How to optimize your email content for conversions

It is a no-brainer that if your email provides value to the reader, it gets you expected results. That brings us to the question: How can you optimize your email content and drive conversions?

Here’s how:

5 Tips to Craft Winning Email Content

1. Understand the expectations of your subscribers

The first step to creating engaging content for your emails is to understand your target audience. This will give you an insight into what they would be looking for. You can create customer avatars of your ideal buyer and then determine what content would be most effective for them. It will help you figure out what the subscribers expect from your brand and why they subscribed to your emails in the first place.

For example: If you run digital marketing courses, bigger chunk of your target audience would consist of students, marketing professionals, and entrepreneurs. You must target each of these customer avatars differently.

2. Determine the objective of the emails

Once you have your target audience in place, you must define the purpose of sending the email campaigns. What do you want your subscriber to do on reading the email? Do you want them to sign up for the free trial or download an ebook or simply welcome them to learn more about your brand? The answers to all these questions will let you know about the “why” of sending the email. Based on this information, you will get a direction into the kind of copy that needs to be written.

3. Write crisp subject lines that pique the subscriber’s curiosity

The key to conversions is getting your emails opened. For that, you must craft crisp subject lines that can grab the subscriber’s eyeballs. They must pique their curiosity and get the subscribers to open the email. It is interesting to know that 47% of email subscribers open an email looking at the subject line while 69% of the email recipients report the email as spam, considering the subject line alone. These statistics make the importance of subject lines pretty much evident.

Make sure you personalize your email subject lines with the subscriber’s first name. Additionally, you can also include dynamic elements such as the subscriber’s geographical location and past purchases in the email subject line. Doing so will make the subject line all the more relevant for them and increase the open rate.  

4. Work on a memorable email copy

All your marketing efforts will go down the drain if your email copy does not leave a positive impact on your subscriber’s mind. To help you create a killer email copy, we are here with 5 tips that Wikipedia won’t tell you about.

1. Use the power of storytelling

We all love stories. In fact, we have grown up hearing different kinds of stories, right? Let your emails too tell a story to your subscribers and encourage them to take action. Stories can tap on the emotional instinct of the users along with a tinge of entertainment. Besides, they can reveal the company’s values and mission in a more interesting manner. No wonder, messages presented as stories get etched in human memory 22 times better than plain facts.  

Take a look at this email example by Lush. It uses interactive storytelling to convey its features and preparation of the products. Such a visually appealing email layout with an equally interesting copy will surely interest the subscribers and make them look forward to more information.

2. Incorporate the Problem Agitation Solution (PAS) formula

For companies who want to introduce an exclusive product or offer to their email subscribers, the PAS formula can work really well. Such emails talk about the challenges faced by the subscribers and then present their products or services as a solution to those problems. Generally, these emails give detailed insights into the product and are longer in length.

Take a look at this email by Readdle that includes a YouTube video thumbnail followed by a CTA in the first fold. The next section of the email includes the features of Spark 2.0 email client. Note that there is a CTA in every fold of the email.

Source

3. Remember the Chet Holmes Pyramid while nurturing the leads

Proper nurturing of the leads with persuasive copy can get you a step closer to conversions. However, it is important to understand whether the buyer is ready to make a purchase before nurturing them. For this, the Chet Holmes Pyramid can come in handy. According to this theory, only 3% of your prospects are buying now, 6-7% of them are open to it, and 30% are either not thinking about it, don’t think they are interested, or already know that they are not interested.

This implies that only 10% of your prospective customers are willing to be your customers.

Furthermore, you must take into account the stage of the buyer’s journey. This means to say that if a subscriber is still in the awareness stage, introduce your brand and products to them. For consideration stage emails, you must let your subscriber know why you are better than your competitors and how you stand out from all of them. Decision stage emails should have customer testimonials and product reviews that would build brand credibility and convince the subscriber to make the purchase by instilling trust.

4. Re-engage your dormant subscribers with the magic of 9 words

Dean Jackson has put forward an interesting tactic of nine-word template that you can use to revive the dead leads. It tries to learn whether the subscriber is still keen on the topic.

Some nine-word statements that you can use in your emails are:

i. Are you still looking for travel packages for Europe?

ii. Are you still interested in learning Salsa Dance?

iii. Are you still keen on running LinkedIn Business Ads?

iv. Have you already given up on this opportunity?

Such phrases trigger the “Fear of Missing Out” and might convince the dormant leads to engage again.

5. Repurpose the content

There might be times when you just run out of ideas to create original content. Repurposing, remodeling, and recycling the content proves to be of great help in such cases. You can curate the content and send it in your emails to build the authenticity of your brand and drive collaboration with other companies. Do it like Wistia does.

To make curating content a breeze, use a tool like Scoop.it that allows you to access content from third-party sources including websites, PR publications, and other media portals.

Have an actionable CTA

Apart from the subject line, preview text, hero image, email copy, and visuals, there is another element whose importance cannot be overlooked. It is the CTA. Your CTA must be drafted in such a way that it grabs the subscriber’s attention and entices them to click-through. Create a sense of urgency through your CTA. For instance: Use text like BUY NOW TO GET 50% OFF.

This would create a sense of FOMO and result in an instant purchase.

If you are a SaaS company, you must experiment with first-person narrative like “GRAB MY FREE TRIAL NOW”. According to a study, such CTAs drive better conversions for your business.

Wrapping Up

Your copy can either make or break your email campaigns. To recapitulate all the tips mentioned above, your email content should be crisp, to-the-point, and persuasive without any technical jargon.  

Have you come across any email with an amazing copy? We would love to hear from you.

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