Email marketing is a powerful tool that can help you nurture existing leads and entice cold ones to convert into paying customers. However, if mishandled, email marketing can backfire and kill your sales.
According to published data, 81% of people who shop online will continue to do so if they receive promotional mail tailored to their purchase expectations. Instead of avoiding email marketing as a whole, here’s what you can do to avoid critical writing mistakes and boost your sales in doing so.
1. Overly Sales-Oriented Subject Lines
Subject lines are critical for successful email marketing when sales content is concerned. Emails with poor or overly energetic, salesy subject lines won’t go well with most audiences. Instead of trying to lure your recipients into feeling FOMO, adopt a different approach.
Be polite, professional, and diplomatic in your subject line writing. Keep your subject lines to under 10 words to make sure both desktop and mobile users can read them properly. You should also use your opening line to introduce yourself, mention your position in the company, and why you’re reaching out. Even if people voluntarily subscribed to your email list, it’s still good practice to write an appealing, personalized opening line.
2. Being Unprofessional in your Sales Pitch Delivery
You should be as polite and professional when you pitch your products or services via email marketing. Being impolite and impatient with your customers won’t get you anywhere close to closing sales. Instead, try to pace yourself and get to the point of your email a few sentences into it.
Avoid using all-cap sentences, special characters, and visuals such as shocked panicked faces. This will not only deteriorate your relation with existing subscribers, but also push them away from buying more goods or services. Don’t push your products onto customers – let them come to you instead by listing their benefits and practical applications. Attach up-to-date links and contact info in your emails’ footer to allow people to follow up on your sales pitches and call it a day.
3. Lacking Segmentation in your Email Campaigns
We are all different when it comes to lifestyle choices and expectations from the brands we purchase from. A millennial customer will have different expectations from your brand than a retiree or a stay-at-home parent. Don’t write generalized sales emails which you will send to everyone on your email list.
Instead, segment your audience based on different elements such as their age, gender, profession, country, etc. Write slightly different content for each audience segment, and consider translating your sales emails for international customers. Appeal to each audience segment as much as you can to encourage them to visit your online shop. Sending generalized emails instead will result in your email address being blacklisted and reported as spam most of the time.
4. Spamming your Email List Unnecessarily
Even though you may be inclined to contact your customers as much as possible, this is a bad idea in terms of email marketing. Scheduling your emails for certain times of day and days in a month is a much better proposition. But, how often should you send marketing emails then? It all depends on the target audience you’re working with and the products or services under your brand name.
If you’re marketing a SaaS platform with only a few features, you shouldn’t send repeat emails every day to each of your customers. However, if you run an online store with a wide range of products and categories, marketing different ones daily isn’t a bad idea. The same applies to your aforementioned email segmentation efforts. Working people won’t appreciate nor engage them during work hours – why not send them in the mornings or evenings?
5. Poorly Formatted Emails Riddled with Grammar Mistakes
Once you’ve said everything you wanted to, you should take the time to format and spellcheck your emails. Poorly formatted emails are big red flags, especially for people who forgot that they’ve subscribed to your emails.
People who work as writers or marketers and students who work on academic papers constantly will spot your mistakes. Students can use thesis writing help to get paper writing done faster and hand in a writing assignment on time with help from professionals. Read through your emails manually and spellcheck them to make sure no tone of voice or writing style inconsistencies crept their way into them.
6. Too Many (Or Lack of) Calls to Action
The main element of your sales emails which will encourage people to buy more goods are the calls to action (CTA) you write. Writing calls to action is a tricky prospect, however. Writing too many calls to action into a single email will almost assuredly result in your email convincing no one to buy your goods. On the other hand, no CTAs whatsoever will result in much of the same, as people won’t have a clear action to follow. So, what do you do?
Writing 1-3 calls to action into each sales email is a good choice, especially if you rely on longer emails that go into details. Position your CTAs at the beginning and end of the email’s body, since these are the elements people will pay most attention to. Anything from “visit our website today” to “call now and receive a 10% discount will do”. It’s important to maintain professionalism in your CTAs to not appear desperate to close sales and people will likely follow up on them.
7. Poor Mobile Optimization
With more and more people using mobile devices such as smartphones and tablets to read emails, optimizing your sales email marketing for them is essential. Without mobile optimization, your emails are bound to fail to capture these customers. How can you optimize your sales writing for mobile?
First off, you should keep your emails short and on point, without delving into long-form writing. Limit your emails to several paragraphs of text interspersed with bullet points, numeric data, and light visual elements. Don’t go overboard with visuals since they can increase your load time and bandwidth requirements – two elements to keep an eye on in mobile emails. Ticking off these two boxes will help you reach out to more people in your email list and generate new sales as a result.
Benefits of Avoiding Common Email Marketing Writing Mistakes
Whether you sell goods via eCommerce or run a blog and want to promote it, email marketing can transform the way you do business. The mistakes we’ve outlined should be avoided at all times to ensure that your emails always land in your recipients’ primary inboxes instead of spam folders. Once you do that, there are a couple of major benefits which you will experience from running email marketing campaigns:
- Reengagement of existing customers with new sales offers
- Maintain a professional, reliable brand image with your email list
- Make your brand more appealing to cold leads through word of mouth
- Improved website traffic and content engagement
- Higher return on time and resource investment with email marketing
Getting Started on your Email Writing (Conclusion)
Email writing mistakes are more common than you think. If you’ve made them in the past, don’t worry. There are plenty of companies, bloggers, and influencers out there who continue to make mistakes in their sales emails. You should, however, strive to become better instead of repeating the same mistakes.
Differentiate your brand from others by adopting a more calculated, professional approach to sales email writing. This will instill your email list with confidence in your business and nudge them toward making repeat purchases even if they’ve converted into paying customers.
Author’s bio
Jessica Fender is a copywriter and blogger at Writingsbyjanice with a background in marketing and sales. She enjoys sharing her experience with like-minded professionals who aim to provide customers with high-quality services.