How to Make Sure Your Emails Give the Right Impression

Given the sheer amount of emails that each of us receives every day – 121 messages on average – it is no wonder that email marketing is getting a bad rep. People are becoming desensitized to our messaging – making it that much harder to reach a lead or prospect.

At the same time, emails play an important role in conveying a brand, not simply a message. Every single email that you send should convey the right brand messaging.

Here are tips that you can use to make sure that your emails tell the right story.

1) Don’t make your emails too long.

I completely understand the temptation to add context and a backstory to every email. However, following every sentence, you should always ask yourself “is this something they NEED to know?”.  What we, as email marketers, WANT to share with our prospects and what the NEED to know, are usually much different.

By crafting a short email, you’re respecting your prospect’s time and attention. To do this properly you have to make use of every word, sentence, and image in your email. Using all those elements you should be able to get your message across quickly and succinctly.

2) Treat your subscribers like people, not numbers.

As we press “Send” to the thousands of people in our email lists, our aim is to catch their attention and increase opens, clicks, and engagement rates. As we reduce email marketing to these KPIs, we forget that it’s real people sitting behind real screens – reading emails sometimes first thing in the morning or minutes before bed.

Despite our digital world, we crave human interaction.

In other words, email marketers have the tendency to talk AT people – to throw information at them – hoping something will stick. If you’re as guilty of this as I was, I would recommend to print out a picture of your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP)  and write out all their pain points. Your emails should always be tightly revolving helping alleviate your ICP’s pain points. Next, focus on building a relationship – show you care about them and their inbox.

Lastly, keep your subscribers opening your emails by making sure your emails are engaging, relatable and succinct.

3) Consistency in branding.

One aspect of email marketing that is overlooked is the consistency in the branding. Although emails don’t have to be beautiful, it certainly doesn’t hurt.

The main thing to remember here is that people go through 100s of emails every day. They usually forget what email they read and who sent it to them. The email template, the color scheme, the images, and the content has to align together to create an impact. If accomplished consistently, the impact can have a compounding affect on your brand.

4) Use Explicit Language.

After reading your email, the last thing you want your reader to be is confused. When you’re sitting in front of someone, they can use social cues such as voice tone, facial expression, and even physical gestures to grasp the full meaning of what you’re trying to convey. However, all of that is not available for them when they’re reading your email. So what is the solution? How can you be sure that your email readers are capturing what you’re trying to express?

The first trick is to use simple and short sentences – avoid paragraphs, especially long ones.

Next, after every sentence, paragraph, and email you write, pause for a second and ask “does this actually mean what I’m trying to convey – is there any other meaning that could be deducted from this sentence, paragraph or email?”.

That’s it, those are tricks and tips I use when writing my emails. I hope you find them useful and if you have ideas of your own, share them with us.

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