How To Write Irresistible Emails That Will Get Opened

Refine an email marketing strategy that effectively communicates to your audience.

Email marketing costs pennies on the dollar, appears right in front of the people that want to hear your message, and provides easy testing elements that help you build a better strategy. With 59% of marketers saying email is their biggest source of ROI, it’s a no-brainer to build your email list and take advantage of this full-of-potential communication channel.

However, if you don’t know the craft behind writing an email and a subsequent landing page, this powerful platform will be wasted. Although sending an email seems effortless, there are key components that ensure people are clicking “buy now” and not “unsubscribe”.  

To build successful emails, you have to understand the obstacles that stand in your way. 

Crowded inboxes filled with emojis, all-caps, and gimmicks that pester the attention of our audiences make your email a needle-in-a-haystack. Getting opened is hard enough, but inducing viewers to take the specified action nears impossible. 

Additionally, you can put endless detail and care into your email construction, but you won’t know how the functionality of your videos and images will change in different email platforms. 

Unlike with ads, if you don’t spark interest, or worse, you tick-off your viewers, they’re one click away from removing themselves from one of your most opportune communication channels.  

COVID-19 demands high quality emails, not high quantity. 

According to Forbes, many businesses are ramping up their email marketing in response to the pandemic crisis. From e-commerce options, delivery & pickup, and online courses, inboxes are being flooded with new ways to spend money in the age of staying at home.  

Before the onset of Covid-19, 43% of subscribers were already wanting businesses to email them less. So with more emails and less value, the way to stand out is to provide strategically timed emails packed to the brim with valuable content. 

Boost your open-rates & click-through rates with these key elements.

Recognizable “From” Line

The often overlooked but very important “from lines” immediately dictate if the viewer will even give your subject line a read. If a viewer fails to recognize the person or the brand that sent the email sitting in their inbox, odds are they’re going to swiftly move your wonderfully crafted email to the trash. Be sure to specify a familiar sender so that viewers feel comfortable. If your brand has a well-known founder that deems a stamp of recognition, this will be acceptable. But if not, headlining with the brand name is the best bet. 

Benefit or Curiosity-Driven Subject Lines 

Just because an email is easy to send to a large group of people doesn’t mean identifying your target audience loses importance. Using your in-depth knowledge of your market’s needs, dreams, fears (oh, my!), construct a subject line that grabs their attention. With a benefit-driven line, don’t make them think about the value they’ll get if they open the email. Simply and quickly let them know what’s waiting for them with one click away. 

With a curiosity-driven line, tease a highly debatable or unexpected topic to pique curiosity. Forewarning: if you go with the latter option, use it very wisely, pay it off with extremely useful information, and ensure you have a relationship with your viewers first. 

As some rules of thumb, always put the most important information at the beginning, avoid all-caps and other sure-to-fall-flat gimmicks, and never use the desperate “please read” subjects. 

Summarizing Snippets

Very underutilized, these small pieces of text are displayed at the very top of the email when opened and are usually visible to the viewer without having to click into the email. Whether or not images are turned on or off in your viewer’s email settings, these golden nuggets of email marketing will always show. This offers another opportunity for you to entice your viewers to open your email. To take advantage of snippets, build upon your subject with more detail and summarize the value held within the email. Pro tip, if the goal is to get viewers to visit a landing page, place the link in the snippet so they can quickly see the value and easily get straight on to the action without any fuss. 

Wholesome Body Copy

And only until all of those precious details above are considered do you dive into the body copy of an email. This is where the full message is contained. Begin with a benefit-driven headline, a subhead if you feel more detail needs to be shared in order for them to make a decision, and a clear call to action. You cannot assume your viewer is going to read everything, and in most chances, they won’t, so make sure the full story is told within the head and subhead. As with most writing, always tell the most important information first and then work your way down. 

Build intuitive landing pages that convert. 

A landing page is the webpage that viewers will land on after clicking your very clear call-to-action button on your carefully crafted email. This page could already exist – such is the case when you’re highlighting a sale on a specific product and you want to link them straight to the product page. Or this page may need to be created – such as a webinar sign-up page. 

Your email and landing page should blend together in all aspects, so that viewers receive a seamless experience. Whether you’re creating the email based off of an already existing landing page or creating both simultaneously, you must ensure that both weave the same language and design elements throughout. 

The landing page should blatantly display the same benefit or value that was specified on the email, and it should display it promptly. Sometimes cute and catchy landing pages that fail to assure viewers they’ve reached the site that provides the benefit they sought will dramatically increase bounce rates – meaning people clicked through looking for the benefit but couldn’t find it or felt mislead so they immediately exited the page. 

Keeping an effortless user flow with language, design, imagery, and deliverables is a must while you construct your emails and your landing pages. 

Employ easy tests that provide a guideline on how to improve your email marketing. 

There are a variety of easy testing elements that provide you with a secret roadmap on how to better your email copy. 

• Open Rates — This percentage of people on your email list that opened your email tells how well you crafted your subject line. As you continue to monitor this metric and collect more data, you’ll find what subject lines work better for your specific audience.

• Click-Through Rates – This percentage of people that clicked through to your landing page from your email displays the quality of your email’s body content. Paid somewhat in part to the subject line as well, this metric shows how much value you packed into your email.

• Conversion Rates – This is the percentage of people that took the desired action. The content on your landing page really dictates that final purchase decision, but this also indicates how well you communicated the value of your offering throughout the email.

• Bounce Rates – As told above, this is the percentage of people who clicked through from your email but then immediately left the page. Although this also includes the amount of emails you sent that bounced back to you most likely due to faulty addresses, this statistic relays how well you tied the landing page to the email.

• A/B Testing – With this test, you manipulate one element of your email to send to a certain portion of your email list. The rest of the list gets the original piece with no alterations. You then compare the open rates, click-through rates, and conversion rates between the two options. Common with subject lines, this allows the opportunity to see which version your audience responds better to.

The framework above lays a foundation on how you can build emails that stand out in crowded inboxes. It’s more important today than it ever has been to craft thoughtful emails so think smarter, not harder. 

Are you looking to convert your current email marketing plan into a conversion-boosting strategy that has subscribers crossing their fingers for your name to appear in their inbox? Schedule a consultation today, and let’s begin to maximize this opportunity-filled platform and grow your business!