Tag Archives: effective email marketing

Cold emails: How to write effectively

Some insights on email marketing

Email marketing is a serious business and in fact, one of the most effective forms of digital marketing. Email marketing is so effective that for every dollar that you spend on it, you get an ROI of $40. It is highest among all the forms of digital marketing.

Here is a graph that I generated recently

Email marketing has the maximum ROI

Many naysayers have been saying for more than a decade that email marketing is dying.

Totally the opposite has been happening.

According to Statista, we are already sending and receiving 293.6 billion emails everyday (2019). By 2022, we will be sending and receiving 333.2 billion emails. By 2017, according to Radicati, there were 4.9 billion email accounts worldwide

Even if 90% of them are spam, the remaining 10% are a lot.

A Marketing Sherpa report has revealed that 72% consumers prefer to receive promotional messages through email, especially from brands they trust.

If somehow you cannot relate to these stats, think of how many times you have to use email. For every online purchase, you get an email notification. Whenever you open up an account with an online service, these days even with an off-line service, you enter your email.

Lost login details? They are sent to your email account. Your domain expiring? You get a notification email. Carried out a bank transaction? The details are sent via email. Your kids homework is sent via email. Someone sends you a message on LinkedIn? You get notified on email. Even terrorists send threats via email.

All your official correspondence happens via email.

The point is, you are checking your email multiple times in a day. So, email is still happening.

Wary about spam?

The various spam restrictions and antispam features in most of the email clients is bad for spammers but good for legitimate email marketers.

Spammers are lazy. They cannot work hard enough to build their own mailing lists of people who would actually like to hear from them. They also don’t know how to write better messages. Whether they send out 10,000 messages in one go, or 1 million messages, the response rate is hardly a little over 0%.

Hence, the field is wide open for people who actually want to use the power of email to not just grow their businesses, but also provide better products and services to their customers and clients.

Now, coming back to…

Writing effective cold emails

What is a cold email?

It is a business proposal email that you send to a person who is not expecting to hear from you. He or she doesn’t know about your existence. In many cases he or she isn’t even aware of the fact that he or she may need your service.

A good example is the InMail function in LinkedIn. You come across a profile that can be good business prospect. You do some study, carefully go through the profile and decide to introduce yourself to that person. You will be sending a cold message because the person is not expecting to receive a message from you.

Whether you like sending cold emails or not is beside the point. I’m not comfortable sending cold emails but it doesn’t mean if a client asks me to write one, I’m going to refuse. I’m going to write it with full enthusiasm as if I myself am sending it.

Here are a few things to keep in mind when writing a cold email

Have a clear understanding of the need of your segment

What are the problems being faced by your recipient for which you are sending a proposal to solve? This will help the recipient to immediately relate to what you’re trying to convey and then possibly, respond.

Suppose you are a marble tiles manufacturer. You want to send cold emails to construction contractors in your city to let them know that you supply good marble tiles that they can use with their clients.

Now, you must know that these construction contractors are either looking for better options, or they are fed up with their current marble tile suppliers.

They may also be looking for variety to create better designs.

Hence, you must know that

The recipients are actually construction contractors.
Now and then they use marble tiles.
They may be looking for better marble tiles or better deals.

Knowing your recipient is crucial to writing an effective cold email.

Start the greeting with an actual name

The email that I was proofreading in the morning started with “Hello Sir!”. Who starts an email with “Hello Sir!” these days?

What if there is a lady at the receiving end of your cold email?

According to an article published in the Sophisticated Marketer Issue 7 (by LinkedIn) 81% consumers say that they are less interested in dealing with businesses who don’t make an effort to personalize their communications.

This is why, especially in these sensitive times, it is very important that you know the name of the person to whom you are sending your cold email.

Use a compelling subject line

You want your recipient to open your email, right?

100% of your recipients will open your message if they are drawn to it by a compelling subject line.

Subject lines are so important that 47% marketers use different subject lines to find out which is the most effective subject line for their email marketing campaign (source).

What makes your subject line compelling? You should invoke a sense of

Urgency
Curiosity
Familiarity (through personalization)
Relevance and timeliness
Profitability
Coolness.

Keep your cold email subject line short, sweet and to the point. Convey the central message of your email as clearly as possible. Make your effort irresistible.

Talk about the problem in the beginning itself

Your copy must immediately hook the person.

If I send you a cold email to promote my service, as a content writer who can help you improve the effectiveness of your email marketing campaigns, I should identify your need to run effective email marketing campaigns with a higher conversion rate in the first or the second sentence itself.

In fact, I should use a headline like “Quadruple your conversion rate”, or something like that.

I must know that you are having problems with your email marketing and you want to improve it and you are already looking for ways to improve it.

Even if you are not actively looking for ways to improve your email marketing, I must know that given a chance, you will be ready to spend some money on improving your email marketing conversion rate.

Then, and the rest of the copy, I will explain to you how my copywriting services are going to improve your email marketing conversion rate.

The biggest disadvantage faced by a cold email is the lack of familiarity. You can mitigate this disadvantage to a great extent by doing some research on your segment and then writing a message that is as relatable as possible.

Content writing for effective email marketing

How quality content writing helps you in effective email marketing

Building your own mailing list for personal branding

Email marketing works. People know it works but somehow, they don’t believe that it actually works. Since they don’t take their email seriously, they think that so does everyone else.

This might have got something to do with email being mostly free.

But they often come across blog posts and articles, and these days even videos, where people are shouting from their rooftops telling the non-believers that email marketing definitely works. It has worked for them.

In The Ultimate List of Email Marketing Stats for 2019 the Hubspot blog post refers to a study that says that email marketing generates $38 for every $1 spent on it. This is 3800% ROI. Which marketing tool or marketing method gives you this much ROI?

The problem is, although people drool over such an ROI, they neither want to work hard for such an ROI, nor want to spend money.

They just fantasize about replicating the success stories of other email marketers and then, since it is so easy to send out “thousands of” email messages, they go on doing the same thing without much success and then in the process, getting disillusioned.

Quality content writing is what makes your email marketing effective. It is content writing that earns you $38 for every $1 that you spend on getting your email campaign written, designed, and broadcast.

Some more stats about email marketing:

83% B2B companies use email marketing as one of the primary content marketing tools.
40% B2B marketers claim that email marketing is most critical for the success of their content marketing.
In 2019, just the US companies spent around $350 million on email marketing.
99% consumers check their email everyday (I bet you have already checked your email multiple times today).
80% respondents, according to this Marketing Land survey admitted that grammar and spelling mistakes were the biggest reasons why they abandoned going through an email message. Words matter.

Writing is important because going through email is a very personal activity and hence, when someone is reading your email, it is as if you’re talking to him or her directly. It mostly happens in the subconscious mind.

So, for effective email marketing, it is very important that you pay close attention to every word, every sentence, every paragraph, every heading and every bullet point that you use.

Even a small oversight may send your recipient to the next message in the inbox.

For email marketing success, the focus of your content writing must be establishing a relationship with your recipients, rather than stuffing a marketing message down their throats.

Therefore, an important key to email marketing success is running a long campaign rather than blasting off intermittent messages.

Take your own example. Do you remember any business, organization or company that sends you messages you look forward to receiving?

If you can recall a few names, these are probably the businesses, organizations and companies you want to do business with, want to spend your money on.

This is because they deliver something valuable. Something valuable to you. Something you enjoy reading.

Deliver something useful. Deliver something useful regularly. And use good language to deliver it. Then, when they need to purchase something that you offer, they will definitely purchase it from you unless you have made it impossible for them to purchase it from you (for example, exorbitantly costly).

When writing content for effective email marketing, keep the following in mind:

Use a compelling subject line that makes people open your message despite all the distractions. Make a promise in the subject line.
A precursor to writing a compelling subject line is knowing what your recipients really need. Only when they need something that you have mentioned in your subject line, they will open your message eagerly.
In the first headline or the first paragraph, talk about the promise that you have made in the subject line, otherwise there will be a disconnect and your recipients will immediately move onto the next email message.
Use smaller words and smaller sentences. Just one sentence per paragraph.
Use a conversational tone but don’t dumbify your writing. Respect the intelligence of your recipients.
Remember that it is a one-on-one conversation. Keep it that way.
Don’t shy away from working with a professional content writer.

Some people have a natural flair for writing expressively. Recently I advised a client to write a blog post on her own because I noticed that she was writing better than me.

This doesn’t make me a bad or and incapable content writer, it’s just that, I agree that when it comes to writing on certain subjects, people who are already working in the field, in the proverbial “trenches”, provided they know how to write, write with much greater passion and insight than someone who is just taking points and writing something.

So, using the guidelines mentioned above, if you feel that you can carry out an effective email marketing campaign on your own, nothing wrong in that. Go ahead.

But if you think that it would be better to work with a content writing service then don’t dillydally. It will one of the best business investments you will ever make.

Importance of segmentation in email marketing

It’s segmentation that makes your email marketing effective

To be effective and successful, email marketing needs to be data-driven and scientific. If you simply build a mailing list and then go on sending out messages, although you may elicit some response, you won’t be tapping into the full potential of email marketing.

According to a Campaign Monitor finding, businesses have experienced an increase of 760% in their revenue through segmented email marketing.

What’s segmentation?

Segmentation means sending out emails based on the behavior of the recipients, or based on some action that they have recently performed or based on something that is going to have an impact on the way they respond to your email message.

How do you know their behavior? You can’t just know it.

There are many ways of creating segments.

For example, you may have a different sign up form (to build your mailing list) on your Facebook business page. You may have a different subscription form link for your Instagram campaigns.

On your website or on your blog you may have a different sign up form.

I have a signup form on my website and on my blog. People can subscribe to my email updates on their own.

In my contact form I have a checkbox that allows people to tell me if they would like to subscribe to my email updates. The information submitted through the contact form is saved in a Google Docs spreadsheet and then later on I manually add these email addresses (for people who have checked the checkbox) to my mailing list.

I also have a “Hello” bar at the top and people can use that bar to subscribe to my email updates. Once in a month I log into my Hello account, download the email addresses of people who have subscribed using the Hello bar, and then manually add them to my mailing list.

Recently I have started associating tags to different sources so that later on if I want to send an email message to those people who opted to subscribe to my mailing list from my contact form, all I have to do is, segment my campaign using that particular tag.

Then, if you have an online business you may have email ids of people who have registered themselves but have never shopped.

Some email ids may belong to people who recently abandoned the shopping cart.

Some people have just shopped and you would like to send them related offers.

Segments can be created based on people’s job titles or the organizations they work in.

These segmentation methodologies fall outside of the ambit of your email marketing campaigns management tool or service.

You can also create segments according to the way people interact with your email campaigns. You can have different messages for people who clicked a link in your email and those who never clicked.

You can also have different messages for people who opened your last email campaign and those who didn’t.

You get this data gradually, sometimes even after sending your first most campaign. But, the more data you have, the more precise your segmentation gets.

Almost all email marketing services provide segmentation these days

As far as using email marketing services like MailChimp and Constant Contact go, they allow you to create segments very easily, out of the campaigns that you have already sent. You can also send campaigns – in many cases – to people residing in particular regions of the world. For instance, you can send Christmas greetings to your European or American subscribers and Diwali greetings to subscribers living in India.

As mentioned above, you can even create segments on people who opened your email messages on a specific day of the week – for example, those people who opened your message on Wednesday no matter when you send out your messages.

Does segmentation mean creating multiple emails for your email marketing campaigns?

In most of the cases, yes. If you want to increase the effectiveness of your email marketing, one, segmentation is must, and two, highly targeted messages need to be created. This often means creating multiple campaigns. But the effort is worth it.