I recently conducted a mini workshop on email marketing for profits, and it dawn on me that most marketers are not taking the time to draft their emails properly. How many emails do you receive in a day? And how many got read? The truth is, we do not want to spend our lifetime reading emails, and through experince I’m sure you’re almost as good as a spam filter.
Although there are no hard and fast rules to drafting a marketing email that converts like crazy, however there are certain common mistakes that most marketers make, which if you do it correctly, will help to increase conversion. In actual fact, if you think about it, drafting a good email is all about putting your heart into the email and adding a pinch of common sense.
So here goes…
1. No use / over-use of personalization
When necessary, it is recommended to personalise your marketing email such as adding receipient’s firstname in the email’s subject, opening and closing. By doing so, it shows that your email is not another mass mail, but rather a personal message directed at the recipient, which the recipient may feel more obligated to read and response to. However, over-use of names in the email will seem too deliberate and result may backfire.
2. Too formal / extreme use of tone and words
Email is all about building relationship and to get your recipients to act on your request, thus it is good to maintain a friendly and business-like tone. Having too formal or extreme use of tone such as SHOUTING, use of vulgarity and harsh words, most of the time tends to put people off. “Talk” to them like to your friends, but add a pinch of professionalism so as to maintain your credibility and show of expertise in whatever you’re promoting.
3. Too pitchy
Nobody likes to be sold, and when you’ve received enough email, you can easily pick out a sales email just by looking at the subject or the opening paragraph. Instead of being too pitchy in your email, tone it down to be more of a sharing or recommendation. At least it won’t sound like you want to make money off them.
4. Lack focus
Each email should have just one objective, and that is to simply get the recipient to perform an action, not two, not three, just one action. If your intention is to get the recipient to visit a specific webpage, don’t give them links to other pages. If you want them to response to your questions, don’t distract them with any links.
5. Talk too much about yourself
Some marketers tend to talk too much about themself. Well, I’m not saying you shouldn’t share about yourself and your results, especially if your recipients do not know you, just don’t give too much non-relevant information that don’t benefit them. In the end, it comes back to the question “So, What?” and “Whats in it for me?”
6. No call to action
The call to action most of the time tends to be missing from the email. Imagine you wrote a fantastic subject line that got people curious and open your email, followed by great opening and body content that got them excited and wanting to find out more….then you sign off. What a waste! Give them something to do, even if you don’t have a product or service to marketing them, at least ask for their opinion. That is the way to create a responsive list.
7. Not giving specific reason to act
Yes of course, the call to action is important. But at times if you don’t give your recipient a reason to act now, they may proscratinate and put off the task and forget about it. Thus, you may want to adopt scarcity tactics such as time base or quantity base deadline.
So what do you do now? My suggestion is to take out 1 or 2 of your emails and see if you can find any of the 7 mistakes in there, and improve on it. Nobody can be an email expert overnight, but if you practice and test, you will gain the skill of an email marketer and see your income grow.
Before you move on, click on the link below for the back-door access to Michael Rasmussen’s training videos that teaches you how to write a good promotional email. And you don’t have to pay a single cent for them.
Click Here To View FREE Training Video
Popularity: 49% [?]
