Travel the Road to Great B2B Email Copy in 6 Easy Steps

Every email that you send should have a goal or purpose. Whether the email is just to stay in touch with a prospect or to inform your clients about a new product, the content of your email is a deciding factor in how successful your email campaign is. Writing effective email copy can be tough, to help out, here are 6 steps you can use to improve your email copy.

1. Analyze your subject lines. The subject  line is the shortest piece of content that you need to write for your email, but it’s also one of the main factors which determines whether your email gets read or not. Writing an effective email subject line is one of the most difficult aspects of your email. It's important that your subject lines are concise, that they create a sense of urgency and that they are intriguing enough to attract your recipients attention. You can read more about creating effective email subject lines here.
2. Create strong calls-to-action. In general, it’s a good practice to keep the calls-to-action in your emails to a minimum and to ensure that each of them tells your recipient exactly what you want them to do. It is usually easier to get your readers to convert on your campaign if you don’t overwhelm them with multiple calls-to-action. This post has more information about improving calls-to-action.
3. Include benefits to Inspire action. Telling your recipients what benefits they will get when they convert on your campaign is a key to inspiring action. If your readers don't feel like they have a reason to convert then they won't.
4. Ensure that you are promotional and educational. Many emails are sent with the intention of promoting a product or service, an upcoming event or company news. It's important to remember that you should provide readers with informational, non-corporate copy on top of your promotional copy (like a link to a thought-leadership interview on a related topic). This both adds credibility to the subject of your email and helps provide your recipients with some additional resources on a topic which, if you've done your email segmenting correctly, they are interested in.
5. Edit to be succinct.Your subscribers most likely receive hundreds of emails daily. By keeping your emails short and to the point, and directly explaining the purpose of your campaign it is more likely that your email will be read and acted on.
   
6. Proofread for errors! Having grammatical errors is one of the quickest ways to erode the credibility of your email campaigns. It's important to check for errors and to have someone else proofread your work before pressing send! 

Posted by Amberlie Denny at August 3, 2010 8:00 AM

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