3 Ways to Effectively Write Email Copy that Always Sells

You are trying to get your sales volume up to a respectable level, so you started to think it might be a good idea to expand your marketing efforts into the domain of email campaigns. The advantage of email marketing is that a properly managed email list can be your go-to place for a needful boost in sales volume when all else is failing. That is of course… if you know the right way to approach your audience and gain their attention and trust in the process.

In order to make this work for you, you must have a basic understanding of how to write email copy that truly grabs your audience and gets them excited about your products and services. As simple as that might sound on the surface, it is a process that will require a little genuine thought and work on your part; however, there is an upside. If you get the formula for compelling email copy right, the payoff can be huge.

Assuming you already have a plan to build your email list into the thousands of subscribers, there are a few things you must know about email copy to reach out and connect with your customer base.

Grab Your Reader With Something Irresistible

Many people incorrectly think that email copy begins with what you write in the body of your email. This sort of misunderstanding is costly. The first thing a member of your regular email list is going to see is the title of the email in their inbox. That title must catch their attention, or they will never even consider opening the email to read the rest of your sales copy. Think that through carefully. If you spend hours writing compelling sales copy to your email list but the email never gets opened, how do you honestly think that is going to turn out for your sales volume? It is going to be disastrous. Effective email copy begins with an email title that gives the reader something that gets right under their skin that they can not turn away from easily.

A few examples should help to motivate this idea more clearly:

  • Make your friends jealous
  • Free for a Limited Time
  • One crazy trick to getting more email opens
  • A secret you will not hear anywhere else

When people read the above email titles, they are left wondering what it is that might make their friends jealous, what is free for a limited time and, more importantly, what is this secret they will not hear anywhere else.The psychology behind writing an effective email title to spark interest is that this part of your email copy must grab your email list member in a way that leaves a nagging question in their mind. If they want to know what will make their friends jealous, they will have to take the time to open the email to find out. While there are some people who will never be enticed with an appeal to something they do not know, the vast majority of people are programmed to be curious. Consequently, this method of using the reader’s own curiosity against them is perhaps the most effective way to get them to take interest and want to read your marketing emails. This is not to say you should never use a more direct title, but keep in mind that people are far more interested in reading your internal email copy if the copy you use in the title of the email peaks their curiosity first.

The psychology behind writing an effective email title to spark interest is that this part of your email copy must grab your email list member in a way that leaves a nagging question in their mind. If they want to know what will make their friends jealous, they will have to take the time to open the email to find out. While there are some people who will never be enticed with an appeal to something they do not know, the vast majority of people are programmed to be curious. Consequently, this method of using the reader’s own curiosity against them is perhaps the most effective way to get them to take interest and want to read your marketing emails. This is not to say you should never use a more direct title, but keep in mind that people are far more interested in reading your internal email copy if the copy you use in the title of the email peaks their curiosity first.

A Compelling Story

While email copy about the specs surrounding your products and services can be direct and dry, nothing keeps the customer glued to your daily or weekly emails like a compelling story. Again, your email copy must constantly make an investment in your reader’s curiosity, else they will get bored with your emails quicker than you think. As you tell your readers a compelling story, a story that you may even offer in installments across a number of emails, you must be aware that all good stories have elements of suspense. It is at these moments that you interrupt the story with a well-placed ad for one of your products or services. You want this ad to be very short, so as not to interrupt the flow of the story too much. Remember, this is just a tiny suggestion that you are slipping in right at the moment of suspense.

Did you catch that? You are associating your product or service in a short and sweet way with a moment when your reader is emotionally charged. What better time could there be to tell your reader about your product or service but during a highly emotional moment of sheer suspense. The psychology here is that the reader is not only fully engaged in this moment, but they are also subconsciously associating the ad with the moment of excitement. This will make the ad for a product or service far more memorable, even if the reader simply skims the ad quickly than it would be if you just threw a dry ad with a bunch of product or service specs at your reader. If your ad is long and overly interrupting, it will break the reader’s concentration too much and kill the effect. If you think about it, this is a very common marketing tactic used in television all the time. The show you are watching reaches a cliffhanger, you are on the edge of your seat and the commercial keeps you hanging all the more until the commercial ends and the show is resumed.

This is the type of effect you are trying to use in your print email ad copy because it is a technique that is wildly successful in television and email marketing alike. Sometimes your daily or weekly email will offer only one moment of suspense. At other times, if your skill as a story writer improves, you can slip in two or three moments of suspense to slightly increase the number of ad interruptions you will be allowed to squeeze in under the radar. The ad itself should not be longer than one or two lines of text with a link to some type of offer. For example, you may want to ask the reader to visit your website with a link to a specific product or new service plan option. Alternatively, you may want to slip in that an offer on a given product or service will be quickly coming to an end at a specific time and date, and they need to click the link now to get in on the action. Sprinkling in ideas like that at a moment of suspense in the ad copy of your compelling story tends to provide more urgency to your ads than you may realize.

An Emotionally Charged Call to Action

While so many email campaigns are dry and boring, your readers will start to appreciate that you have taken the time to engage them with something that is more than dry, lifeless ad copy that loses their attention fast. The mistake of most authors of ad copy is that they do not know how to reach the passion of their readers, and in email marketing, this is truly one of the worse transgressions you can make.

By the time their reader gets to the call to action, they are left rolling their eyes with complete disinterest and quickly shuffle that email into their trash folder. On the other hand, by the time they reach your call to action, they are sitting right in the midst of an emotional experience with suspense nipping at their heels. Now, consider what it is like to be in the moment of suspense and you then read that a fantastic offer is going to come to an end soon and you need to take action now before it is too late. Peaked curiosity with the sense of loss if you do not act is a combination of some very powerful emotions. The simple reality is that if your ad copy does not continue to emotionally charge your reader to take action, while their emotions are already charged, then your ad copy will tend to not be compelling enough to get that many sales. Most people simply buy more when their emotions are jacked up through the roof. Of course, we could deny this reality all we like, but this is the reason engaging ad copy works and dry ad copy does not work so well to spike sales volume on a consistent basis. Is it more work to write ad copy this way? Yes, at first it is. But, when you get the hang of how to write a good story with suspenseful moments and then ramp that suspense with a one or two line offer that interrupts the moment with an urgent call to action, you then have a winning combination of ad copy methods to get your reader in a highly emotional state where the impulse to buy is being triggered far more easily than with ad copy that does nothing but tell them the facts about a product or service.

Keep in mind that the product or service you are pitching does not have to relate directly to the story itself. You simply have to wedge it in at an emotionally charged moment of suspense in your story-based ad copy to get your reader thinking about your products and services in a more powerful way.

Getting the Most Out of Your Email Subscribers and Adding More Daily

No matter what your goals are for email marketing or online business, focusing on improved engagement and building trust through emails is one of the best ways to get you there. If you are ready to work with the expertise of a leading email list building service that can truly transform the way you market online, then be sure to visit afteroffers.com to learn how they can help you get highly targeted subscribers to your email list today.

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