Define Your Email Goals
Before you actually go in and write your email, it might be helpful to take some time and define your email goals. What do you want to achieve with this email? What are the main points you want to get across? And how can you do that in a concise way? Figuring out the goals of your email can help you write your email much more quickly and effectively.
Consider Your Audience Needs
There’s a reason why you can’t just copy and paste your emails and mass send. You need to actually change the tone of voice in your email to fit each individual audience. For example, your tone to your boss will sound a lot different than your tone to a close colleague. You have to consider your audience's needs and write at the appropriate reading level for them. If you’re going to be using any supporting data in your email, make sure that matches the audience as well.
Craft a Compelling Introduction
Your introduction should immediately grab the reader’s attention and entice them to keep reading. Your introduction should be specific for the person who you’re writing it to. Keeping your reader engaged is an important part of effective email marketing. You want the reader to feel like the email was written personally to them, even if it’s being sent out to multiple people.
Be Concise
No one wants to spend half their day going through emails. Keep your email as concise as possible, without leaving out important information, and aim to say more with less words. You can do this with bullet points or by adding visuals to break up the text. Your email design is crucial because it allows the reader to properly navigate the content. If an email is shorter and includes images, the recipient will be more likely to actually read through the entire thing, rather than just skimming it.
Use Proper Etiquette
You want to sound friendly and polite in your emails, but not too casual. And at the same time, you don’t want to sound too serious. Just be sure to include a friendly salutation and closing in your email. Also, make sure to not send an email very early or late in the day. Be considerate of the recipient’s personal life.
Stick to one topic
If you have multiple topics that you want to address in your email, avoid including them all in the same email. This can make it confusing for the recipient to read and make them less likely to respond. Instead, space out the emails to be sent at different times so it’s less intimidating for the reader.
Proofread
The biggest mistake you can make is not proofreading your email before clicking send. It doesn’t matter how many emails you’ve sent in your day, always proofread your emails. Just take a couple minutes to check for spelling and grammar mistakes, as these can reflect very badly on you or your business.
Schedule Your Email Blasts
If you’re planning on sending out multiple emails at once, it’s important to schedule them. Not only does this make it much easier because you don’t have to go in and individually send a bunch of emails, but also it ensures they get sent at the right times. Most people tend to check their emails shortly after waking up, so scheduling email blasts in the morning may be ideal. However, make sure you take into consideration the different time zones so you don’t send an email at five am to someone on the West Coast.
Follow up
It’s not uncommon for a reader to forget about a deal you offered, especially if they’re receiving hundreds of emails a day. But as a general rule of thumb, you should wait 2 business days to send a follow-up email. Sending something sooner than that might make a customer unsubscribe from your emails.
Embrace trial and error
It’ll likely take some trial and error before you can nail down how to write an effective email. But don’t let this deter you! Understanding how to write emails in an effective manner is a learning curve, and you’ll get the hang of it eventually. And while you’re learning, you can try out email A/B testing, which is essentially the process of sending out one variation of an email to one person and a different variation to another person. This will help give you an idea of what type of email works best.
