How to Write Persuasive Emails That Convert Into Sales!

Email marketers are well aware of the competition out there when there is a huge range of businesses trying to catch users’ attention.

It begs the most crucial question of the millennia- how your marketing message or email is going to stand out amongst others?

How are you going to penetrate through the pile of unnoticed and overlooked dozens of emails that your recipient receives every day?

It all goes to one thing – how persuading your marketing email is?

The quality of content and copy in the email has the biggest burden to live through as being the determining factor for the success of the email or whole campaign.

Hence, to really generate sales and write emails that convert, you need a good copy.

And if you ask professionals, a good copy is what is able to persuade potential buyers to take any action, here which is to make the purchase.

So, without wasting much time, here is everything you can do to make your emails persuasive and write emails that convert into sales.

Keep It Short, Simple, And Sweet

According to a recent study, the current average attention span of an average individual is merely 8 seconds.

So what does this tell you?

If you are not getting to the point, people are just going to go away. You have a very short window of time to hook them and tell them why you are worth their time.

It is quite safe to assume that your subscribers are anyway going to overlook the content you will share with them.

Image Source: HubSpot Blog

So keeping that in mind, you must strategize your content, subject line, and email body accordingly.

There are many strategies that you need to stick to, but more importantly, is cutting to the chase and first hitting the right note for your audience to intrigue them and make them interested in you.

Otherwise, no amount of strategy work if subscribers or recipients are just not opening your email or paying attention to your content.

How To Keep It Short?

While storytelling and long-form content are always helpful and gel well with the audience, you cannot expect them to read long paras and emails all the time.

Most of the time you have to be on point, without wasting their time. Then, there will be occasions where you get to use storytelling to communicate and create relatability.

So it is always better to create short copies as well to give just the idea of what you are proposing.

Make sure to create more snackable content, more readable, and easy to scan through to make your emails go easy on the subscribers.

In fact, some emails must be just about very short catchy stuff that just hooks them and make it memorable in their memories.

Your goal is to redirect them to your CTAs or make them take the suggested action.

Make Sure Your Subject Lines Stand Out

Just like how the trailer of a film encourages you to watch the movie, similarly, the impact the recipient has on them by just looking at the subject line of the email.

The first thing recipients see about your email is the subject line, and if that’s not intriguing and compelling enough, they won’t even click on them.

In fact, most of the emails will be passively ignored or overlooked if the subject line is not enticing enough to stand out and grab the reader’s attention.

You have to focus on crafting your subject line that hooks your recipient to open your email immediately.

Writing a compelling and creative subject line is the first step to creating a persuasive marketing email.

Here’s how you do it :

Try using more sensory words in your subject lines. Sensory words are basically words that evoke particular five senses in human beings.

Punctuate your subject line with sensory words while creating more of a mental image that relates with your reader. The idea is to create an image in the reader’s mind as they read your subject line to leave a long and lasting impression on them
The best way to do so is to think about what emotion, feeling, impression, or thought you want to put in your recipients’ minds when they read those words in your subject line.
Another important optimization you can do is add action words to your subject line. Since this is the first point of contact, the first impression before the recipient gets into the body or contents of your email, it is crucial to put your recipients in a more action mindset and make them more prone to engage.
Action words and verbs in the subject line are not about commanding or ordering your subscribers. They are simply about nudging them towards the path you want them to go. It is merely a directional suggestion to move along.
What more you can do with your subject line is create a sense of urgency. This is basically the oldest trick in the book, but it always works like a charm. Create subject lines that show the ticking clock on the recipients so they have to engage with it. Otherwise, they will lose the opportunity.
Make sure you don’t create a subject line that is not personalized according to the targeted recipients or subscribers. The more personalized your subject line will be, the higher the chance you will have of its engagement. In fact, personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened than their non-personalized counterparts.

Always Explain Why You’re Sending The Email

First, it is always appropriate to tell your audience or subscribers when they can expect an email from you and how often.

Even better if you ask them to respond on what frequency they expect or want about the emails you send.

The idea is to be the least intrusive you can. And that’s also why you need to explain in the email why you are sending them this, and what it is about.

Be very specific and clear in explaining your objective.

Don’t be too clever or try to cheat. If there is a product, your company has launched, just tell them you are sending this email to inform them about this cool product that you think they might be interested in.

Tell your audience about the end goal of sending this email.

Sometimes just explaining will communicate the value of your email, and they will be sold on giving it a go.

Also it also adds a storytelling element to your emails, giving things a deeper level of context and meaning in what you do.

You can tell them behind the scenes or your story behind doing things. It also adds an emotional aspect to your product or services, more importantly, the value it provides.

If you get successful in engaging the audience, half the battle is already won there.

Tell A Story Through Your Emails

One thing that connects all human beings, irrespective of anything, is their inclination toward stories.

Stories have been part of human evolution from the Stone Age to today’s modern times; whether it is art, business, or life, stories move people.

Narratives have always been the core element of business marketing and communication as well as speaks to human emotion.

Marketers especially utilized the power of storytelling to communicate, advertise and sell to the audience, and it works like a charm.

So why not use the power of storytelling in your emails as well in order to make it more persuasive, convincing, and converting as well.

Also, it is the best way to cater to the emotion of your prospective customers.

Here’s an example you can learn from

Image Source: Sendpulse

Talk About Benefits Not Features

One successful marketing or advertising campaign was run by Apple way back when they introduced the iPod; here’s what it looked like “

Image Source: VA

So if you look at this advertisement, instead of saying that the iPod has this much or so and so space or storage, they said, “ 1,000 songs in your pocket.”

This is way more powerful and convincing for the target audience to make them buy the iPod because it caters to what they are getting out of the iPod, what benefit they will gain rather than the exact technical feature.

When you tell the features, it doesn’t speak to the customers emotionally; it doesn’t tell them the value of the product, what it can do for them or how these features convert to their day-to-day life.

At that time, telling people that they would have access to 1,000 songs anywhere easily created wonder and fascination, which hooked the audience right away.

So, focus on telling the benefits of your product or service, and how it will change their life or make things easier for them.

Communicate the value you’re offering to your prospective customers instead of listing out the features of the product.

If they are interested, they will go to check them in detail.

Make the email about them, not you or your product. Center your audience in the spotlight and connect them to your product in a way that they feel incomplete without it.

Write Emails Keeping Your Recipients In Your Mind

When you create your email copy, it is essential to keep the recipients in your mind actively. Be mindful about everything you put in your email with respect to who you are writing for.

The best practice is to create a customer persona, an ideal customer with detailed characteristics, profile information, interests, preferences. Demographic info and much more.

Dig deep and figure out your target audience, their aspirations, fears, desires, and problems, what exactly they need, how they think, etc.

As for the subscribers, find out how long they have been subscribed to you. Whether they are previously engaged with you or have bought from you, or they might not have opened your emails for a long time.

Here also comes the part when you create segments of your email list to create this categorized set of people with more similarities to target specifically.

Image Source: HubSpot Blog

Answer more and more questions related to your targeted audience, segment them accordingly, and then create email copy according to them.

Even before you start writing your email copy, the idea is that you have to have a very defined and clear picture of who you are writing for and where they are exactly at this stage.

Along with this, you also have to figure out what you want them to do after reading this email, what your objective is of sending the particular email.

Always keep yourself in the shoes of your subscribers or audience. It will help you write more relatable, compassionate, entertaining, engaging, and interesting email copy.

You also have to find something in between what you want to say and what they are interested in, and through that overlapping space, you build a relationship with your customer.

Don’t forget to personalize your email based on the segmentation you’ve made and optimize your email content, email subject line, and much more.

Improving Your CTA

You can’t really get away with persuasive email marketing without talking about the most important section of the email, that is – CTA.

It doesn’t matter how persuasive your email copy is or how intriguing your subject line is if you don’t have a set CTA in your email to drive persuasion toward an action.

Here are aspects where you need to be careful while you craft the CTA of your email :

Where are you placed for the CTA?

Image Source: eSputunik

Usually, with the brands, if you look at them, they tend to place the CTA button above the fold. They do this, so the subscribers are attracted to it when they open the email.

However, there are brands that often take risks to include just one CTA in their emails.

But it is suggested to always have a secondary CTA in your email just below the fold, along with the one above the fold.

This way, you reassure your CTA link’s clickability and make sure it is visible and reachable.

Especially if you are writing long content or where it needs to be scrolled, more than one CTA button needs to be placed, preferably strategically.

How Your CTA Should Look Like?

The visibility of your CTA button is essential, and the size, shape, color, and type of your CTA button play an essential role in deciding the visibility.

What size you are going with your CTA button decides how easy or hard it is going to notice it or see it in your email.

You wouldn’t want it to be very small, so it won’t be noticeable or overlooked, also, you don’t want it to be very big, so it doesn’t look aesthetically to the overall email design.

The sizing of your CTA button also depends upon the dimension of other design elements in your email and the overall structural layout.

Image Source: eSputnik

Make sure it goes with the overall visual hierarchy you created in your email design to make the messaging more powerful and focused.

When it comes to the shape of the CTA button, you have a few set options to go with, such as rectangular buttons, rounded-at-the-edges buttons, and maybe a few other similar versions.

But the focus should be to make it go easy on the eyes and seamless to the design and copy of your email.

You also have to ensure that your button’s design must complement your email’s overall design. It doesn’t seem off or as if it doesn’t belong there.

Now, when you talk about choosing the color for your CTA button, the best way to do is right is to stick with the colors of your brand color scheme simply.

So if your brand colors are yellow and black, black may be a good choice. It also depends upon the background color, text color, and overall color scheme of the email design as well.

You have to make sure that whatever color you choose must pop out from the rest of the email design.

The color of the CTA button must add some extra level of visibility by creating contrast quite sharply against the background color.

What CTA text or phrase to use?

CTA button texts or phrase is not very difficult to figure out. The idea is to keep it simple and straightforward.

However, it doesn’t mean you create boring and generic CTA texts or phrases like “try this demo, or click now.

You certainly have to do better than that. It is important to be creative with creating CTA phrases that make your brand look more cool, relatable, quirky, fun, creative, or whatever your brand identifies with.

Don’t hesitate to be creative with your CTA phrase. In fact, make it clever, quirky, relatable, and more action-oriented.

Get Personal With Your Readers

Personalization might seem to be already covered in the previous points, but it is way more important to be given a dedicated slot to explore its significance.

Besides, getting personal with your recipient is different than personalization; it is still a part of personalization.

In order to get personal with your recipients, subscribers, or readers, you need to make sure that everyone reading your email must feel like you’re talking to them on a personal level.

It isn’t just a generic message or marketing bulk message tone, which simply disconnects an audience from the content immediately.

Also, you must make your email messaging conversational and very easy to read. It needs to be written in a way that is easy to scan and read through.

Focus on putting elements into your email copy that relate to your users. Start the conversation casually, perhaps with a question.

You can also create references of what’s currently going on in the world or that particular industry or even something you know about the given customer.

For example, users who you are sending emails to going to celebrate their birthday next week or their wedding anniversary.

The idea is to find common ground where you and your readers can communicate personally to set a comfort level and trust.

Linking Your Landing Page To Your Email Copy

One of the powerful methods to general sales and convert prospects is to link your landing page to your email copy.

You are basically creating another stage or a step in the sales funnel. Still, it removes any hesitation from a customer due to the limited info you provide in your email copy.

So it is very less likely that a prospect will directly buy from your email copy CTA as they certainly need more convincing.

There is a gap between required communication regarding the product or services that you are trying to sell, which the landing page can cover.

However, it is essential that you create a consistent and seamless design similar to your email as well as a landing page, in fact, across all the platforms.

This creates a strong brand image and builds trust among the potential buyers/

You also have to ensure that the landing page serves a cohesive journey from the email from where the prospective buyer is sent from.

If not, then the prospective customers can get confused. So make sure you write this email considering the copy you wrote on the landing page or plan altogether.

Remind Your Recipients That It is Always Their Choice to Take Action

With so many marketing emails your subscribers receive on a daily basis where they must have been shoved a range of products to them, to buy or to take action, it puts too much pressure on the recipients.

And the golden rule of marketing is encouraging your prospects to take action. In fact, be quite aggressive in your persuasion.

But it doesn’t work like that now. However, you do have to persuade, but it needs to be subtle and powerful.

What you shouldn’t do is put pressure on your recipient to take action. In fact, by addressing or establishing the fact that they are in control of making the decision, you give them space to make the right call.

And by this sign of maturity and understanding, you also establish your brand as more customer-centric, authentic, and honest.

So, ensure you remind your recipient that the final choice is always up to them. You are recommending them on the basis of their preferences and the value they can provide.

And if that relates to them, they can check out your product or service in time.

AIDA: 4-Step Copywriting Formula For Making Your Emails More Persuasive

copywriting formula for persuasive emails

These terms work as a natural progression for how you encounter your prospect leading towards a sale.

When it comes to email marketing, this progression starts from when your subscriber sees the email you sent to the time they click through it.

Let’s go through each stage and figure out how to optimize your emails according to this copywriting strategy to make them more persuasive.

A-Attention

The first and most important aspect of AIDA for email is Attention. Nothing will happen if you don’t get the attention of your subscribers.

This is itself the most challenging aspect of email marketing.

Since your subscribers receive dozens of emails a day, perhaps hundreds, they are more likely to ignore or overlook most of the things that come their way unless it becomes impossible for them to overlook or be too valuable to miss.

Another way may be to grab their attention through curiosity and their specific interests, preferences, tastes, fears, etc.

There are two parts of your email initially that catch the attention of your subscribers :

Sender’s name
Email Subject line

You have to optimize both of these aspects to draw attention from your subscribers and make them open your email no matter what.

Sender’s Name

To begin with, you have to avoid using some generic sender name such as “info”, “support”,” contact,” or “admin,” or even worse, “No reply.”

These generic sender names will not go to get the attention of the subscribers or the recipients.

Rather they are going to be perceived or even marked as spam.

So, it is always best to use a more friendly sender’s name. You can use an actual name, a person’s name, which makes it more likely to get attention.

Any other way around only works for recognizable brands that are already established, such as Amazon, Apple, or Google.

You also try to use special characters in the sender’s name to make it attractive and stand out from others or what people become used to seeing.

However, don’t all go crazy with special characters, or do not overstuff your sender’s name with it, as it will make you spammy.

Email Subject Line

To make your email subject line effective, you need to make sure of certain elements that must be in your email.

Your email must contain trigger words like “free delivery”, “news”, “free,” and others.
Make sure either it is very short or quite long.
Your subject line must connect with the reader’s internal problems
Make sure to personalize your subject line by using the recipients’ names.

Then, there are other aspects, as your subject line must be intriguing, something curiosity-infused that the recipient will be compelled to click on it.

However, you have to make sure whatever expectation or anticipation you build up in the subject line; you carry that out in the email body. Otherwise, it will be a clickbaity gimmick that the audience despises.

I- Interest

The second step to creating compelling and persuasive email copy is “interest”. Now, what does that mean?

Well, it is simply about what your targeted audience is interested in. You might get their attention, but they won’t sustain or convert if they are not interested.

The interest here basically means how invested they are or how much sincerity in the attention they are paying to depends upon their need.

So opening your email due to a catchy subject line is one thing, but continuing reading it is another, and that’s what you want.

So here are a few ways how you write a persuasive email by creating interest in your email and engaging the audience :

Talk about the biggest problem of your readers

You need to write about something that connects with your readers deeply. And that can explain the biggest problem they have.

The problem that really troubles them keeps them up at night, that sort of issue that they are desperately looking forward to solving.

When you talk about their problem and how to solve it, they are definitely going to be interested in what you are saying.

Telling A Story

Human evolution tells us that we as species are hardwired to respond to stories. People are more inclined to listen to stories than facts or statements.

Because it caters to their emotion and is something they relate to, it is also a way to identify with them, just like how they identify with the stories’ characters.

Stories are powerful in communicating and connecting with people. And you need to embed that into your email.

Making A Big Promise

One of the best ways to hook the audience right away is to make a big promise to that about things that matter to them, which you can solve.

It is all about making a big statement that makes them inclined toward you. Something that makes them go, “ What? Really? But How?”

It goes without saying that this big promise needs to be big enough or ambitious enough to make people interested but also believable enough that they can do it.

D-Desire

Now you are at the stage where your subscribers are reading your email. All you have to focus on is building a compelling and driving desire for the offer you are going to make.

Whether it is a free no or a product you sell doesn’t matter. Without really setting up a burning desire in your emails, readers will discontinue reading.

Even if your target readers recognize their problem and want a solution but are still not motivated enough to take action, they are simply too lazy to act or maybe busy at the time.

So you also have to focus on persuading your readers to act immediately, and that’s how you get more sales, conversions or whatever you intend to do with your campaign.

A- Action

The last step of this copywriting formula for email marketing to persuade your readers is about telling them what to do next.

So, you have persuaded them so far, but this last step matters the most for actually getting your readers to do what you want them to do.

Are you persuading for generating sales, leads, or more traffic to your website? Whatever your objective is, you need to put it in a clear and precise CTA, call-to-action.

It needs to be in the form of words and in a button. Your goal is to leverage this persuasion momentum to take them to the next step of taking action.