommend sticking to only one primary call to action per email.
That’s not to say you can’t include more than one link in your newsletter. But you should know which call to action you want to prioritise and make it clear to your readers that this is the one action they should take. Keep in mind that 81 per cent of emails are read on mobile devices. It’s crucial that your emails are easy to read on any device.
5. Test and learn
There are always ways to further improve your emails, ensuring more of your subscribers are reading them and acting on them as a result. And the best way to do this is to test changes to your strategy and content.
I’ve talked about running split tests on the podcast before, but here’s a quick recap if you’re not familiar with the term. Split testing, also known as A/B testing, is a way of comparing two emails in order to determine which is the most effective.
In an email A/B test, you set up two variations of one email and send them to a small percentage of your total recipients. Half of the test group is sent Version A, while the other half gets Version B. The result, depending on what metric you are measuring, determines the winning version. This winning version is then sent to the remaining subscribers.
Most email marketing platforms (like ActiveCampaign and Klaviyo) offer in-built A/B testing functionality to simplify this process for you. However, if your platform does not, you can still conduct A/B tests (although a little more manual intervention will be required).
A/B testing ideas
1. Subject lines
Using emojis, personalising with first names, questions vs. statements, ideal length.
2. Your sender name
Opting to use a real person’s name vs using your business name.
3. Send time/day
Weekdays vs weekends, mornings vs nights, etc.
4. Call to actions
Text link vs button, colour, wording, placement in the email, number of CTAs in the email, all caps vs lowercase, etc.
5. Landing pages
Where are your emails directing to? Is one landing page more likely to result in conversion than another?
6. Email design and length
What you think looks good might not match up to what your subscribers want to see.
7. Email copy
Tone, structure, and short-form vs. long-form all have an impact. (Short form is generally the winner, but every audience is different so it’s still worth testing.)
8. Timing
What day and time is more effective for delivery?
Whatever you test, the most important thing is that you never stop doing it.
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