Email copywriting is the craft of writing emails designed to convert customers, whether that’s into visitors, subscribers, or buyers. But most emails fail to do this effectively.
Some lack energy or direction, and others are simply misguided.
They’re sent to the wrong people, at the wrong time, or in the wrong tone. So, if your open rates are suffering or your sales won’t pick up, you need to give your email copy a makeover.
We’re talking copy that makes customers feel something. That nudges/goads/rattles them, depending on the size of the email’s ‘ask’, into taking action.
In this guide, we’ve laid bare the essentials of effective email copywriting, done rundowns on examples, and provided email templates for you to borrow, adapt, or draw inspiration from.
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The role of an effective email copywriter
As an email copywriter, you have one primary responsibility — to get email subscribers to convert.
This conversion could be through a
- reply
- click
- sign-up
- download
- review
- share
- follow
- purchase
To make your email copy effective, you need to know:
- Who your audience is
- What makes them tick
- And just as importantly, what doesn’t
Email marketers seem to be trying every trick in the book these days, like Kentucky Derby attendees competing for the flashiest hat. It makes you wonder: can you still connect with customers without turning your outreach into a circus act?
The short answer is yes. All you need is some smartly-worded copy and a way to find the right contacts to send it to.
6 tips on how to become an effective copywriter
Here is a list of steps to write impactful, resonant email copy.
1. Understand Your Audience
Once you’ve understood your audience and what it is you want from them, you can start planning emails that bridge the gap between the two.
Audience research helps you overcome the usual challenges associated with email marketing:
- A lack of trust
- An unengaged audience
- Competitor comparisons
- Indecisive leads
You can create audience personas and then draft templates based on their demographics, psychographics, and firmographics.
These personas also help you look for more ICP matches on B2B lead databases like Hunter Discover.
Or, you could enter the names of your top clients in the search field and cherry-pick criteria, e.g., a company size of 200-500, or those using Salesforce, to build a lookalike audience.
Track company news and monitor intent data for these prospects to time your emails strategically and ensure they land in your prospect’s inbox when they’re most likely to engage.
2. Crafting a compelling subject line
When your caffeine-fueled creativity is running on fumes, and the deadline is just ten seconds away, it’s tempting to go all out with all caps, fifteen emojis, and a million exclamation marks in your subject line.
Or sputter tired phrases like “Sale Ends Tonight” and “50% Off – Buy Now”.
We’re not ruling any of these out completely because as norms change, so will the methods to break away from them.
Case in point is Huckberry’s emoji-only subject line.
Even the bravest copywriters are close-handed with emojis, but that’s precisely what this subject line does to stand out in a crowded inbox.
Then there’s Email Love’s clever wordplay in ‘Zooming in on Zoom’s case study.’
And intrigue-building in this one from Who Gives A Crap.
The key is switching up your style to keep readers hooked.
3. Keep the email body clear and concise
It’s not just minimalism in design that’s trending. Because of the sheer volume of emails people receive every day (double or triple that for the holiday season), lean email copy is the way to go. It respects readers’ time and ensures your message sticks.
Let your images do the talking.
To keep your emails straightforward and focused, use the slippery slope technique, where each sentence has to form the next part of the slope.
If a line
- isn’t about the topic in general,
- doesn’t build on the previous sentence or
- creates friction,
cut it out.
A few other ways to add clarity are:
- Steering clear of run-on sentences and walls of text, and
- Using bullet points for easy scanning.
4. The power of personalization
Personalization has never been more personal than it is now. And if trends are anything to go by, the horizons just keep expanding.
Take, for example, this Manchester City birthday email that contains personalized copy within a personalized image.
This level of personalization may be daunting to some of us, but the good thing is email personalization isn’t an all-or-nothing game.
As an email copywriter, you’re responsible for making emails as individually relevant as possible. But impactful personalization doesn’t always need sci-fi movie-level tech.
You’d be surprised how much you can achieve with tweaks as simple as mentioning company names in subject lines. Or sending time optimization, Apple privacy updates be dashed.
But remember that personalization goes hand in hand with specificity.
So include enough relevant details in your email to let your customers know you care (but not so many that you venture into stalker territory), to the extent your resources allow, and you’ll see email campaign stats improve.
5. Create engaging and actionable CTAs
Think of CTAs as doors leading prospects from your email to the next destination in their sales journey.
- If your email has too many doors,
- If they don’t look inviting enough,
- If the knobs are broken,
- Or they’re jammed,
your traffic is going to take a hit.
For businesses already dealing with low engagement, we suggest sticking to a one-CTA-per-email policy.
If you must, raise this to two, but any more CTAs will dilute your message’s impact.
Use empowering, non-onerous verbs in your CTAs. So, words like ‘grab’ or ‘claim’ instead of ‘request’ or ‘give.’
Make sure the call to action (CTA) is spaced apart from the rest of the text. Buttons are useful at drawing the reader’s attention, too.
When prospects click on them, lead them to mobile-optimized landing pages that keep them moving further down the funnel.
6. A/B testing for optimization
The trait that sets effective email copywriters apart from their ilk is their openness to change. They’re willing to admit that all emails are a work in progress.
Use A/B testing to look out for incongruous elements within your email and tweak it to customer preferences.
- What’s better — a subject line with emojis or without?
- Would a different intro have more impact?
- Is the copy too long?
- Does the CTA not resonate with recipients?
- Should that image move two paragraphs up?
Iron out these uncertainties by A/B testing on a small batch of recipients.
Measure, analyze, and compare
- Open rates
- Viewing times
- Click-through rates
- Response rates, etc.
- for both versions
and send emails containing the winning element/(s) to the rest of your list.
Use the insights from each segment to shorten sales cycles and provide better customer experiences.
Examples of effective email copies
In this section, we’ve presented brilliant examples of email copywriting from other brands, as well as original plain-text templates that you can use as is or embellish with visual elements and design.
Promotional emails
Subject line: Want to watch us face our biggest fear this Halloween?
We’re really big on celebrations here at {YourCompany}. And with Halloween just a week away, we thought — What better way to celebrate than by opening ourselves to the possibility of public ridicule that comes with every product launch?
So. deep breath doesn’t work dies inside We’re launching {product name}, a {product description} for {target audience}.
It’s the fruit of many years of labor, and before you ask, no, we’re not even remotely ready. But everyone we’ve asked has greenlighted this, so, yeah. You’re invited. Here’s the event link.
As one of our oldest customers, we’d love to have you there. Please come virtually hold our hand on the most important day of the year for us?
Product launch emails are more brand-sensitive than others, so create your template keeping your brand voice and tone in mind.
This one uses defeatist humor and sarcasm to make its announcement, but the overall format remains the same.
Your subject line should be non-generic and pique customer interest.
A short description would improve click-throughs for most promotions.
End with a similarly non-cliche CTA.
Invite participation with quizzes or interactive elements.
Harry’s uses a unique headline and a visual product guide to launch the pre-shave primer.
Follow-up emails
Subject line: teething troubles
Or beginner’s bad luck? Nope. Someone should coin a more serious phrase for the avalanche of {problem area} issues that {industry} companies face right after {milestone/event}.
Avalanche of Adversity? Sounds like it’s part of the Mission Impossible franchise, but most {designation}s we’ve spoken to feel like they need an army of Tom Cruises to fix their {detailed explanation of problem}.
At {YourCompany}, we don’t have Tom Cruise. But we do have a bootstrapped team of {list professions} that can {benefit 1}, {benefit 2}, and {benefit 3}.
Can I explain a little more? And if you’re not the person to talk to about this, mind redirecting us to someone from the team who is?
This template uses humor and pop culture to slice through the awkwardness of double-emailing a recipient.
A description of the issues that companies and ICPs face also helps register the significance of what you’re offering to solve.
Lastly, the redirect request takes care of any loose ends in the outreach.
If you’re looking for something more multimedia-heavy, Graza’s follow-up email wins back the attention and affection of its customers with this tongue-in-cheek flowchart.
The Absorption Company understands that their readers are already weighing them against competitors. So they might as well do it themselves and show everyone who’s boss.
Cold outreach emails
Subject line: Want to make {CompanyName}’s {problem} go away?
I was looking around on your website earlier and was wondering how you were {addressing pain point}? Here are a couple of ideas that might work for {CompanyName}:
- {Suggestion 1}
- {Suggestion 2}
- {Suggestion 3}
The third suggestion’s got a bit more meat to it and covering it here would turn this email into a ten-pager. So I made a video to show how we executed it for one of our clients and the {measurable impact} it had on their {department/issue}. Check it out here.
We plastered “book a call’ buttons all over the video page (by all over, we mean in three places) and sent out the email using Hunter Campaigns, our cold email software.
Regardless of the specifics, try drafting a template with these elements:
- Start by providing specific context for reaching out.
- To someone receiving an email out of left field from an unknown sender, the first line is the make or break. A specific intro helps them understand you’ve done your research and have an offer that’s relevant to them.
- Take the personalization a step further by using attributes in the offer copy.
- To end your email, double down on the value of your offer by linking to a relevant case study or send them a no-strings-attached lead magnet.
Once you’ve finalized your template, you can
- link each attribute to a corresponding data column from your sheet,
- add more emails to the sequence,
- define the triggers and timeline for follow-up emails, and
- automate sending times based on time zones and/or previous reader activity.
Conclusion
All that remains between you and record-breaking conversion rates is
- strategically-written copy,
- a way to personalize emails at scale and
- the means to make sure the emails land in the right inboxes.
Use the examples and templates listed here in conjunction with Hunter.io’s array of tools and services, all of which have been designed specifically to enable and improve outbound email marketing campaigns, and you’ll be ready to create effective email copy in no time.
Whether freelance or full-time, Arc helps you find your dream remote marketing job at top startups and tech companies.
Work the way you want from anywhere in the world 👉 Join Arc now
