4 Tips for Writing an Effective Marketing Email

By Michelle Voznyuk, Marketing Specialist at Heinz Marketing

Everyday we are bombarded by marketing emails. Yet as marketers, we still send them. Why? Because they’re still proven to be one of the most effective methods for reaching prospects and customers.

Targeted ads are great, but they can take a big bite out of our budget. Marketing emails have little to no overhead and can be sent in a “batch and blast” approach, reaching a broad audience in one click.

That being said, it becomes much harder to get our audience to open, read, and act on our emails over time. But sending more emails doesn’t solve the problem. In fact, it pretty much does the opposite. Pushing our audience too hard only creates a greater risk that they unsubscribe completely.

So, what do we do? The answer is simple – we have to create top notch emails.

Here are four tips for creating effective marketing emails you can implement in your strategy as we close out the year.

Create Strong, Yet Concise Subject Lines

You’ve probably heard the saying “first impressions are everything”. The same is true for our emails. The subject line is the first thing prospects and customers see when they receive our emails. When we’re fighting tooth and nail against a multitude of businesses sending them emails each day, we have to do our best to stand out. With that in mind, we need find the right balance between gaining interest and getting to the point. As a rule of thumb, according to MailChimp, subject lines should be no longer than 9 words and 60 characters.

Hot tip: if you want to go the extra mile and get some insight on how your subject line performs, consider running an A/B test.

Open All Emails With an “Attention Grabber”

While subject lines are extremely important, getting our audience to open our emails is only half the battle. Our first few sentences need to grab attention right away or the reader will jump ship quickly. This is where we need to tap into the real person reading the email. Fluffy sales and marketing jargon should be left off the table. Instead, we need to find a way to speak to the pain points the reader might be facing. After all, our product/service was created to help them solve those challenges, right?

Make Sure All CTAs are Clearly Marked

The worst thing that can happen is getting to the point where a prospect or customer wants to act on an email, but they can’t figure out how. Not only should we have multiple CTAs throughout our emails, but they should be clear as day. As a best practice, we recommend having a CTA “button” that stands out in a different color from the rest of the email. Also, we recommend linking a section of the text before and after the button and making sure the email banner leads to whatever landing page or destination we are trying to send them to as well.

Don’t Overdo It

When writing emails, we need to make sure we don’t overdo it. There’s a very fine line between an email that reads well and contains all necessary information and an email that is just too long. We should always operate under the assumption that our audience is busy. We shouldn’t say something in a paragraph that could be said in a sentence. Additionally, we should consider how many emails we are sending as a part of that effort. Is it a series? If so, email length should typically get shorter as the emails are sent. For example, maybe we’re promoting a survey. The first email should be the longest, introducing the survey (why we’re conducting it, why we want their feedback, etc.). But the last email in the series can be as simple as “if you have a couple minutes to spare, we’d appreciate your feedback on X”. Keeping it short and sweet will increase our chances that our email is read.

I hope you found these tips helpful as you gear up your marketing efforts for 2022 and close out the year strong. Happy writing!