Six tips to write an email that prompts your subscribers to action

It is no doubt that electronic mail as a marketing tool has proven its undeniable effectiveness. No matter what kind of business you run, if you don’t use email to stay in touch with your customers, you are probably losing a good chunk of income that you could be making.

However, sending out emails alone with the content irrelevant to your customer needs, even if it is on a regular basis, will not do the trick. Making sure your email marketing campaign is well-crafted and speaks to your audience must be a priority task to tackle, regardless if you are a newly minted entrepreneur or a long-established business.

A newsletter is an email sent to inform your readers of your announcements, interesting and relevant content, and, most importantly, promotions. It is one of the most essential tools in keeping your customers in the loop and in gaining traffic to your webpage as well as your social media pages.

1. It will help you retain already existing subscribers and therefore maintain your credibility.
2. It could potentially grow your customer database.

According to Campaign Monitor, 0.17% is an average unsubscribe rate. However, if your email unsubscribes rates jump over 2% this signals that you need to review your newsletter campaign.

So what does it take to create a compelling email that not only helps you grow the number of your customers but also increases your click-through rates and consequently draws income? We have assembled 6 tips on how to write an email that will prompt your subscribers to action.

Send out emails only when you have something to say. Even though the numbers above imposingly tell us to push for email marketing, do not overestimate it. Email is good, but it’s even better when combined with other marketing strategies. Consider the social and financial situation in the world right now, think what would be relevant to your customers, and try to weave that into your newsletter campaign.

Choose one primary call-to-action. It is acceptable to highlight several things in your email. However, do not let those overshadow the main message. Your message could come across unclear and customers will lose interest in reading further. Make sure your email has a core point and let the rest of the information remain secondary.

Don’t enforce sales content too much. Clearly, the ultimate goal is to gain customers’ loyalty and subsequently earn the profit. However, stuffing your email with sales content only will come off as pushy and somewhat aggressive. After all, making each and every email in your newsletter campaign a special offer may get your customers thinking about how “special” is your “special offer”. Instead, try to balance the content by making it 10% sales and 90% educative.

Invest time into creating an eye-catching subject line. Believe it or not, subject lines are the first step to enticing your subscribers to read more. Your email campaign may be great, but if your subject line isn’t — everything can fall through. According to Marketo, seven words or 41 characters are considered the best size for a subject line. This number yields the highest clicks to open. Surprisingly enough, eight words subject line produces half as much as that number.

Remember that your emails may be opened on various devices, be it an iPhone or a MacBook, so you might want to consider making your subject line even shorter. As sad as it may sound, people don’t have time to read lengthy texts, so try to keep your subject line short, striking, and to the point.

Invest into design. According to HubSpot, an average user spends between 3 to 5 seconds skimming a website. We can easily assume that these metrics can be applied to a newsletter too. This means your email has to grab your customer’s attention, get your message across, and awake your customer’s interest, all in 3 to 5 seconds. Sounds like a challenge? Remember, that if the layout of your email newsletter is too heavy on media and is cheaply designed, you may not get the desired results. Make sure your newsletter has some blank white spaces. This will alleviate the overall outlook of your email and make it easier for your subscribers to click the right button. If you are struggling with designing your newsletter layout, hire a professional designer, or use an app. There’s plenty of beginner-friendly applications that allow you to create stunning layouts.

Keep it short and concise. We know no people who would want to read a 500-words email, especially in the times, when everything in life evolves with lightning speed. Making sure your email includes only relevant, crucial information, that prompts your subscriber to click and find out more is the key in a successful email newsletter.

And one last but not least tip, even though contradictory in its nature to the entire idea of the email newsletter, don’t forget to add an Unsubscribe button. As sad as it may sound, your customers must be given the freedom to unsubscribe. After all, nothing is perfect, but those “Unsubscribe me” requests are actually an alarm for you to improve.

Clearly, preparing a decent newsletter campaign is a chunk of work, but in fact, it is only a drop in the ocean in the entire email marketing campaign. Making sure those honed to the perfection emails reach real people and hopefully make them your loyal customers is something you should consider next. Mailcheck, our email validation tool, uses state-of-the-art algorithms to conclude whether the emails in your database belong to real people, so that all that time and efforts spent on perfecting your email doesn’t turn out fruitless. After years spent refining the validation process, Mailcheck can now sift through thousands of emails in no time. It offers an API integration that handles your email database validation every time you set up a new newsletter campaign.

We learn as we go, and the above list is probably exhaustless. Perfecting your email newsletter campaign is a process that involves constant changes, and the best way to ensure that your changes are actually improvements is to test them.