Okay, you’ve already heard about it:

Email is among the most effective marketing tools to boost sales and influence your overall conversion.

With an average ROI of 3,800% and all those email marketing trends such as segmentation, humanisation, and collaboration, all you need to do is send tons of optimised emails to consumers and wait for positive results, right?

Not quite.

Competition is high, and the battle for users engagement is bloody. You follow the rules, read about different email marketing tactics, experiment, and try to be creative… but your competitors do too.

To stand out and overtake rather than copy them, try some tricky email writing techniques this year.

So, what are the tips for writing effective emails in 2019?

It’s not about email lists creation and email marketing campaign automation, which are copybook maxims for savvy email marketers like you. It’s about crafting the content of your marketing emails:

• What types of interactive content work best in emails?
• Why use a P.S. in email marketing copies?
• What words to delete from the email body?

Keep on reading to get answers to these and other questions on writing emails your consumers will click.

1. Consider Preheaders

While you follow the common rules of writing email subject lines, making them customised and personalised, as well as using emojis to impact the campaign’s performance, you might ignore pre-headers.

A Preheader is the text appearing after a subject line.

Some marketers forget about pre-headers, and lose the chance to grab consumers’ attention and improve the open rate of their emails.

And it’s a huge mistake!

After all, a pre-header is among the secret weapons of your email to entice readers. Use pre-headers to summarise a message, offer a call to action, or just hook an addressee with a value to motivate them to click.

To add a preheader, you’ll need to insert an extra line of HTML code in your email. Or, just write it in your email builder (most of them have this feature).

Make your preheader short, sweet, and up to a point (a recommended length is 85-100 characters).

2. Use Advanced Personalisation

Personalisation makes a difference in email marketing campaigns: the open rate is 26% higher, CTR is 41% higher, and the overall conversion is better.

Yes, most of you already add consumers’ first names in the subject lines, personalise emails by location, and even segment them by behaviour. But what about going further?

• Personalise the CTA based on your buyer persona.
• Compliment them (the content they published, comments they shared, etc.)
• Personalise by their personal events, such as birthdays, for example. (They have 179% higher unique click rates than promotional emails, by the way.)

So, after you’ve grown the contact list, do your best to segment it accordingly and create advanced templates for all the prospects.

3. Delete Damaging Words

Bad news: most people don’t want to get marketing emails.

Good news: 72% of them still prefer communicating with brands via emails. But to grab their attention and motivate them to open and read your letters, make sure your emails don’t look and sound too salesy.

Avoid writing damaging words in the email body.

These words are:

• Professional slang: Remember that you need to speak the same language as your audience. Most people don’t understand your professional jargon and technical language, so concentrate on their pain points and conversational tone to communicate your message.
• Plague words and superlatives: Given that people scan, not read your emails, they see your generic and sale words as spam. The same holds for outreach emails. So stay brief and concise, write short sentences, and make it clear for the audience to see what they’ll get from your message.

Consider email etiquette and persuasive writing. For that, use active verbs and power words to trigger an emotional response from readers. It will make them want to take action after reading your email.

And that’s where brand storytelling will come in handy. It’s about the trend known as brand humanisation: you create an emotional connection with consumers, choosing the right tone of voice to communicate your brand values.

4. Add Interactive Content

Interactive content is a built-in element of your email, inviting some actions within the message without leaving it. Yes, it’s among email marketing trends in 2019, too.

But what content types can you interact in emails, exactly?

Here are the top five:

1. Surveys: allow you to get feedback and segment the audience.
2. Calculators: allow you to demonstrate the benefits of your brand and, therefore, generate more leads from email marketing campaigns.
3. Games (image carousel, quizzes, GIFs, educational kits): allow you to engage consumers and invite them to do action.
4. Videos: allows increasing open rates and CTR, as well as dwell time of your email.
5. Interactive infographics: allow you to differentiate your brand from competitors and communicate your marketing message to all segments of your audience. With inspiration from design tools offering ready-made templates, you can create animated design and customise it to your marketing goals.

via GIPHY

Interactive content in emails builds brand awareness, brings higher engagement rates, hooks the audience, and allows you to create more value for consumers. So why miss this opportunity to make your email marketing campaigns of higher performance?

5. Write a P.S in Your Emails

Do you know that most people who open an email read its P.S first, before the content itself? Reasons are many: a postscript’s visual and summary advantages, the Zeigarnik effect, and just a habit to start reading from the end. Given that, adding a P.S to your email can boost CTR:

People scroll, see your P.S with CTA, bonus tip, or surplus value — and they take the desired action! Feel free to enhance this effect: design a PS accordingly.

Make it stand out with fonts of other size and colour, or use consumers’ names in P.S. for a more personal approach.

It’s a chance to boost trust and build more customer loyalty. And it comes as no surprise that writing P.S in marketing emails is among the top three unconventional ways to get traffic to your website.

Over to you

Email content and design matter. It’s a fundamental part of your marketing strategy, to be specific. So, experiment with email texts, using the tricks we’ve mentioned, and remember:

You can always track rankings of your content traffic, monitor and calculate the results of your marketing campaign, do the advanced A/B testing, and optimise emails for better performance. Just listen to your audience, and they’ll tell you what to do.

• About the Author...

Lesley Vos

https://bid4papers.com/

lesley.j.vos@gmail.com

Web writer and guest blogger. Content strategist at Bid4Papers blog. In love with sax music and pizza. Secretly having a crush on Hemingway. Feel free to visit @LesleyVos on Twitter for more writings of hers.