From newsletters to order confirmations, email is an increasingly important aspect of commerce. However, the e-business industry is still so inexperienced about email that even following these basic tips will put anyone ahead of most of the industry. Here are the rules and standards in writing effective emails.
Don’t recycle traditional direct mail copy. Even if it was successful.
Understand that the Internet is a completely new medium. The copy that pulled high response rates in the world of direct postal marketing doesn’t get read on the Net. Especially not as email.
Here are the rules to effective email copywriting:
The subject is the headline: Write a succinct subject ‘headline’ – 3 to 5 words. Your subject determines whether your email gets read – or not. Tricky headlines (not related to your message) don’t work. Internet users are smart and they know exactly what they want. They resent being tricked. It’s a tough way to start a relationship.
Make it personal: What exactly is spam? It’s any email message that the recipient deems uninteresting or irrelevant — regardless of who sent it.
People on the Internet want personal notes. Write for an audience of one. Use common conversation, and avoid formal speech. Think of email as a way to service clients, enhance relationships, or tease them into interacting with you.
Remember you don’t have to be making a sale every time you talk to them. Positioning yourself as an expert can keep you at the top of mind for future purchases or better yet, for referrals.
Do feel free to make your e-mail fun and irreverent, if this is appropriate for the customer and the moment.
Don’t be overly casual and risk being disrespectful to your audience with the wrong tone.
Give them an incentive to act: By containing a hook, the e-mail makes it easy for a customer to understand the point of the email. The customer is more likely to respond if the choice is clear: act or don’t act to get the specified benefit. Customers are less likely to act, understand, or otherwise have a good experience, if they have to spend time figuring out the point of the email.
Do refine the hook to express the idea or message clearly and simply.
Don’t rely on jargon or indirect wording to express the hook.
Include a call to action: Tell people what you want them to do. Don’t leave them wondering what to do next. Point them to your ‘most desired action’. Otherwise they may just surf around and forget what they’re trying to accomplish. Then they bail.
If you are providing information, be sure to let them know they can email or call you if they want further information. Leave the conversation open ended and easy to reply to.
Get to the point: Keep it short and simple. Don’t drone on and on for several paragraphs … or pages. People on the Internet want information quickly and clearly. Paragraphs should be no more than 4 – 6 lines. Keep total length under 300 words.
Just as the hook provides focus for the email, so should the rest of the email refer to the hook for focus. For example, an email telling customers that there is a sale on a particular product line on an e-commerce site should do just that — tell customers about the sale.
This same email should not be considered an opportunity to inform customers of every promotion, feature, or tidbit of corporate news. Customers tend to scan emails, and if several propositions are presented, even the hook will go unnoticed.
Do stick to a single subject in the email.
Don’t try to incorporate as many elements as possible.
Do use dashes or bullets to express lists of ideas or section headings.
Don’t require users to read long continuous blocks of text.State the most important things first: Customers will start reading an email from the beginning and read the introduction to see if it’s worth spending more of their time. Readers tend to pay less and less attention to what is written as they scan more quickly through the rest of the email.
To make sure customers read the most relevant information, put the most important information (the hook) at the top, followed by the most important supporting information. Each successive paragraph will receive less and less of the reader’s attention and should contain less and less important information. As soon as the hook is well enough supported, end the email.
Do provide the customer the most important information at the beginning of the email.
Don’t “save up” the key information for the middle or end of the email.
An email must have a good reason for being sent; otherwise it’s better to not send it. The hook of an email is the single thought or message conveyed by that email and should be stated in the first sentence or two.
Use your website: Drive people to your website. Don’t try to close the sale in the email. You want people to have (and ask) more questions. Questions require interaction, and interaction promotes relationships.
Build relationships: Few (if any) customers worth having are interested in a ‘one night stand’. Have a long-term relationship objective in mind. Listen to your customers. Treat them like you’d like to be treated (so long as you’re not a masochist…).
Follow through: Do what you say. Put your hands and feet where your mouth is. Deliver on your offer, because it’s an ever-increasingly small world.
Always offer an option to unsubscribe: Email should only be sent when customers have requested information or if there is something noteworthy to tell them. Even with this level of permission there will still be people who will want to unsubscribe from the email list or newsletter.
Always offer the option to unsubscribe. As an emerging convention, customers can now typically expect to see unsubscribe instruction as the last item at the bottom of the email, following the signature and P.S.
Spell Check: You are positioning yourself as an expert – do not be tempted to send out the email quick. Run spell check! Have someone else read it to see if your message is grammatically correct before you hit the send button!
