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How to Write Thought-Provoking and Attention-Grabbing Email Copy

This article is more than 6 years old.

Writing email copy is not an easy process but it is something you can learn. Make the tone of your correspondence warm and friendly, as if you are writing to one person. In this article, you are going to learn about the different types of email and some creative writing techniques that should help free you to begin writing fresh, inspirational, and compelling content. We guarantee you will free yourself from writer's block and open doors of creativity in your writing that you may not even know existed.

But is email worth the effort? Yes! Email brings 40% more conversions and sales than any other type of social media, even more than Facebook Ads or Google Ads. Email marketers average ROI is $38 for each $1 spent with one in five companies reporting an average ROI of over 70:1. People tend to lean toward the personal touch of an email correspondence.

Types of Email Copy

  1. Welcome email – Include a greeting and a thank you for subscribing. This email automatically transmits during an opt-in or after a sign-up
  2. Announcements – Here’s where you want to share your latest promotions, new blog posts, or if you’re about to release a new product. Create a sense of anticipation with words and phrases such as can’t wait, the best is yet to come, eager, curious, hope, expectancy, our promise is our guarantee and so forth. Say less and provide more. Let your promise become your guarantee.
  3. Products – This email is only needed to announce new products, products about to go on sale, liquidation, or any other type of product information that you think is relevant to your customer base.
  4. Surveys – These types of inquiries provide valuable marketing information regarding the need and desire of your client base. In this email, ask for reviews, product preferences, and regard what your prospects and customers are telling you about what they want. Offer an incentive for filling out the survey such as a coupon code for a discount free e-book, or free social media marketing resources.
  5. Newsletters – Your newsletter is your honey pot. Make it fun, make it interesting, make it relevant; in other words, make it appealing enough to read! Write attention-grabbing headlines. Be sure to have a weekly, bi-weekly, or monthly schedule to send out your newsletter. Your consistency builds trust and reliability.
  6. Giveaways – Create excitement and exhilaration with some freebies. Your freebies can be of a digital or of a physical nature. Giveaways possess the potential to go viral and manifest exposure that enlarges your prospect and customer base. Great way to get your prospects to try your stuff.
  7. Thank you emails – Whenever anyone subscribes to your email, solicits inquiries or offers feedback regarding your brand, a timely thank you is appropriate.

You’re the type of person who likes the personal touch and you want to compose your emails and blogs yourself but you feel you either lack the skills or the time. Like anyone learning how to play an instrument, writing is a craft that is learned through practice. Following are a few basic writing tips that should point you in the direction you need to go to create gripping content.

Editing Tools

  • First Drafts

Get the words out of your head and on the paper. Trust that the first draft will not be your best effort. Don’t think that you have to wait for that first power punched sentence to smack you between the eyes. It is a rare writer who can begin his composition in its final form. Say what you want to say and then rearrange sentences and paragraphs in the order you want them read by your email audience.

  • Hemmingway App

The Hemingway editor helps make your writing readable. It measures such things as the number of adverbs and usage of the passive voice. Hemmingway highlights sentences that are hard to read and sentences that are very hard to read. But you don’t need to pay too much heed to those parameters. When you are composing blogs or email, make the content personal and speak in whatever colloquial is fitting for your reader. The key to good writing is to write the same way that you speak. Always think of your reader. Hemmingway offers a readability metric that might make you think you’re not too smart when it displays your writing readability metric at Grade 6, 8, or 9, all of which would be considered excellent scores. Remember, you’re goal here is to make difficult concepts easy to understand.

  • Grammarly

Grammarly is a Chrome extension that makes editing suggestions that include spelling, word choice, and grammar. A free version is available and is all that you need. Most content writers could not live without the Grammarly extension.

Creative Writing

  • Writing Practice

In her book, Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg explains a form of writing that "free's the writer within." Set your timer for 5 or 10 minutes. With pen on paper, begin writing and do not lift your pen until the timer goes off. No self-editing allowed. Bad punctuation, bad grammar, misspelled words, anything goes. Nothing will free writer's block like writing practice. If you find you don't have anything to say then write that over and over until something comes to you. After a week or so of writing whatever happens to pop into your head, graduate to topical writing practice. Set your timer and pick any topic to write about for 10 minutes or longer.

  • Writing Prompts

Writers Digest suggests some of the most practical writing prompts. You see, writing is not easy. In order to get into a writing groove, you may need to limber up your writing digits by working some of these prompts. 

  • Word Banks

Before writing, create a list of words you want to include in your copy. Check out All Things Topics or My Vocabulary for word selection ideas.

Writing Checklist

  1. Does the copy honor the promise of the headline?
  2. Does the first paragraph grip the attention of the reader?
  3. Is the content understandable to a 6th grader?
  4. Does your copy make promises, guarantees, and statements that are true?
  5. Is the copy persuasive?
  6. Is the copy specific?
  7. Is the copy concise?
  8. Is the copy relevant?
  9. Does it flow smoothly? Read your writing out loud to determine if there are any hiccups in the way.
  10. Does it call for action? An appropriately call to action button placed in your email composition will do wonders to expand your email list.

And finally, if writing is not your cup of tea, then consider outsourcing your email marketing campaigns to a professional firm or freelancer.