By lkolowich@hubspot.com (Lindsay Kolowich Cox)

Email marketing remains crucial to most marketing campaigns. However, not every marketer knows how to write a marketing email that will boost conversions and audience retention.

If your marketing emails aren’t well-written, your subscribers will stop opening and start deleting your messages.

This article will break down best practices for an effective email that will boost your next lead-nurturing campaign.

10 Email Copywriting Tips for Writing Better Marketing Emails

We’ll start with copywriting tips for better subject lines, followed by copywriting tips for the bodies of your emails.

How to Write a Subject Line

Part of writing effective email copy is nailing the subject line.

The subject line is like the gatekeeper of your email: No one gets to read your stellar email copy if they aren’t interested enough to open your email in the first place.

That interest is garnered almost wholly on the email’s subject line (with the sender’s name also playing a role).

We’ve written a few blog posts about crafting email subject lines, including one showing 157 examples of awesome subject lines from brands.

Here’s a distillation of what you need to know to write some excellent copy.

1. Use actionable language.

With email subject lines, using actionable language doesn’t necessarily mean using verbs, although it certainly helps. OpenTable, for example, sent me an email that said “Take Mom to Brunch” in the subject line.

This is one way to use actionable language effectively in email subject lines: by incorporating a verb (like “take,” “download,” “reserve,” “ask,” “buy,” etc.), the reader knows exactly what they can do in the email.

But there are ways to use actionable language without relying on verbs, which gives you more room to play around with wording.

It comes down to using language that clarifies to the recipient what they can do with the information in the email, should they choose to open it. In other words, keep the value for the user top-of-mind.

For example, I once got an email from TicketMaster with the subject line “Don’t Miss Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band.”

They didn’t order me to purchase tickets by saying, “Purchase Tickets Tomorrow for Bruce Springsteen and the E Street Band,” though such a subject line may have performed just as well.

The original subject line worked well because it was clear what I could do with the information in that email — ensure I’m prepared for the 10:00 AM sale time so I could snag my tickets. (Which I did, thanks to that email!)

2. Personalize when possible.

Highly segmented emails tend to have higher performance levels — such as open rate and clickthrough rate — than emails that aren’t personalized.

Our research found that the most effective strategies for email marketing campaigns are subscriber segmentation (78%), message personalization (72%), and email automation campaigns (71%).

This isn’t exactly surprising. After all, the more segmented your email list, the better you can personalize the …read more

Source:: HubSpot Blog

Author: Aaron