Email campaigns are an often underrated marketing tool for businesses, despite being one of the most powerful and cost-effective. For businesses large and small, email campaigns and marketing sequences extend your reach, grow your audience, and inspire consumer action if they’re crafted correctly and tactfully. 

Here, we’ll work through the principles of persuasive email writing and how a strong, compelling email campaign will help drive clicks to conversions and grow your customer base. Remember, the buyer’s journey is usually anything but linear, even with a perfect setup.

Persuasive Email Marketing Basics

There are a few basics we need to cover to understand the foundation of a compelling email that makes recipients click “open.”

👉The first is to know your audience and what piques their attention and interest. 

👉Understanding how to create succinct, cohesive, and eye-catching subject lines is the second step. 

👉Knowing how to structure your email body to get information across efficiently and without fatiguing the reader is third. 

Now, let’s hone those basics and refine them a bit.

Know Your Audience

As with most marketing strategies, you’ll want to create an audience avatar or two to understand your readers’ motivators, needs, and pain points. Creating some reader personas can help refine the language you use in your emails, the keywords that capture attention, and how you structure your email content.

This also helps you visualize how your audience will perceive your email series.

Wrangle Your Subject Lines

The subject lines are probably the most important part of the email, in that they’re what motivates the reader to actually open it. If you want to take advantage of a strong ROI with an email campaign, take time to craft a stellar subject line that’s personal, attention-grabbing, but not spammy.

When you’re creating an entire campaign, make sure these subject lines push the narrative your campaign is following. Be mindful about how each email follows its predecessor and sets up each succeeding email afterward. People are wired to recognize patterns, and creating those subtly will keep an audience hooked, even three emails in.

Do:

• Be clear, not clever. Avoid clichés and vague subject lines in an attempt to be mysterious. You want your reader to know what’s in the email, just enough to motivate them to read more.
• Find a balance between curiosity and urgency. Teasing language toward a consumer benefit can be your ticket to a click. Think an “only 24 hours left to claim this killer discount” type of vibe.
• Lead with the benefit, always. Tell your reader that what’s in the email is going to be important, useful, or educational for them.

Don’t:

• Use spam triggers like “act now” or “free!!!” Excessive punctuation and emojis will land your email in the junk folder more often than not.
• Use misplaced humor or riddles in a subject line. Readers either won’t bite or will add you to the spam list.
• Be too dry in your subject line. While you don’t want to be obnoxious, you don’t want your email to sound lifeless or “too corporate.”

Ignite Inspiration

When your email is opened (and if you follow those recommendations above, it will be,) that’s where the clock starts ticking. The first few seconds of reading are the most important to grab attention and keep them hooked until the end.

Compelling first lines are a great place to start. Consider using one that acknowledges a problem, asks a question, or offers a surprising stat or fact relevant to the rest of your body content. Prime the reader to read further.

Remember that relevant language to your audience, grammatically correct sentences, industry-specific terms that resonate with your audience, and visually appealing graphics can all be tools you can work into your formatting.

Don’t cram content into an email body that takes a reader minutes to get through. Generally, 10-11 seconds is all the attention you’ll get.

Keep Your Email Marketing CTAs Consistent

While the CTAs at the end of each email don’t have to be the same, be mindful about how they relate to each other. Is your email campaign developing a more curated contact list with each click conversion? Is it motivating the reader to buy a particular product or accessories each time?

What you’re asking the reader to do will decide how you craft your CTAs to complement each other. 

When in Doubt, Just Let Dez Write It

If you don’t have the time or don’t know where to start with an email campaign, consider outsourcing to a content and copy specialist. They can help take the hassle and stress of logistics and content creation off your hands so you can spend your valuable time refining your other marketing endeavors and building your business reach.  

With Dez, a quick call is the first step toward boosting your conversions, creating more traffic, and slamming home runs with each marketing campaign in this year’s deck.

Let the “Just Let Dez Write It” team handle your content this year! Contact us and let’s get your content working for you.