Jo Kelly shares seven tips for writing effective marketing emails, without sounding like a spammer.
Email should be the perfect promotional channel for arts organisations. It’s relatively cheap, relatively quick and you can put campaigns together in-house. So why do so many struggle to make email pay? We can summarise the problems as a general unwillingness to open, read, believe or act on promotional emails. There are solutions though. First, let’s be clear: we are selling. Selling doesn’t mean being ‘sales-y’, cheesy or ‘spammy’. It does mean having a clear, commercial goal: repeat ticket sales, member recruitment or subscription renewals, for example. It then means ensuring that every word, full stop and image work tirelessly towards that goal. You could do worse than follow the sales formula: attention – interest – desire – conviction – action (AIDCA). Grab your reader’s attention with a headline. Secure their interest by showing them how they benefit. Arouse desire, perhaps by using storytelling techniques to dramatise your offer. Instil conviction by including a testimonial from a satisfied customer. Prompt action with strong, clear and direct language telling them what to do. With that in mind, here are our top seven tips for effective email copywriting.
1. Get your subject line right
Use your keywords – ‘ticket offer’ for example – at the beginning. This is partly because people scan their inboxes vertically, not horizontally, and partly because mobile phones and some email programmes truncate subject lines. Test using your recipients’ names in the subject line. Don’t worry about whether it looks like a promotional email, measure your open rates instead.
2. Include a headline
Headlines that work in emails should promise a benefit of some kind. They should be personal, urgent, practical, irresistible and specific. Short is good, but don’t make a fetish of brevity. Relevance is more important.
3. Open with an immediate appeal to your reader’s
self-interest
People often screen emails by looking at the first few lines using the preview pane. This is not the place to digress into the history of your organisation, or even the process that led you to contact them. If you have a half-price ticket offer or a special deal for members or supporters, open with that.
4. Don’t hide your
call to action
Why not have a call to action – a hyperlink to a landing page for example – at the top of your email? Then repeat it a couple of times more through the email itself. You could use images and text links, and test which ones people click more. Make it decisive. Don’t say “If you would like to join us”. Instead, try “Join us today and you get...”
5. Keep your tone of
voice friendly
The emails most people prefer to read are those from their friends, family and colleagues. Look at your own personal emails and see how they are written in a personal, informal style. For a promotional email you may want to adjust the style and tone to reflect your organisation and brand. But emails are no place for stiff, starchy language. Why use “purchase”, “immediately” or “complimentary”, when “buy”, “now” and “free” are available?
6. spam filters
You may have been told that you can’t use the word “free” in a promotional email or it will get marked as spam. It won’t. SpamAssassin software, used in lots of email checking programs, has 746 separate spam tests, but none explicitly forbids the use of “free”. In general, if you aren’t a spammer, and you are writing relevant, truthful copy about an ethical product or service, you have nothing to worry about.
7. Shorten your sentences
Offline you should be aiming for an average sentence length of 16 words. Online, even that figure allows sentences that are just too long to be easily understood. It’s not that your reader is stupid. Indeed, for arts organisations, most of the time your reader is better educated than average. But reading onscreen is physically more tiring than reading off the page, so you need to make your copy easier to understand by chopping it up into more readily digestible chunks. Let’s say you aim for an average sentence of 12 words.
Above all, write with a genuine voice that meets expectations of email as a communications medium and of your organisation. Always sign off with a person’s name. Emails signed by “The Arts Centre Team” deserve to be canned, possibly with a label showing a piece of that lovely, shiny, pink meat called... shh, don’t even say it.
Jo Kelly is Commercial Director of Sunfish Ltd., a communications agency specialising in direct response copy for online and print campaigns, and
corporate publicity.
E jo.kelly@sunfish.co.uk
T 01722 413 900
W http://www.sunfish.co.uk