How to write the perfect marketing email

With more and more products and services being sold online these days, businesses have started to devote greater resources to the concept of "email marketing" – the practice of building vast customer email lists that they can promote their products to…

As a result, the importance placed on the content of a promotional email has grown significantly. After all, if many of your customers can only be reached via email, what that email message communicates to them is absolutely crucial to your ability to make sales.

Ultimately, it must convince them to open the email in the first place, it must be able to tap in to their needs, wants and desires and it also needs to be convincing enough to compel the reader to take the action required (which typically involves clicking on a link).

So how exactly can all of this be achieved?

1. Have a compelling subject line – The subject line is the most important part of your promotional message. If your prospects don't open it, you stand no chance of making a sale! Consequently, the subject line needs to be exciting, intriguing, humorous or shocking. Whatever route you take here, you need to make sure it convinces the prospect to open it!

2. Adopt a personal touch – Nobody likes a generic email addressed to nobody in particular. If you want the reader to trust you and buy from you, you need to create a positive relationship of some sort. And the first thing you can do to foster this relationship is to personalize your email. "Hi Brian" will receive a much greater response than "Hi Reader", for example. Personally addressed email deliveries can be set up easily via email marketing services such as Get Response or AWeber.

3. Think about aesthetics – It's easy to make a promotional email look wordy and unappealing. To counter this, make sure that it's not written as a solid block of text all the way down the page. Instead, break the copy up into small paragraphs and use bullet points for lists wherever possible.

Also, keep your message thin, like I'm
doing at the moment. Don't let the text
go all the way across the page.

This way the email will be easier to read
and won't look as ‘wordy'. This technique
has been proven to convert better, so it's
definitely something worth adopting.

4. Insert your link regularly – Don't leave your call to action until the end of the email. You don't know how much of the email your prospect is going to read, so it's important that you insert your link a number of times in the copy to give them every chance of clicking on it. I've found that including the link around 3-4 times in an email has the best success rate.

5. Keep the email concise – Many marketers make the mistake of turning a potentially sharp and punchy promotional email into an overly long and tedious sales page. Long sales copy does work, but it's definitely not suited to the email medium, where the prospect hasn't consciously chosen to visit your site and read about your product. Instead, your email should provide a taster of what's on offer, and the reader should then be encouraged to click through to your website or sales page for more information.

6. List the main benefits- As with any piece of direct response copywriting, the most important thing to do is answer the reader's number one question; "what's in it for me?" And the best way of doing this is to list the main benefits of your product or service in your promotional email and show the reader how it will make their life better.

7. Allow them to unsubscribe – Although you obviously don't want anyone to unsubscribe from your list, the worst thing you can do from a business point of view is prevent them from doing so. If someone wishes to unsubscribe, they will understandably become very angry if the email you've sent doesn't offer them the option of leaving your database. The best way of including this opt-out link is to place it at the very bottom of the email. This way it can be easily found should anyone wish to unsubscribe, but it's not immediately visible.

8. Offer valuable information – A common mistake made by many online marketers is to over-promote to their prospects. This tactic can become very annoying and it's clear that the marketer is only interested in making money out of his or her list. The fact is, if you want to sell to people online (and get them to buy from you again in the future), it's crucial that you build a positive relationship first. A good way of doing this is to provide useful tips and information that will help your readers out, and then intersperse these emails with product promotions.

9. Sidestep the spam filters – In order to make money from your email marketing, you need to make sure that as many people as possible actually get to read the email. Many email providers these days have tight spam filters which block emails that resemble spam, so words like "money", "opportunity" and "cash" for example, are immediately red-flagged and the email blocked. To give your email the best chance of getting through, try using a service like e-filtrate.com. Simply submit your email and it will highlight any problematic words for you.

If you follow these guidelines and incorporate as many of the above recommendations as possible into your promotional emails, you'll stand a much greater chance of converting readers into buyers.

Article Source: http://www.articlesbase.com/email-articles/how-to-write-the-perfect-marketing-email-4867793.html

Nick Cobb is a freelance copywriter, online marketing consultant and the founder and Managing Director of Write For You Ltd, a copywriting agency based in London, England. His principal website; My Freelance Copywriter provides a wide range of copywriting services to domestic and international businesses, while his sister site; Red Hot Sales Letters, is dedicated to producing profit-pulling sales copy for online marketers.

Labels: online email marketing, promotional email

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