Understand The Purpose Of Your Email And What Readers Want From It

The first step toward creating great content is to understand its purpose and what recipients want from it.

Once you have this information, you can create quality content that meets their needs. This approach is precious when writing pre-written email templates, but it works well when you’re just firing back a quick response.

Writers often create audience personas when they’re writing content to understand what their readers expect and then deliver it. You don’t have to go that far for every response you send, but you should answer a few quick questions in your head before you fire off an email that leads to a back-and-forth:

• Will the reader understand technical terms, or should I use plain language?
• What are they expecting from my email?
• How much information do they already have on this topic?
• What is the purpose of this email- marketing, sales, etc?

Even if the email is a response to a question or query, you need to consider what you want the end goal to be - a sale, brand recognition, etc.

By understanding what your readers want from your email, you can save yourself time by delivering it in the first email, rather than creating a long email string.

Hire a Professional Content Writer

If you send out a lot of pre-written templates for sales and marketing campaigns, then consider working with a professional copywriter.

They can save you time and produce a high-quality, perfectly proofread template that will engage and entice customers. When working with outsourced content writers, you should also provide a comprehensive brief, so that they know exactly what you’re looking for and can reduce the number of edits you need to make.

Tell them the style you want, the audience you’re targeting, and any necessary information that each email needs to contain. They can then turn your notes into engaging emails that will serve your purpose.

By investing in expert content writers for your pre-written content templates, you’ll improve your chances of converting leads and earning more sales from your newsletters and email marketing campaigns.

Begin Every Email With A Positive Attitude

Starting an email with a positive approach, even if the email is a rejection or refusal, will make a good first impression and encourage your recipient to open it quickly.

The initial use of a positive phrase will ensure that your reader associates you with positive feelings and show your manners. This last point is particularly crucial- increasingly, individuals forget basics like please and thank you in their emails, and this can make them look unprofessional.

No matter how busy you are, make sure that you always thank people for everything that they do for you, apologize for anything that you do wrong, and say please for anything that you need. These small acts of kindness will make your recipients more inclined to help you and provide you with what you need.

If you’re selling to them, then good manners will encourage them to trust you, as they will feel like they’re getting excellent customer service before they’ve even bought anything from you.

Make Your Subject Line Stand Out

As average attention spans are as little as 8 seconds, you need to make sure that you’re making an impact before you even get someone to open your email.

After all, if they’re skimming through their inbox and are unimpressed or unsure about your subject line, then they’ll be unlikely to even open your email, meaning that you’ve wasted your opportunity to engage with them.

Worse still, if they think that your subject line is suspicious, then they might mark your email as SPAM. Being marked as SPAM can have a number of consequences, including impeding deliverability and damaging your domain's reputation.

To avoid this, you need to make sure that your subject lines are short, snappy and original, but that they also convey everything that the reader needs to know about the contents of your email.
Try to make them factual, whilst also teasing the recipient if you’re sending out a cold email. For newsletters, you can get a bit more creative, while you should remain factual and to-the-point when writing follow-up emails.

At the end of the day, the subject line you write will depend on the purpose of your email, so you need to refer to the above paragraph and try to understand what your reader is looking for in your email when trying to compose the perfect subject line.

Read Every Email Through Before You Hit Send

When you’re firing off quick replies, it’s easy just to type out a response and then hit send without reading it through from start to finish. You might think that this approach is a waste of time, but you might spot inaccuracies that could cause confusion and lead to follow-up emails.

By removing these issues, you can save yourself the effort of replying to more emails and answering questions that wouldn’t need to be asked if you’d read your original email in the first place. You can also spot any pesky typos and fix them so that your email always looks professional and well-written.