Improve Your Email Copy, Improve Your Conversion Rate

If you're a typical online marketer, you're extremely busy, had way too much caffeine and have two many tasks that were due yesterday. When it comes to preparing an email to promote an upcoming event, all you can think about is the date of the event that is looming and your eager boss that has not seen the invite go out yet. Have you been here before?

When it comes to writing your email copy, you sometimes forget some of the key elements that will get you the conversion rates (event registrations) that you need to demonstrate for your established marketing metrics. John Murphy has written an excellent article called How to design your e-mail copy to maximize response. In this article he states:

The key to developing an effective e-mail campaign is to remember that everything about your e-mail copy should be focused on one objective – getting the recipient to click through to your landing page. Everything else, including branding, product details and awareness, is secondary.

This obviously depends on the nature of your email but this is typically a major objective for marketers. It's easy to forget this basic point when your pulling your copy together and your designer has created these cool pictures. Focus on conversions.

Besides some of the obvious tips such as keeping your email body text brief and keeping the subject line below 35 characters, I found it interesting that he recommends not using typical words like "unsubscribe" or "remove me" as part of your opt-out process. Words like these will typically be picked up anti-spam software. He suggests something like "If you don’t want to hear from us...”. This is an immediate take away and something I will experiment with.

For timing of B2B emails, he recommends sending them between 10-2 EST and weekends for B2B emails.

Julian Scott has added another great tip in his article "Fast and easy creative best practices for e-mail". He claims that while you should have a strong call to action in the preview pane, also have it at the end of a content section or at the bottom of your email. Email recipients will tend to not want to scroll back up to the top.

I hope you enjoyed these tips.

Chad H.

Tags: email marketing, DM news, online marketing, B2B marketers