Email Copywriting: 25+ Tips to Nail Your Strategy

Email Copywriting is the backbone of your email marketing campaign

It is what helps you to convey the right message, build connections, and establish trust and long-term relationships with your readers. 

The right email copy can convert a potential buyer into a long-term customer. A bad copy, on the other hand, can ruin your reputation right away from selling anything at all. 

Even though the copy is all about selling, writing one is more than that. You need to be perceptive, strategic, and impactful with it. 

Email copy includes the subject line and the email body, which convinces people to take a specific action. 

As a marketer or small business, you need to focus more on crafting your email copy.

Well, you got covered as through this article, you get 25+ actionable and practical email copywriting tips to implement in your email marketing campaign right now. 

best email copywriting tips 

Make Sure You Have A Goal Assigned To Your Email 

Effective email copywriting begins by taking the first step in apprehending the purpose of sending the particular email. 

Sending an email without a set purpose or a goal doesn’t only make it less impactful but also takes it far away from its effectiveness in driving action from prospects. 

Your focus should be on creating action-oriented emails which motivate prospects or readers to take the next step. 

So think, what do you want the subscribers to do after reading your particular email? 

And you will have to set a purpose or goal for every email or a particular email marketing campaign. 

You have to decide what they will do after reading the email

  • You want them to sign-up for your free trial. 
  • You want them to purchase your product
  • You want them to download your mobile application
  • You want them to visit your website 
  • You want them to follow you on various social media profiles.

Or anything else.  

Depending upon the action you want to take after reading the particular email will decide how you will frame your email copywriting. 

When you know the exact goal of your email, you can focus on crafting a copy of your email to encourage and deliver towards the goal only. 

For e.g., If you write an email where you want users to buy the product you’re offering, the copy will focus on selling it. 

It will highlight how the product can help them, its benefits, and other selling techniques to make a purchase right away. 

Embedding A Promise In Your Subject Line 

An email Subject line plays an integral role in the opening rates and conversion rate of your email marketing campaign. 

Moreover, when it comes to crafting the copy of your subject line, what truly makes it stand apart is its promise. 

That’s also what attracts and holds the reader’s attention enough to open it. It makes them curious. 

The idea is to infuse some ‘promise’ in your subject line in the form of copywriting. Now having only so many limited words, it becomes tricky and challenging to do that. 

You have to be precise, informative, and still punchy about it. It should make the reader curious and interested in the email body.

When you make a ‘promise’ in your email subject line, they get compelled to open it to get the promise delivered. 

But make sure you don’t go too ambitious with it as becoming unable to deliver it in the email body. 

This makes you untrustworthy and also leaves a bad taste in your mouth. Make it catchy and click-worthy. 

Knowing What Will Encourage Your Audience To Take Action 

To really know what will encourage your audience to take action after reading the email, you need to know them first. 

The more you learn about your audience, the better chance you will have of encouraging them to take action. 

You need to dig deep and know their preferences, wants, desires, needs, insecurities, problems, financial status, demographics, and much more. 

It also depends upon what kind of product you’re selling and what it is resolving for them. 

When you know your audience, it strikingly reflects in your email copy. You will be able to relate to them more and hook them to read to the end. 

Understanding your audience also helps you in list segmentation which allows you to laser focus on a specific set of audiences.

An effective copy is about relating to the audience, grabbing their pain points and dialing up to their desires, and offering them promises with your product. 

Make sure you create customer avatars of your target audience and see what kind of copy is more effective or impactful for them. 

Work More On Crafting Your Email Subject Line

Subject lines are critical to your email marketing campaign. It is the first thing that your subscribers see when you email them. 

With hundreds of emails bombarded to people’s inboxes, it becomes second nature to ignore the emails, especially the marketing ones. 

So how do you overcome this first obstacle in order to even present your effective copywriting in your email body? 

Well, it begins from the subject lines only. A good email with effective copywriting also has attention-grabbing copywriting in its subject line. 

Ideally, your subject lines should be long enough to convey the purpose of your email with effective promise. 

But it also needs to be short enough to be easy to read and grab the attention of the subscribers. 

The required shortness is also required as you want it to be snappy and hitting hard, tapping into the instincts of readers to just click on it with curiosity to know more.

You can also use dynamic elements such as : 

  • First name as personalizing the email
  • User’s geographical location
  • Their past purchases 
  • Using emojis to add a personal touch 

Focus On Benefits, Not Features In Your Email Copy

When you send an email about a new product launching soon, it is definitely going to be tempting to just put each and every feature in the copy. 

But it is essential to hold back and not oversell, especially by bombarding the prospect with tons and tons of features. 

Even though it might sound impressive to count more on features, that’s not hit home for a prospective buyer. 

Instead, try to focus more on the benefits that your product offers and what changes it can bring to customers’ lives. 

Communicate how your product can change prospects’ lives and promise them to resolve their issue or elevate their lifestyle. 

The truth is, customers really care about the benefits they will gain from your products or services, after which they further get interested in features. 

Make your email copywriting around the benefit and promise you’re offering to the customer rather than going technical or too specific with features. 

Keep It Short 

No matter how good your email marketing copy is, if it is too long to read or even not scannable, they won’t read it. 

You won’t get anything from it. The thumb rule of copywriting always has been to make it short and concise. 

As per research, the most effective emails were found to be consisting 50 words to 125 words. 

This means when it comes to marketing emails, you need to pack a lot in fewer words to make them more punchy and impactful. 

You can decide whether you want the particular emails to communicate the message or go complete marketing with it. 

Overall, anyway, you need to be precise about what you want to say. So better get to the point as quickly as possible. 

Prefer Using Second-Person Narrative In Your Email Copywriting 

This is one of the effective email copywriting hacks to use where it is preferable to use the second-person narrative in your email copy. 

When you address your prospective buyers directly, helps you to connect with them more. 

It has more chances to get more opens and higher conversions. Not to mention, it surely increases the engagement with the subscribers. 

The second-person voice is more approachable, comfortable, and conversational, making the copy more connecting and relatable. 

You wouldn’t want to sound like a corporation while talking to your customer. 

When you use a second-person narrative in your email copywriting, it adds a personal touch to the email. 

Also, when the subscriber reads it, the email looks as if it is exclusively drafted to address them only. 

Adding a personal touch to the email copywriting, the communication becomes more intimate. 

It makes the conversation almost like having a one-on-one conversation to every particular member of your subscription, and they feel that too. 

Look at the emails you receive per day and see which kind of emails, marketing or otherwise connect to you and whether they have a second-person narrative. 

Writing The Smart Preview Text 

In modern email marketing, you have to come up with smarter strategies to optimize the effectiveness of your emails. 

One of the best ways to optimize the preview text of the emails you send.  

When you email someone, they do not just see the subject line and name but also a piece of the text from your email as a preview. 

This first line of your email that shows up in the preview catches the attention of your subscriber. 

So, it becomes integral in the process of their decision-making on whether they should open the email or not. 

With this, marketers get this opportunity to attract subscribers into opening the email, so you have to write this first line very carefully. 

They are going to judge your email on the basis of these three elements- subject line, name, and the preview text. 

So try to make these 35 to 140 characters depending upon the email client and platform or device they are using, highly effective. 

Be Clear To Your Call-to-Action (CTA)

This goes back to our first tip which is to know what goal or purpose you have with the particular email you’re sending. 

Because when you have a clear goal or purpose with the email, then only you will be able to assign it a clear call-to-action (CTA). 

Readers must know what they need to do once they complete reading your email. 

Or in other words, you need to make sure they give them specific actions to perform as what you want them to do after reading the particular email. 

An ideal well-designed and formatted email marketing copy needs to have a designated CTA. 

Also, make sure you draft your CTA in a way that attracts the readers, grabs their attention, and prompts them to click on it. 

You can use other marketing strategies to make your CTA more clickable such as using a sense of urgency in your offers. 

Another trick is to use the ‘fear of missing out (FOMO) of the user to make them take action quickly. 

This again goes back to the copy of your email writing as for all these strategies, you have to use specific trigger words to bring these effects to your emails. 

For example, if you want to inject a sense of urgency in your email, you need to use the words or phrases such as ‘Hurry up’ or ‘Offers last up to today only’ and so on. 

Avoid Using All Caps 

All caps words or sentences in your email don’t look very good. It has a bad reputation as it is equivalent to shouting online. 

Not to mention, it screams spammy marketing. Too much usage of all caps makes your whole email copywriting spammy and unprofessional. 

Even in the subject line, you have to be very careful with the decision on why or whether even you want to use all caps or not. 

This can seriously hurt your email open rates as once they get used to your emails, they won’t open it. 

Chances are, they might mark your emails as spam making it stop coming from their inbox permanently. 

If they report you, it also hurts your email deliverability and even chances are there to get blacklisted. 

Make Your Copy Highly Relevant 

Relevancy is key to everything and it comes from precision. You can’t be generic in your marketing approach and so in your email copy as well. 

You need to single your focus on what exactly your specific audience seeks. 

The more specific you will be in your targeting, the higher chances there will be for open rates, click-through rates, and conversions. 

You need to use this relevancy and embed it in your email copy to make an impact on the particular audience. 

Writing Copy As Per Customer Avatar 

Another way is to create a customer avatar and profile them which helps you to write more relative and relevant copy for your email. 

You can create a custom profile where you know more about their demographic region, their interest, the current stage in their buyer’s journey, etc. 

It will become more clear on writing copy for them depending upon their customer profile.

For example, if you know your prospective customers are all or mostly females, it will be better to personalize the emails to them. 

Writing Copy As Per Segmentation

Segmentation also helps to bring more specialized direction in your writing as you know more about the customer you’re targetting.  

For example, segmentation helps you to create different lists of prospective customers. 

A list will be of all new subscribers and another will be of those who are repeat customers, and another can be of those subscribers who hardly open your emails. 

Do you send the same email to each of these segments? Definitely no! 

So you would know what exactly to write in your copy depending upon the segment you are choosing. 

Infuse Curiosity In Your Subject Line 

Another way to make your subject line empowering and click-worthy is to make it evoke curiosity in your reader’s mind. 

It should leave a hook, in the end, to make the readers want to know more about it. 

This is a thin line to walk as too much with it, you might end up making it click-baity which you wouldn’t want. 

Nobody wants to be hard-sold, so don’t make your subject lines about selling for sure. 

Also, do not go entirely to another side where people cannot assume that it is still a marketing email as they might feel cheated when they open and read the email only to find out it is about buying the product. 

Craft Your Emails As Per Your Subscriber’s Current Stage In Their Buyers’ Journey

Marketers tend to send all kinds of marketing emails to all of their subscribers. This is not how you optimize your results for better conversion. 

Also, marketers craft their email copy and send emails to their prospective buyers or subscribers without knowing their buyer’s journey standpoint. 

Every subscriber or potential buyer is at a different stage of their buyer’s journey. 

To understand this, you need to know what the buyer’s journey is. It is important to acknowledge the fact that people do not just decide to buy things. 

There is a  journey or a progression on which they move further towards making the decision. It can be fast or gradual but it is there, always. 

When you know at what stage your potential buyer is currently at, you can craft the email copy accordingly. 

Image Source: Localiq

This is primarily a sales tool that comes from Chet Holmes Pyramid which tells marketers which leads to nurture and how. 

The Chet Holmes Pyramid states that only around 10 percent of your prospects are considering or thinking to buy the product. 

This is primarily an example to understand the buyer’s journey as this model ties into it as well. 

The bottom line, is you need to craft your copy according to the specific stage in which your prospective buyer is. 

If they know that they are not interested in your product, and you are consistently using your energy and time to send them offers, you are wasting it. 

You should probably focus on the reasons why they are not interested and focus on that in your copy. 

When you adjust your email copy according to where your subscribers lie in this journey, your emails will be more appealing, relative, and relevant to them. 

And hence, it will be more effective and able to achieve higher conversions. 

Write For Readers 

If you remember just this one line ‘write for readers’ while crafting your email copy, you probably just saving your email to get boring, cold, dry, or all of these. 

You have to make sure what you are writing is addressing the readers directly as if you are talking to them one-to-one. 

So, focus on writing to engage, entertain and tell stories through your content rather than just shout-boasting your product. 

Use the emails to connect to the thoughts of your subscribers. Try to take them on a spin, stir their imagination and relate with them. 

Try to connect through some stories, personal anecdotes or conditions, or things going on in your or their life. 

Also, find common ground to start a conversation or make it more relative. Imagine yourself in their shoes and then craft your content accordingly. 

Bring new topics, address current news, festivals, weather, or the problems they might face which you face as well. 

Try to make your emails every time different. Don’t repeat. Make them look forward to your emails. 

This is known to be strong email copywriting which helps the brand build long-term relationships. 

Using Right Words To Convey Your Message 

When it comes to your email copy, words matter the most, which words you use and how you use them. 

It is all about using the appropriate and hard-hitting words to create an impact and establish connection and trust. 

Not only your words should be powerful but also has to be grounding. It still has to be sound practical and rational. 

You shouldn’t make your copy feel over-promising or ‘sale-sy’ to make it more impactful and powerful. 

Do the research to use which words are best to use in the marketing email copy, how to personalize it, and effective. 

Moreover, try to be precise and concise. Use fewer words to make a big impact as less is more. 

It also depends upon what niche you’re in or what kind of product you are selling. 

For example, if you are a travel agency promoting holiday deals, then you should be using words like scenic, splendid, breathtaking, verdant, etc to really establish the impact and effect. 

Then, apart from powerful and marketing words, you can also use emotional words to build connections. 

Be Empathetic To Your Readers 

To make your email marketing copy even more outstanding and relative, you need to take an empathetic approach. 

The problem with marketing emails is how cold, repetitive, robotic, and selfish it feels from the reader’s point of view. Not to forget, they are receiving tons of them daily. 

So, not to make yours just another unempathetic sales marketing pitch, you need to inject some empathy and understanding into your emails. 

Establish in the emails that you are taking their precious time and show gratitude. Try to relate with them with any common link or ground. 

For example, you can wish them if there is a holiday, festival or their birthday. 

You can also connect with them about some incidents that they must have gone through. 

For example, if you are selling online photography courses, you can relate with them on the fact, of how difficult is to find the right clients or decide your rate initially. 

You can also try to be more permission-oriented. Reduce the number of automated emails or autoresponders sent from your side. 

There are hundreds of strategies and gestures you can use to show empathy in your marketing copy. 

Conducting A/B Testing On Your Email Copy To See What Works Best 

You have to understand the fact that the world is consistently evolving and so are the market and your customers as well. 

Their needs want problems, and desires change over time. The same trick that worked a year ago might not work today. 

Your customer might not connect with your products as much as they did a few years back. 

Their habits, decisions, their financial situations, economic situations – everything changes. 

Then you also see how the pandemic has changed the market and how grandly it impacted the purchasing habits of buyers. 

All this explains why you need to consistently check what works and what doesn’t before you go completely in. 

To do this, the best tool or method you have is A/B testing. You can do A/B testing with different sets of email copies and see what resonates with your prospects now. 

You can perform these tests on a certain percentage of your subscribers like 25% or you can try for a few days only on all of your subscribers. 

According to this, you need to change your email copy and use only what works best.  

Reflecting Your Personality In Email Copy 

Showing your personality in the email copy is different than personalization but still a part of it. 

The idea is to build connections through reliability and authenticity. 

When you share a part of your personality in your content, it looks like coming from a person and not some robot or corporation. 

Injecting your personality doesn’t mean you will be too casual with your approach or make it unprofessional. 

It is just finding common ground but first sharing your experiences is the first step. This goes perfectly with the storytelling approach. 

Focus on putting a human element in your emails, it is something that the reader misses after going through hundreds of similar cold emails and sales email ads. 

Leveraging Psychological Strategies In Email Copywriting & Marketing

The human brain function in a specific way and that’s what psychology tells us about. 

Understanding how humans function, what drives them, what triggers them, and other such behavioral patterns, all of these make you a better, smarter marketer. 

And that’s what you need to embed in your email copy. 

There are many psychological tactics used to make the potential buyer tick and take action. 

The best part is, since it is the psyche of human beings, it works for people all around the world irrespective of any constraints. 

Here are some of these psychological tricks you can use in marketing and a copy of your email. 

Fear of missing out (FOMO) 

FOMO heavily exist in people’s mind because they don’t want to miss out on anything. 

This is human nature as when they feel they are missing out on things and won’t get them, they want to do it or get it. 

Using a sense of urgency and scarcity with this strategy makes this even better and helps you achieve higher conversion. 

You need to show them that your product availability is time-constraint or you have limited stocks for time being. 

To begin with, it definitely caters to their curiosity, so they will at least open the email and check out the offer for sure. 

Using Social Proof 

Humans are social animals and so we do things that other people do. People tend to seek validation from people around them. 

If people like them like something, they tend to like it too. 

So if you provide social proof saying that you have a good product, then they are more inclined to open the email or link or even buy the product. 

Social proof about your product is basically customer reviews and testimonials in written or video form. 

Pictures Of Faces In Email Copy

This is quite a subtle approach that may not sound very promising but it is highly effective. 

You need to use pictures of the faces of people in your marketing email copy or people using the product or looking at it. 

This makes the product more relatable and in a way more humane. To the core, it basically illicit emotion and makes the product more connected to them. 

Color Choice In Design 

Again quite a subtle yet very impactful psychological tactic used by most of marketers and brands. 

Specific colors evoke particular emotions. For example, Green represents the environment, peace, and harmony. 

Yellow is more attention-grabbing and highlighting, also cheerful and vibrant. Black is more sophisticated. 

The color choice you use in your marketing email design helps your copywriting as well. It increases the overall impact and effectiveness leading towards the conversion. 

Personalization

This is already an integral part of a good email marketing campaign to increase not just conversions but also open rates and click-through rates. 

You can personalize the email copy content and subject line as well. 

Personalization works because people want to interact with other people, not machines, not corporations or authorities. 

They do not respond or connect inhuman entities such as corporations.

Using personalization such as mentioning the name of the person in the email subject increases the open rate of the email dramatically. 

Have A Rich Vocabulary In Your Email Copy

No one wants to read something that is ineffective due to repetitive words and bad word choice. 

It just makes any prose sound uninteresting and not impactful at all. 

To really make your email copy highly effective and reachable to your target audience, you need to choose a rich vocabulary in your writing. 

A rich vocabulary and good writing don’t mean dictionary words. It is just about using the right words, better words to bring an effect and impact. 

For example, you can say beautiful twice or thrice in a paragraph talking about your vacation packages but it sounds boring and incompetent. 

So you better use words like breathtaking, picturesque, heart-whelming, and other relevant words depending upon their meaning. 

Try Storytelling Approach In Your Email Copy

Stories connect the best to the readers. That’s how it always has been! Humans are always driven to stories. 

When you appeal to their emotion, connect with them, entertain them or engage them, they are more than happy to give you attention. 

So, try to use the power of storytelling in your email marketing copy. 

Stories can make your brand more memorable than just any other brand they come across plenty of times over time. 

For example,  in your welcome emails, you can tell how you started the copy, the very inception of your business, and the struggle. 

Build a brand story and reach out to your customers and prospects where they can relate to you, and your story. 

Another great way to inculcate storytelling into your brand is to feature customer testimonials in the form of a success story, which people love to hear. 

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