A Thorough Guide to Email Copywriting For Businesses

Email copywriting is the process of sending inbound and outbound marketing emails to customers and potential leads as a way to cultivate a relationship with them, and form your brand identity with them. 

It’s an important aspect of branding for the following reasons:

• There are 3.9 billion daily email users, of which 47% use it on their phone. 
• 73% of millennials prefer to be communicated from businesses through email as opposed to ads or cold calling
• Marketers who use segmented campaigns note as much as a 760% increase in revenue.

Email marketing still remains the strongest lead converting tool in digital marketing. And the way that kind of stats can be achieved is through an excellent online branding persona and consequently, excellent copywriting. 

Types of Email

1. Welcome Email:

This is a very important email because that’s the first correspondence your customer has with you. Be it a welcome email for subscription, for signing up to a mailing list or for for their first purchase/shop visit. Mention their name to add a personal touch. Show, don’t tell!  Be enthusiastic and use exciting words and phrases in your copy. Tell them what to expect from this correspondence. Address concerns like data privacy, spamming etc. Use a CTA in every email.

• Use names and other identifying data for a personal touch 
• Be enthusiastic about the customer joining your brand 
• Tell them what to expect– data privacy & frequency of emails 
• Assurance of them making the right choice by signing up etc. 
• Use CTA at the end to take them to your home page or anything else.

2. Formal Emails- 

Emails like account confirmation, purchase confirmation, shipping confirmation, password recovery etc. may not be relevant to the products or services you’re selling, but it is often overlooked when it comes to integrating your brand voice in your copy. 

Sure, a generic password recovery email may be fine, but imagine how much more memorable your brand would be if it was something fun like “Hey User! You forgot your password? We got you.” 

• Put a fun twist on common sentences
• Use customers’ name to reinforce the relationship 
• Give a little “teaser” information about the product/service to keep up the excitement. 
• Make the customer feel like they made a great decision.

3. Onboarding emails: 

This involves newsletters, webinars, product launches etc. Newsletters and webinars are short form blogs that are the best way to assign an identity to your brand through storytelling. 

Make sure to use your own name as the email’s sender; people respond to human names more than brand names. Authentic stories about your business and its process make the customer more invested.

• Be authentic in your newsletters
• Use your own name as the sender–people respond better to humans than companies 
• Integrate your product launches to the newsletters. 
• Keep your sentences short and easy to read. 

4.  Topical and Inclusion emails:

Companies are taking political and humanitarian stances more now than ever. However, the line between a heartfelt message and an insensitive grab for attention is the way you word the message. 

With these kinds of emails, it’s so important to research your customers’ thresholds for Inclusion emails, then take a stance, and make sure you use respectful language. 

• Take a stance 
• Be respectful in your language.
• Don’t isolate or attack anyone.
• Include an action you did to make the situation better. Eg: donation 

5. Cart abandonment Emails: 

A critical part of lead conversion. A lot of people tend to stop at the checkout process because:

1. they want a “cooldown” period to decide if they made the right choice. 
2. They don’t like the shipping fees
3. They were browsing

Two of these issues can be fixed with copywriting. You can fix shipping issue by possibly making shipping free with a minimum amount. For the rest, we send a reminder email.

You could say they are “selling hot!” or “Running out of stock” to create urgency. Be mindful of the timing of the message. Too soon and too many, it may be perceived as pushy. Send no more than 3 emails, one after an hour, one after 12 hours and one after 24 hours. 

 

• People abandon cart because they need time to decide
• Send them a reminder email
• Be mindful of the timing and amount of messages
• Create a sense of urgency and appreciate them for their picks

Structure of Email

The structure essentially boils down to the what and why of the content:

• What are you offering?
• Why it’s important 
• How do you get it?

We can now weave our story around this structure. Keep the tone of the email consistent with your brand voice throughout the subject line, content and cta.

Subject Line: 

• Make it attention-grabbing. 
• Use a lot of numbers and power words. 
• Make it personal. More “you” than “me”
• Create a sense of urgency with words like “now” and “don’t miss out”
• Keep it to a length of six to ten words.

Preview text

• Think of it like a tweet to pique the interest of the reader
• Follow up the subject line with the same content in the preview text 
• Use this snippet to solidify what your readers need to expect from this email
• Use questions or conversational/casual tone. 
• Keep in mind that mobile push notifications show far more preview text than desktop and write accordingly

Content

The body of an email is a lawless land. There are no rules here, you only have to decide on your goal. There are tons of directions you can go in:

• Tell a story 
• Teach a subject 
• Share a blog post 
• Introduce a product or resource
• Update users with important news 

The most important point is delivering the message you used in the subject line. If you promised something in the subject line or preview text, it’s imperative that you deliver that promise either in the email itself or through a hyperlink. 

People really love storytelling in emails. As long as you format it so it’s not too dense– 2 sentence paragraphs should be fine, it piques interest for a lot of people. Start your sentence with an “I” statement, like “I was reading a book about…”. It could also be a descriptive hook, like “I didn’t believe her when she said she was going to burn the hats.”

There are many more ways to share the content: 

• Case studies 
• Run industry surveys and share the results (could even be used as a social signal)
• Conduct studies and share the analysis
• Do something niche that your contemporaries are not doing and share the experience. 

If you decide to put a hyperlink in the email that takes the user to a blog or a product, the general rule of thumb is, the length of the email is inversely proportional to the length of the hyperlink. So if you write a 600 word story in your email, the copy in your hyperlink needs to be less than the copy– just a checkout page or a brief landing page. If your click-through is a long form copy like a detailed sales page or a blog, then keep the email itself brief so the readers get to the link faster and avoid reader fatigue. 

• No rules on how you want to write the body
• Deliver the promise in the subject line in the preview line itself 
• People love stories–utilise storytelling to push your message
• The email length is inversely proportional to content in the hyperlink.

Call-to-action

• Always, Always include a CTA in your newsletter. It doesn’t have to be to a sales page every time, so include a soft CTA to another blog or a sign up etc so that when you do pitch a product, people are not thrown off. 
• You can ask people a question about the email at the end and prompt them to respond as a CTA
• Repeating the CTA in-line of the body is okay as long as you don’t spam it
• The general CTA rules apply here too. Use active words, sense of urgency and a safety fallback 
• Highlight the CTA or make it bigger and easily visible. 
• Use a “P.S.” to reiterate your CTA. It’s a very underrated conversion tool as people might skim the email but they always read the P.S.

Template and Sequence

There’s a lot of sequences out there, and nobody really knows which is the best one as it depends more on the customers than the company. You have to think about the tolerance your customers would have for the frequency of emails. After you get some insights on that using split tests, then you decide on a sequence. 

The bad news is, orchestrating emails in a sequence and writing the copy is not easy. It takes a ton of time and resources to get everything in order. The good news is, you can always use a pre-made template and sequence from any email automation website (do your research!). Here’s a generic sequence from Backlinko’s Brain Dean:

And here’s a generic template from the same for maximum SEO strategizing:

It goes without saying that the most effective conversion is done when you customise your email sequences to the best of your audience. This is where a good branding and online digital marketing agency will do the grunt work.