Email marketing is a powerful way to drive traffic to your blog or sell a product. But unfortunately, many people do it the wrong way. In this post you’ll learn how to write valuable email newsletters that your audience would love and eagerly expect.
First, let me share my experience with you about how “salesy” emails annoyed me and motivated me to try a more valuable approach to email marketing so my audience would not be annoyed by my emails.
Contents
What Email Marketing Should Not Be Like
The reason why I subscribe to any email newsletter is to get more value – content, knowledge, entertainment, money etc.
But after receiving about 5 to 8 emails, I unsubscribed because they were not what I expected. So, I analysed all newsletter emails that I unsubscribed from, they all have two things in common. They are:
- Emails did not provide as much value as anticipated or no value at all.
- The emails are consistently salesy. Repeatedly selling a product or offering promo discounts on a product or service.
Most marketers or even top brands get it all wrong when it comes to Email marketing.
They see Email Marketing as an opportunity to “sell and sell a product until they buy”. Or an opportunity to randomly send links to your audience via email and hope to get traffic.
It really does not work that way.
Also, keep in mind that open rate is not an ideal metric to judge the success of a your email marketing campaign.
Results of Writing Poor Emails
- Your audience would lack trust and confidence in you or your brand
- Opt-out or unsubscribe rate would continue to increase
- Even those who do not unsubscribe would be passive. They’ll open your email, skim through and exit EVERY TIME.
- Out of being disappointed, some of your subscribers may even report your email as spam.
Obviously, you do not want any of these kinds of results after taking your time to write emails to your audience.
So, it’s better to learn how to write engaging email newsletters.
Tips For Writing Better Email Newsletters
To write converting email newsletters that your audience would love, you need to keep a few things in mind.
1. Change your mindset about email marketing
To succeed in email marketing, you need to change your mindset about how you think it is.
Of course, your main goal in collecting emails in the first place is to sell or get more traffic, but if that is all you care about, you are bound to fail.
Do not see email marketing as an opportunity to sell or send traffic to your blog. See email marketing as an opportunity to create a rapport or build “friendship” with your audience.
They don’t know you before, yet they trusted you enough to give you their email, should you not take the best advantage just so they do not regret giving out their email.
This is the kind of mindset you should have about email marketing.
2. Focus on your audience not you
Most email marketers or even top brands focus too much on themselves and what they want rather focus on the audience and what the audience wants (or needs).
For every email, you want to send out, change your mindset and start focusing on your audience and what they really want or need.
Let this be your guide all through your writing process.
3. Provide value To your audience
When you start focusing on your audience, you’ll naturally want to provide value to them because you cherish their trust in you with their email.
Your major goal in sending out emails is to provide value to your audience. Every other goal should be secondary.
4. Keep it super simple
Today, there are many fanciful email marketing software that has so many interesting features.
The truth is that you really do not need 90% of all those fanciful features that this software offer.
To be candid, just a simple plain text email can get the job done.
Again, keep it super simple. Do not get distracted by how “beautiful” or “colorful” your email looks.
Step By Step Process of Writing A Converting Email
Basically, there are 8 steps to take in order to write a converting email to your audience.
Follow these steps one after the other.
1. Define your goal
Before you begin writing your email newsletters, you need to define your goal.
Of course, there are several specific reasons why you’d want to send out emails. It is important that you make that clear from the get-go.
Not sure what your goal is? Here is the question to ask yourself to help you define your goal:
What do you want your audience to do after reading your email? That is your goal.
2. Write a Compelling Subject
Writing a compelling email subject is too important. This is the first thing your audience would see and they have just 2-3 seconds to decide if they want to open your email or not.
But you really need to be simple also and avoid words that can be filtered.
Using marketing terms like Buy, offer, discount, promo, etc. would only make providers like Gmail filter your email to the “promotion’ section instead of hitting their inbox.
If you are sending your audience to a landing page or article, a question version of your topic could suffice. Or a rephrased shorter version that literally makes sense.
For example, if your blog topic is “how to make your dog your friend”, a good subject could be “Do you want your dog to be your friend (first name)?” or “Make your dog a close friend now (first name)!”
The subject is important but you do not need to overthink it.
As long as it logically makes sense, you are good to go.
Read More: How To Hyperlink In Gmail Mobile App
3. Introduce your email with a problem statement
Another tip that can help you write better email newsletters is to provide a problem statement at the beginning of your email.
Sticking to our earlier example, our problem statement here could be:
“Hello Stephen,
Do you know that many Dog owners are not even close to their dogs anymore. Recent study shows that about 17% of Dog owners today do not spend as much time with their dogs anymore.”
The point here is clear, stir some level of curiosity in your audience.
This first statement could strike your audience especially if he’s well-targeted to have a similar problem.
4. Summarize your solution
You probably have captured the attention of your audience with the problem statement.
It’s now time to offer them hope.
Your summarized solution could be:
“In case you are curious to know how to bridge the gap between you and your pet, we already published a detailed guide that outlines 10 practical steps to take in order to make your pet close to you.”
5. Make reference to your article (or landing page)
Next, you can simply make a reference to your article or landing page.
“Read our full guide here” or “learn more about the practical steps”.
If you are selling a product or anything related to that, do not write “buy now”. That’s too aggressive.
It may be better to write “learn more about XXX here” or “check out XXX”.
Simple and straightforward. But that’s not all…
6. Highlight what they will benefit in bullet points
Of course, there will be a level of resistance to clicking the link. It is just normal.
But your job now is to give your audience a reason to click the link or take action.
One way to overcome the resistance is to highlight what they will likely enjoy or benefit from in the article, product, or any action they are expected to take.
If you are sending traffic to a blog post, bullet list all major subheadings in the email thus:
“In our guide, you find out:
- XXXXX
- XXXXXXXXXX
- XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
- XXXXXXXXXXX”
On the other hand, if you are sending traffic to any product or sales page, similarly bullet list the solutions that the product provides.
Or find a way to adapt the template to whatever action you want your audience to take.
7. Express confidence in your content
At this point, the level of resistance should have reduced but if at all it still exists, there is one last hope – express confidence in your product, landing page, blog post, or any expected action.
Simply write:
“I’m super confident that you’ll gain practical value after doing XXX…”
You may also insert your call to action and reference link again after expressing confidence just so they do not have to scroll up again if they are already convinced of taking action.
8. Closing pleasantry
This is the simplest part of it all. Simply write something like
“best regards,
Stephen from Digitalacce”
You really do not need to have footer links to all your social media platforms or other unnecessary things that could distract you.
Remember to keep it simple.
What To Keep In Mind About Writing Email Newsletters
At this point, you now understand how to write converting email newsletters to your audience but there are some things to keep in mind.
1. Template is flexible
This email newsletter template works for almost any niche. But you need to know that it is also flexible.
The template is not a one-shoe fit-all-sizes kind of template.
Hence, the writing method or template could vary slightly depending on goals.
Try as much as possible to adapt the principles and align them to your email campaign goal.
2. Writing perfect email Newsletters would not fix poor audience targeting
No matter how perfect your email newsletters are, if you are targeting the wrong audience, this strategy would not work for you.
Get your signup strategy right and ensure you are getting the right audience.
Also, you can segment your audiences into separate lists based on interest or demography.
3. Just one CTA is perfect
One common mistake email marketers make is having too many calls to action or clickable elements for different actions in the email.
Just one call to action is best and this CTA can be placed not more than twice in your email body.
The only other link should be the unsubscribe button.
Social links or all other fanciful stuff would only distract your audience from taking the one action you want them to take and they likely end up doing nothing.
Conclusion
Always respect your audience for trusting you enough to give out their personal email. This should propel you to want to give them value.
To recap, here are the 8 steps to take in order to write compelling email newsletters to your audience:
- Define your goal
- Write a compelling subject
- Introduce your email with a problem statement
- Highlight your solution
- Make reference to your solution
- Highlight potential benefits
- Express confidence in your solution
- Closing pleasantry
Of course, you can always tweak this email template to suit your desired goal.
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