Don’t Overlook These 4 Things When Revising Email Marketing Copy

Micheli , Invited guest @ Mailrelay

As an email marketer, you don’t have to guess what your audience wants to engage with in their inbox.

And that’s because A/B tests allow you to make a side-by-side comparison of two versions of the same email copy. This way, you can compare the open rates, click-through rates, and overall engagement to find out which option your audience responds best to.

From this data, you’re able to make informed changes to your email marketing copy — but specifically your revision process — going forward.

In this article, we’ll share the four things that you shouldn’t overlook when revising your email marketing copy.

1. Your Fellow Email Marketer’s Content Strategy

It’s easy to get into the habit of writing email marketing copy the same way today as you did years ago. And that’s because no one wants to abandon past practices that once worked.

But when you’re marketing your business across multiple channels, you have to constantly  adapt and optimize your content strategy to be successful in the long-term.

Using email marketing software like Mailrelay will help you streamline communications, but you still need to put in the work on your end to keep improving the email copy itself. Hence our focus on revision in this guide.

This brings us to the first thing that you shouldn’t overlook when revising email copy, which is your fellow email marketer’s content strategy.

If you’re wondering why you should analyze other email marketers’ work before you start revising your own, it all comes down to one very simple reason: personal bias.

We all have our own personal biases and preferred writing styles, which can make it difficult to open ourselves up to different ways of doing things.

One way to hone your email copywriting skills is to learn from your fellow email marketers’ mistakes and successes.

While competitor analysis is always an option, we recommend paying closer attention to the email lists you’realready subscribed to.

What do you notice about the email copy? How and where are calls-to-action introduced? How are you as the recipient encouraged to act (i.e., buy a product, subscribe to the service, etc.), and do you feel incentivized to respond this way?

Let’s take a look at the example below and mull over these same questions.

Right out the gate, you can tell that this is a product email intended to get email subscribers to purchase stickers and labels through Moo.

And as you can see in the image above, the email marketers include several CTA buttons that direct readers to different options. This makes it possible to either peruse all of the stickers and labels options or only a specific type of sticker or label.

By analyzing the copy in this email and others, you can stay up-to-date with how different companies market their services via email and fine-tune your own email copy at the same time.

2. Your Audience’s Level of Interest

Have you ever received an email and known immediately that this email wasn’t actually intended for you?

Maybe the subject line included a phrase like “Start your free trial today,” but you’ve been a subscribed member for months now.

This is an overt example of an email segmenting mixup, but it happens every day in more subtle ways too.

The reason why this type of issue occurs is that the email copy wasn’t personalized to the recipients.

As you write and revise your email copy, you have to make sure that you are accurately segmenting your audience.

To personalize even the coldest of cold emails, you also need to know and understand each audience segment’s interests, pain points, etc.

Here are some stats to prove why this is important from an engagement and conversions perspective:

A great way to gather this type of information about your audience is to incorporate  Voice-of-Customer (VoC) research as part of your customer behavior analysis.

By surveying different audience groups, you can get a better sense for how you can meet their needs. And then you’re able to include your participants’ own words in your email copy.

So, if the participants describe your business as a “reliable business” with an “easy-to-navigate pricing page,” you can revise your email copy to include these specific phrases.

When you understand your audience’s interests, you can appeal to them directly and incentivize them more effectively.

3. Your Subject Lines

A key metric that every email marketer pays close attention to is open rate. And according to a HubSpot study, the average open rate for emails across all industries is 20.94%.

When it comes to higher open rates, subject lines are pivotal.

If the subject line isn’t properly formatted or optimized — or if it isn’t actually related to the email content — this can be a major thorn in the side of your email marketing plan.

You could optimize the rest of your email copy, but if the subject line isn’t on par, your email could remain unopened or be instantly deleted.

While you can and should A/B test your subject lines, it’s also a smart idea to run your subject line copy through a keyword grader tool like the Email Subject Line Grader or the Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer beforehand.

To provide some more context about what this might look like, let’s take a look at this email from the SaaS company Animalz:

The subject line “💬 How to Turn Wild Opinions into Traffic, Backlinks, and Social Proof” has all of the makings of a successful subject line and here’s why.

  1. The subject line gets right to the incentive.

The email marketers with Animalz know what drives their audience and positions this email as a hub of information about traffic, backlinks, and social proof.

  1. Including an emoji in the subject line is strategic.

As cited by Forbes, 56% of brands see an uptick in open rates when they use an emoji in their email subject lines.

  1. The subject line ranks well in keyword grader tools.

This subject line is rated highly by the Email Subject Line Grader with a score of 86 and has a 27.27% emotional value score as well.

As you revise your email copy, consider coming up with a few different subject line alternatives and testing these phrases before settling on one.

4. Mobile-Friendly (Not Just Desktop-Friendly) Email Copy

Look, it’s happened to the best of us. You optimize your email copy for desktop browsers and assume that the email will appear the same to mobile users.

In all actuality, this doesn’t always happen.

Take the email’s subject line as an example. When your audience views an email through a mobile app or browser, subject lines with more than 30 characters won’t be fully visible — even though they would be on a desktop browser.

This type of visibility issue can happen with images, videos, and other visual elements, which is why it’s important to double check that the formatting will be consistent on desktop and mobile before sending out the email.

By keeping these four things in mind, you can enjoy a more streamlined revision process and make sure that your email marketing copy has the best chance of hooking your recipients’ attention and incentivizing them to take action.

Mackenzie is a copywriter at Soundstripe, a royalty free music company that provides filmmakers, creators, and advertisers with a range of stock music, like royalty free ambient music.

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