How to write the perfect mail? At first, you probably think, how hard can it be? Putting a few words on paper. Yet in practice, it often turns out to be difficult to write a powerful converting mail. We have put together the 10 most important tips for you.
I do not want to use too many words to describe this, but keep it short. Nobody wants to read messages that are too long. Try to make a good division between content and images. The 60/40% rule is often used. Whereas 60% is devoted to images.
Second of all, why are you sending this E-mail? Of course, you want to get something out of it, but what does the receiver get in return? It is important to keep your target audience in mind at all time. Which problem of the prospect do you solve? And why should they take action after reading your E-mail?
IF you cannot answer this question, it’s back to the drawing board.
Do not underestimate the subject line. 33% of your recipients will decide to open your E-mail based on the subject line. The perfect subject line should be, short, clear and it should trigger to read more. Stay away from texts written in ALL CAPS and subject lines with too much exclamation points (!!!), there is a big chance you end up in the spam filter.
Less is more. We often communicate too much or use too many words to explain a topic. It is important to have one call to action in your email. What is the result that you want to achieve: do you want to link to a certain page with an offer or a download, or do you want people to get in contact? Choose one per mail. If you have too many actions, people will get confused and will choose neither. You can have multiple buttons or links but remember, everything links to the same!
And again, keep it short, one call to action, not too many words and keep it clear. Your message and design should be straightforward. Choose a simple layout in order to give the prospect the time to understand your message and not be distracted be everything else. Work with a recognizable template when sending multiple emails to a recipient.
Keep it personal. You do not have the time to write an email to every person, but you want to give the reader the idea that you wrote this email personally for him or her. There are a lot of email and market automation programs where it is possible to personalise. Think of first name, last name, gender, etc. Besides that, A/B testing is becoming a trending topic. This allows you to send (slightly) different emails to your audience. You can change the content, subject, images, buttons or even the send date. The idea is that you change one of those aspects in one of the two mails you send. Those two mails go to a small part of your target audience. The E-mail that performs best, gets sent to the remaining target audience.
To whom are you sending the email? Is it B2B or business to consumer? Do you normally address someone formal or informal? These are aspects to keep in mind when you are writing your email.
It is important to measure your results and to see how you can improve. By using different UTM codes for buttons or hyperlinks in your email, you can easily see on which link is clicked most. A UTM code is a piece of text that you put at the end of your URL. You can choose the text yourself and so you can refer to the name of the campaign, the medium, a specific person who is sending out the link, etc.
Test your email campaign always before you send it. Send the email to a test group (a selected group) to check on grammar, interpunctions, whitespace, missing links or other errors. You never get a second chance to make a first impression.
Everything is set. Now you can send it. But, to whom? You can have such a good message but if you do not have the right addresses, your message does not get delivered and goes to waste. It is important to have and manage the right addresses of the contacts you want to approach.
Do you not have the right addresses? We can help. With our B2B Benelux MarketBase, we have over 165.000 email addresses of decisionmakers. Together with you, we can set up your perfect target audience.
And there you go… good luck writing your email. May your open and click rates rise to infinity and beyond!
