Facebook might have 3 billion users but that is still not enough to stop email, since email is even growing faster than most social media platforms.
With almost 4 billion users, email remains one of the most common communication methods and marketing between brands and their audience, eliminating social media, chatting, forums, etc.
Every year, email gets new hundreds of millions of users and in the near future, half of the population on earth will be using email for their business purposes, and for communication.
The main factor is not whether one should focus on Email marketing, or should ignore it for the sake of social media marketing because most online businesses know that the money is in the list, and to drive that money to their businesses, they need to do marketing to that email list, which in simple terms is email marketing.
But what most online businesses do not know or haven’t focused on yet is the actual process of sending out marketing emails in order to drive sales, and other results and achieve specific goals.
Now when a new business starts using email marketing as a way of communicating with their target audience, they face many problems, even from the beginning.
In the beginning, they need to have an email list which in itself is not a small task but an email list is not that hard and can be built by having a good lead magnet and a good high converting landing page that anyone can make with leadpages.
But what comes after making an email list is sending out emails to people, and in those emails marketing your business or its different services to achieve goals which most of the time are sales.
Sending marketing emails is not a difficult task, anyone can do that as simply a marketing email will be an email where something will be promoted and that is an easy task to do to write some lines promoting a product or a service but what is not an easy task and is rather difficult writing and sending effective marketing emails which are not only limited to just writing some promotional lines for a product but to drive sales to that product as well.
Writing a good marketing email is not only important for driving sales, there are other businesses whose goal is not to get sales rather they have other goals which are to sometimes make brand awareness or just build trust or a relationship with their audience, and even those businesses need to write a good email.
With the increasing number of emails, the number of businesses who use email marketing for driving results has also increased, and even if the other businesses might not be your direct competitors, they might have a different niche but in the inbox of your targetted customer, they are your competition.
Since email users also only spend a limited amount of time reading their emails, it is important that you make your email stand out, and make it worth enough to get the customer to spend their time reading your email.
But how do you do this, How do you write an email which not only is enough to market the product but also gets the user’s attention and then drives sales as well?
That is what I am going to teach you in this article, and if you are thinking that writing emails might be difficult, especially those which can bring results, then do not worry as after you read this article, writing effective emails will be like a piece of cake for you.
Divide your email list into more targetted small lists
Segmenting your email list is the first step that will lead you to write a good marketing email that will be enough for driving the results.
The better you will know your customers, the easier it will be to write an email that will get their interest since you will know which things they might be interested in and which things they are not interested in, and by using this data, you can write emails which will feel more personal to them.
When your email will feel personal to your email subscribers based on what you wrote in the email, it will make them think that the email has been written by a person who knows them very well, and hence they will give the email much more attention.
By segmenting your email list, you will be able to know much better which type of email will get your email subscribers more interested, the more you divide your email list into smaller groups, the more targetted email list you will have, and the more you will be able to target the deep interests of your email subscribers.
A great example of this can be 2 emails, one is the email of a customer who signed to your email list from a pop-up sign form while the other email is of the customer who was about to buy some products from your website but ended up not buying them.
Now you should make 2 different segments of these emails, in one segment, there will be the email of the person who signed up from a pop-up form, and does not have much knowledge about your brand, you need to introduce them to your brand, and slowly convert them into customers.
While the other segment of your email list will be of the person who was about to buy some products but then abandoned the cart, You need to send marketing emails to that person which can encourage them to complete their purchase which they abandoned earlier on.
According to this example, you will also need to make different segments of your email list based on the data you will have, and then when you will be writing emails for a different segment, you will have a much clear idea in your mind that what your email should be about considering all the information of that segment of your email.
If you are thinking about how big of a difference-making different email segment will make, then Mailchimp which is one of the biggest and oldest email marketing software and also has over a million users, did an experiment where they tested two email marketing campaigns, one with email segmentation and the other without email segmentation.
The results showed that the email marketing campaign with the email segmentation performed better than the other email campaign without segmentation in every single field.
But in the practical world, you might be thinking that what are the ways or according to which factors should you be segmenting your email list?
In email segmentation, the deeper you go, the better it will be since the more segments you can make, the better your email personalization will be, but it does not mean that without going very deep into diving and segmenting your email list, you cannot be successful.
In the beginning, you can just start with segmenting your email list on the basis of common factors which are found in every email address in your email list, for example, separate the email addresses which are from the USA, and then separate the ones which are from brazil, Just do it for different countries so then you will be able to send the email according to the country, and hence you will be able to target your customer in a better way.
Another thing that can help you to segment your email other than the country of residence is the language, for example, make different segments for those who speak English, and make another one for those who speak Spanish.
Gender is another factor that can come into play when segmenting an email list, make segments for the male and the female audience in your email list, then you will know the gender of your audience, and you will know which things will get them more interested in your email.
Age can also help you in segmenting your email list, making different segments of your email list according to the different age groups of your audience. When you do this, you will know that an email that can attract a teenager does not mean it will also attract an adult or an older audience, and hence you can write different types of email for that adult audience that has different interests than teenagers.
However, these are the basic things, which can only help to some extent in writing better emails, a better way to segment your email list is according to their behaviors, their response rate, and also the amount of time they are in the email list.
A lot of Email marketing software will allow you to segment your email list in different factors such as New subscribers which will consist of new email subscribers, inactive email subscribers which will be the segment of email subscribers who are not engaging with your emails, and so on.
With these types of segments, you will know the condition and the situation of an email subscriber in a much better way and you will have a much better idea in your mind of what type of email you need to write in order to get that email subscriber engaged.
Most ESP also provide you with features through which you can automate the emails that you want to send to different segments of your email lists, this will not only make sending and targeting each and every single segment possible but also less time-consuming and easy for you.
Know your goals
If someone comes and asks you why are you planning to start email marketing or even better why are you doing email marketing, what is the reason behind it?
How will you answer that question? will you just say that I do email marketing because it brings results?
To this, if the other person says what kind of results do you want from email marketing?
Those who can answer this question are on the correct route, they will know what their goal is and what type of results they want to get from email marketing, that is because email marketing is not used for a single purpose, it is used widely for different purposes and for different goals.
But those who will not be able to tell others what kind of results they would like to achieve from email marekting are on the wrong side of the road.
Sending emails without knowing your goals is just like practicing your accuracy with arrows without having a target.
Unless You do not know what type of goals you want to achieve from email marketing, you will not be able to write an effective email that can help you achieve that goal.
There are 4 types of emails that you can write in order to achieve your different goals.
For example, if you want to introduce your email subscribers to your products and also want to have a chance of getting some sales, you will write a descriptive email.
A descriptive email is an email in which you introduce the email subscribers to your product, You express your product in that email.
These emails are also a great way of marketing when you launch a new product and want to create some hype around it and make awareness about it.
However you will need to write a completely different email if your goal is to convince the customers in doing an action, you will need to write a persuasive email.
A persuasive email is a type of email that will be an effort from you in encouraging the email subscriber to do the required action.
That action can be anything but a great and common example of this can be an email which will encourage users to give a review to the product that they just bought, since giving a review is an action that you will want your subscribers to do, this email will totally be based on convincing your subscribers to do so.
However, there are also other types of emails that have very different purposes from convincing the subscribers to do an action or introducing a new product for getting sales.
Expository emails are those emails that you will be sending out to your subscribers in order to teach them how to do something, or for explaining a topic.
A common example of Expository emails is newsletters but they are not the only emails that come under Expository emails.
An email that will be telling users how to create an account also comes under Expository emails.
At last, we have narrative emails which are simply the emails that tell a story or at least are represented in the form of a story.
It can be the story of your brand, or of someone else who explains their whole process, ups, and downs, or other certain things which happened in a certain amount of time and can relatable to your email list.
After you have read all of these different types of emails, now you should also have a goal in your mind that you should be trying to achieve when sending out every different type of email.
For example, whether you are sending a narrative email and telling a story or you are sending a descriptive email, you should know what you want the email subscriber to do after he reads your email.
Steps for writing a good email
Have a good email list
Before you start writing an email you should first have an email list because without an email list and a targetted email list, even if you write the best email in the world, to whom will you send that email? to no one?
That is why first it is necessary that you have an email list and then start writing your email.
To make an email list, you have a lot of ways but one of the easiest and the most popular methods is using a lead magnet.
A lead magnet will be something valuable that you will be giving to your target audience in the return for their email.
A lead magnet can be anything, even the simplest material such as an Ebook or just a checklist can also be used as a lead magnet however more attractive lead magnets such as free tools also work very well. It depends on you, what kind of lead magnet you want to make.
After you have made your lead magnet, you will now need a landing page where the visitors will be able to access the lead magnet and also sign up for your email list.
The landing page will be a really important part of your journey when making an email list, because not only will it be responsible for collecting emails but also deciding your conversion rate which will be the number of people who sign up to your email list divided by the total visitors and then multiplied by 100.
Make sure that your landing has optimized for both mobile and desktop devices because if your landing page is not optimized for mobile devices, then you will be losing most of your email sign-ups since most of the landing page visits will be from mobile devices.
Also, your landing page should have a good conversion rate so that you can get the most amount of email sign-ups from the total number of visitors, all of these things can be achieved by making a landing page using leadpages which is one of the best landing pages and software for collecting leads.
Make a good subject line
After you have built an email list, now it is time that you to start writing your emails and sending them to your email subscribers.
But to do that, first, you will need to write a good and attractive subject line, it will be one of the most important parts when writing a good email for driving results.
No matter how good of an email body you write, unless the email subscribers open the email, the email body will be of no use.
That is why Subject lines play such a vital role, in fact, a third of your email subscribers will only open your email if they think that the subject line is worthy enough and attractive enough.
This means that a less attractive and bad subject line alone can eliminate a huge part of your email list from opening your email.
There are a lot of great ways through which you can improve your subject lines and make attractive and amazing subject lines that will make your email subscribers open your emails with great interest.
The first way is ofcourse personalization, not only does personalization mean to target the interests of the email subscribers but it also means to interact with the email subscribers as if you know them personally.
Adding the first name of your email subscribers in the subject line can get the attention of the email subscribers very well.
Writing long subject lines also does not make any sense, the longer the subject line will be, the higher the chances will be of email subscribers not reading the entire subject line, moving on to the next email, ignoring yours, and dropping your open rate for your email.
Another disadvantage of writing long subject lines is that a lot of Emails software to not tend to show the entire subject line if it is just too long and exceeds the word limits that they have set for showing an entire subject line.
If you have to add a lot of words in your subject line, then instead use short forms for some common phrases such as instead of using the entire phrase “in case you missed it”, used ICYMI, it will be recognizable by almost your entire audience and you will end up saving a lot of words with still delivering the message.
Make sure that you make a difference between the subject line of a spammer and the subject line of a legit brand like you but not using common spam words like BUY NOW.
Keep emails short
Just like Subject lines, Your email will also be more interesting and more attractive to read the shorter is, the longer your email will be, and the more chances will be there of your user just not reading your entire email just like the case with the subject line.
Even though you can include as many words and as much information in your emails, it does not mean that you have to take full advantage of that and end up writing a couple of thousand words.
People do not open their emails to just read a whole article in the email, Would you even try to spend 5 minutes reading a single email? most probably not.
Most of the time, when you receive an email, you might spend a maximum of 1 or 2 minutes reading an email, and mostly the time is even shorter than a minute spent by a user reading an email.
If you have to add some necessary information which includes the risk of making the email longer than the user would like it to be, then there are two solutions that you can apply in order to add necessary information with still keeping the emails short enough to keep the user engaged throughout the email.
The first way is to divide the information throughout multiple emails, so you can send a small part of that information in one email, and the other parts in other emails, in this way each email will be short, however since you should not be sending out a lot of emails to a user in a short amount of time, this method can actually extend the time your email marketing campaign will take.
The other solution is instead of putting all the information in the email, you should give a little description and then provide a link to your website or to your blog where the email subscriber can read the whole information.
This will be like a Call to Action and it can work very well for you.
You need to keep these little things in mind such as the length of the email as these things can sometimes frustrate the email subscriber and can lead them to click on the unsubscribe button and after that, you will never be able to send them emails.
Optimize your email templates
You must have experienced visiting some websites on mobile and then those websites not optimizing their ratio according to the screen size and ratio of your mobile.
When you visit such websites, what do you do? obviously, you immediately bounce back.
Similarly, you might have received some emails in your inbox which were not optimized according to the ratio of your mobile screen, what do you do here? you do the same thing, you just immediately close the email or you might even delete the email.
Now you need to think the same from your email subscribers’ point of view when choosing a template for your email.
In 2022, a lot of internet activities people now do on their mobile device which they were used to doing on their computer some years or some decades ago, and opening their emails has become one of those tasks which half of the people have started doing on their mobile phone.
More than half of the mobile users just immediately delete the emails which are not optimized for their mobile device.
This means that if you do not optimize your website, according to general data, more than a quarter of your email subscribers will delete your email.
That is why you will need to make sure that the email template that you are using is optimized for mobile devices as well.
Many ESP like Constant contact will provide you with a lot of templates that are mobile-friendly, even if you are using any other ESP, make sure that you do not end up choosing a non-optimized email template and ruin your email campaign.
Provide a proper guide for your offer
Keeping your email short is one thing, but it does not mean that you should just ignore important questions that the email subscriber will have in his mind regarding your offer.
Questions such as what your offer is about, for how long, will it be, or at what time the offer will be available, who is presenting this offer, the brand, and most importantly how your email subscribers can get access to this offer are the questions which do not take a lot of words to answer, they can be answered in one sentence but these questions can provide a proper route to your email subscribers from reading the email to buying the product that you are promoting to them.
For example, if your offer is interesting to your email subscriber but you do not tell them how they can access this offer, how will they buy the product? similarly, if you do not properly tell in your email what your offer is about, how will your email subscribers decide whether they should buy it or not?
without proper guidance, your email subscribers will probably end up not buying the offer since they will either not have proper guidance about the offer or they will not know how to get access to the offer, and they will be lost.
Add personalization to your email
Earlier on, we talked about adding personalization in the subject line, while that helps, we need to continue this strategy into the main body of the email itself as well.
When you will add the name in the email body, it will get the email subscriber even more engaged than he already was, increasing even more chances of getting a conversion.
It is all about making your email subscriber feel special, you have to make them feel that this email was specially written for them, and not just sent to an entire email list and they are just one little piece of that email list.
The more you try to talk personally to your email subscriber, the more it will make them feel that the email is special to them and the more engagement rate you will get, and you will end up getting more and more sales.
Also, do not treat them like an email subscriber, treat them like a person and use a second-person perspective when talking to the,m such as using “you” whenever you are referring to them.
It will make them feel that you are directly talking to them, offering your offer to them in person, especially to them, and convincing them.
Make sure there are no grammatical mistakes
When you’re writing your email and designing your template, it can be common thing to make multiple grammatical mistakes
And if you fail to spot these grammatical errors, all the time that you spent in making an amazing email, making yourself professional and personal to your email subscribers will be kind of going in vain.
Where you invested a good amount of time into making an attractive email, why not invest a part of that time into making sure that your email does not contain any grammatical errors?
After you have written your email, then read your email by yourself ie your subscriber would repeat this process one more or two more times to have more assurance of your email does not contain any such errors.
Another thing that you can do is use tools that help correct grammatical errors such as Grammarly which I myself use and it is very useful, you just need to go to chrome extensions and install Grammarly, you can also purchase its premium plans if you want better options for avoiding grammatical errors.
Most of the time, when you will make an error, it will correct it automatically or if not, then it will underline that word with a red mark and when you will click on that word, Grammarly would provide you with the correction of that word as well which saves a lot of time.
It is so simple to use, you just need to install its extension and make n account, and then you are done, it will start working on your browser and will start highlighting and correcting your mistakes.
Conclusion
If you are doing email marketing, you will already know how big of a platform on how big of an audience it can provide but you might not know how to utilize it correctly and write emails that can drive results.
Even if you have yet not started email marketing, you should start it because it has more users than any other platform such as social media.
When you will want to drive emails out of your email marketing campaigns, you will need to deliver the user with something which should be attractive enough to get your sales, and that is what I have talked about in this article.
From making a targetted email list, personalizing your subject line, all the way up to correct your grammatical errors, I have mentioned it all.