Wednesday, March 24, 2021

How To Write Really Good Sales Emails


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How To Write Really Good Sales Emails

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According to DMA’s “Marketing Email Tracker 2020” report, the average estimated return on each £1 spent on email marketing is £34.56.

Yes, you read it right, it’s an astonishing 3456% return on investment. And that’s only the average.

Presumably, you could get an even better ROI if you mastered email copywriting.

Want to learn how to write really good sales emails?

Continue reading…

Clearly Define Your Target Audience

You can’t be effective at selling if you don’t know who you are selling to. That’s why you need to clearly define your target audience.

Here’s the bare minimum that you should know about your ideal customer:

  • Their gender.
  • Their age.
  • Their nationality.
  • Their job title.
  • Their marital status.

You may also want to narrow it down even more based on additional characteristics such as interests, hobbies, aspirations, political beliefs, religious beliefs, etc.

Knowing who you are writing to will help you craft a message that truly resonates with your ideal customers.

Conduct Proper Customer Research

Do you know who are the best copywriters?

It’s not the people who are most talented at writing, it’s the ones who do the most in-depth customer research.

You see, clearly defining your target audience is not enough. You need to go out there and learn everything you can about your customers. Become the customer. Think like them. Dream like them. Hangout where they do.

For example:

Let’s say that you want to sell online weight lifting coaching to American men between the ages of 18 and 30. How can you learn more about them?

Go where they hang out online and observe the discussions happening there. Let's look at where those places might be.

YouTube

You can find a ton of popular YouTube fitness channels oriented towards young men by simply searching for related terms.

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Go to those channels, sort the videos by popularity, then watch the most popular ones.

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Also, pay attention to the comments, they can help you understand what your ideal customers are struggling with.

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Reddit

Reddit is another great place where you can find plenty of discussions about weight lifting.

The most popular relevant subreddit is r/fitness that has 7.8 million members, but there are also smaller, weight lifting specific subreddits like r/weightlifting (over 98,700 members) or r/lifting (over 17,500 members).

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You can sort the threads by popularity by clicking on the “Top” button and then choosing a time frame.

You can also use the search bar to search for a specific term on a particular subreddit or the entire Reddit.

Online Forums

There are also various online forums that focus on weight lifting, gaining muscle, bodybuilding, etc.

The most popular of these is probably the Bodybuilding.com forum.

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You can read the frequently asked questions section, go through the popular threads in various subforums, use the search function to find information on specific topics, etc.

What Do Your Customers Really Want?

This general customer research process of going through YouTube videos, Reddit threads, and online forums apply to most niches.

The primary aim of all this work is to uncover what your customers really want.

For example, if you sell online weight lifting coaching to young men, then your customers obviously want to gain muscle. But what is the underlying motivation behind that goal?

Hanging out in places where young men discuss weight lifting will show you that they want to feel more confident, be more attractive to women, and gain the respect of other men.

Additionally, you should aim to gain an in-depth understanding of the psychology of your customers, including things like their hopes, fears, and dreams.

Moreover, you want to also pay attention to the specific language that your target audience uses.

Throwing in jargon that is familiar to them will make your message more compelling. For example, you should know what “natty”, “juicing”, etc. mean in weight lifting context.

Once you know all that, you can incorporate it into your copywriting, which will make your copy much more persuasive.

Of course, if you belong to your target audience, then understanding your ideal customers is that much easier.

However, you should still do proper customer research, because observing a group you belong to from the outside may lead to valuable insights.

Craft an Attention-Grabbing Subject Line

There’s a famous quote that is attributed to David Ogilvy, one of the best copywriters who ever lived:

"On the average, five times as many people read the headline as read the body copy. When you have written your headline, you have spent eighty cents out of your dollar."

An email subject line is its headline. It’s what determines whether the recipient will open it or archive it immediately.

That’s why you need to make sure that the subject line grabs people’s attention, piques their curiosity, and makes them open the email to learn more.

Get a free copy of Jon Morrow’s “52 Headline Hacks” ebook. You want to master these headlines formulas. It will give you a solid foundation for writing subject lines.

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You should also experiment with the three timeless subject line formulas from GrowthLab’s “Ultimate Guide to Email Copywriting”.

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GrowthLab explains how you can use this template as a starting point and then improvise to make the subject line even more compelling.

For example, you can take the first subject line, then make it more casual:

“So you wanna wake up productive, huh?”

Or you can make it more powerful by using a real example of what “waking up productive” means:

"Get more done by noon than most people do all day"

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The power of this formula lies in how specific these subject lines are. Concrete claims with numbers tend to work better than vague claims.

That being said, you need to be careful here, you don’t want to promise something that you can’t deliver.

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This subject line formula is even more dangerous than the previous one because it relies on outrageous claims (no, you are not going to get arms like Arnold Schwarzenegger without any training, sorry).

You can avoid trouble by either toning down the claims or relying on true stories about people your target audience is familiar with.

The balancing act here is that you need to create a subject line that is click-baity enough to get the recipient to open the email, but not so click-baity that you can’t deliver what you promised.

Once you have mastered both Jon Morrow’s headline formulas and GrowthLab’s subject line formulas, you can get creative and experiment with some more “out there” subject lines.

For example, Bushra Azhar got great results with her “Nothing like the smell of piss & horse sh*t to start the day” subject line. It had a 69% open rate and a 28% click-through rate.

“People don’t think of these things when talking about starting a day. It’s unusual and disruptive — and that’s why it worked so well,” she explains.

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Her advice for writing attention-grabbing subject lines is to disrupt the recipient’s mental patterns. How can you get them to do a double-take?

You want to give people something unexpected. It can be uncommon word combinations, new twists on popular expressions, shocking statements, etc.

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Of course, you need to exercise common sense here, you don’t want subject lines that are so risqué that you end up alienating your readers.

Sell On Benefits, Not Features

There’s an old copywriter saying:

“Features tell, benefits sell.”

What’s the difference between features and benefits?

  • A feature is a quality or a feature of a product. For example,” waterproof” is a feature. When you say “These shoes are waterproof” you are selling on features.
  • A benefit is something that the customer will get out of using your product. For example, “keeps your feet warm and dry” is a benefit. When you say “These shoes will keep your feet warm and dry” you are selling on benefits.

It’s important to understand that people don’t buy features, they buy the benefits that they get from those features.

That’s why your sales email should be focused on the benefits that people will get by using your product.

This is where all that customer research comes in. What do people in your target audience really want? That’s the benefit(s) that you should focus on in your copy.

Of course, you need to mention the most important features as well, but you should use them to support the benefits that you are emphasizing.

Provide Social Proof

People are more likely to buy products that others vouch for.

Moreover, they are more likely to trust you if they see that other people hold you in high regard.

That’s why you want to add social proof to your sales emails whenever possible.

You can do that by including customer testimonials, referencing the results people got by using your product, mentioning that your product was featured in a prominent media outlet, etc.

For example, Brian Dean of Backlinko recently launched his premium business training program, SEO That Works 4.0.

One of his sales emails had a simple subject line “New Case Studies”.

In that email, he shared three case studies of his previous students, told the reader that SEO That Works 4.0 comes with a 30-day satisfaction guarantee, and reminded them that the program was closing at midnight the next day.

When you click on one of the case study links, you are taken to a case study page where you can learn more about how that particular student benefited from the SEO That Works program.

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As you can see, Brian Dean doesn’t come off as salesy at all in his email, it’s a really soft sell. Why?

Because he is an established authority in the SEO industry, his training program is widely acknowledged as one of the best out there, and his results speak for themselves.

The truth is that the more social proof you can provide, the easier it is to persuade people to buy from you.

You may not have the same amount of social proof as Brian Dean, but you probably have something, so make sure to include it in your sales email.

End With a Compelling Call To Action

You can’t just say “Here’s my offer” and leave it at that.

You need to tell people what they should do next.

That’s why all good sales emails end with a call to action.

For example, in the previously discussed email Brian Dean used a simple “Join SEO That Works 4.0 today” link as his call-to-action:

This is the most basic call to action, but it can work well.

You can make it more persuasive by mentioning bonuses like Nick Stephenson did in his “Open now: Self Publishing 101” email:

Another way to make your call to action more compelling is mentioning the main benefit of your product. What will the customer get out of it? Include that in your call to action.

Of course, you can also get creative, like Wesley Atkins did in his email “When writing your book feels like “pulling teeth”, in which he introduced Joshua Sprague’s 30-day email challenge program:

What’s important is that you tell people what they should do next if they are interested in buying your product.

The aim here is to get them to click through to your sales page.

Conclusion

Email marketing can be incredibly effective.

However, if you want to get the most out of it, you need to learn copywriting.

Sure, it’s a skill that takes time to acquire, but once you do, you will be able to create persuasive sales emails that make people want to buy your product.

So study copywriting. Practice it. Master it.

You won’t regret it.

Wednesday, March 3, 2021

The Most Creative Emails We’ve Ever Seen


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The Most Creative Emails We’ve Ever Seen

Need some inspiration to help with crafting some creative emails? If that sounds like you, welcome. You're in luck. We've curated our favourite and most creative emails we've ever seen in this article, explain why they work, and show you how to craft your own.

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The Most Creative Emails We’ve Ever Seen

Creativity makes the world go round. And in a world in which there are 269 billion emails sent every day, you need creative emails to stand out in the inbox.

Fortunately, we’ve been on the lookout for creative emails. And today, we’re going to show you examples of the most creative emails we’ve ever seen.

And to raise the stakes, we’ll also show you how you can start using email creativity more effectively. Just like the inbox wizards in our list.

Let’s hit ‘Send!’

The Easiest Way to Send Creative Emails: Cool Visuals

Let’s start off simple. You don’t need to have an email provider that offers interactive email content. And if you’re a solopreneur who wants to pack more punch with their newsletters, you can always use one thing:

Cool visuals.

This means:

  • Unique GIFs
  • Cool photos that fit your brand style
  • Cool photos that don’t fit your brand style, but provide a positive shock effect that’ll keep your customers glued to their screens

Here’s what we mean:

Adobe: Hypnotic Animated Gifs

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This is a minimalist email where the cool GIF definitely takes the cake. You can use their structure: CTA + a cool GIF to increase excitement and engagement about your brand.

For example, if you’re launching a new product, you can announce it in a few lines. And then add a GIF that stimulates excitement like this one:

This email example is creative, but it’s also punchy, so you can drive a lot of emotion at once.

CreativeMornings: Keep Your Customers Scrolling

CreativeMornings always start their weekly roundup emails with minimalist and interesting illustrations.

If you want to be artsy, you can find interesting visuals that fit your brand style for more toned-down emails, as well. You can start off your email with them to keep the readers scrolling.

We recommend creating an archive of gifs, images, and illustrations that will resonate with your audience.

Leaf Institute: Provide a Unique Twist

A great way to be more creative for both promotional and regular emails is to provide a unique twist on a common topic. Do this with interesting visuals and you may have a winning email.

For example, this email is targeted to artists, art historians and aficionados. But instead of simply pasting the Magritte painting, the marketers added a ‘Ringer on silent mode’ graphic.

This is a great email to draw inspiration from if you want to stand out from the crowd. And show your customers that, even though there are a lot of businesses that sell the same thing, your brand is special.

For example, if you’re a marketer, you might want to use standard visuals with a twist to show customers why you’re different from others.

You can also make your headline stand out with Portent’s Title Idea generator, where you’ll get ideas such as:

  • Ways Your Mother Lied to You about Email Marketing
  • 7 Things Spock Would Say about Email Marketing
  • How to Fight the Rock Using Only Email Marketing

And you can easily create interesting graphics as a beginner with Canva (it’s free).

Tinder: Make Your Emails More Engaging with Smart Gif Placement

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Your email provider isn’t letting you use dynamic content, but you still want to keep it fun?

No problem - just look what Tinder did!

You’d think this whole email is one big clickable fest, but it’s not. There are clear CTA buttons. Still, the gifs give it plenty of dynamism. Psychologically, this will make your customers want to click on some buttons and get right in there.

This creative email is great for welcome emails and user onboarding, especially if your customers have to follow a process.

With gifs, you can illustrate it (and make it even more fun) and improve your engagement rate.

Main consideration: the gifs should be similar in style and tone. If you’re using a cartoon style, then make sure all the gifs fit it. We’d avoid standard reaction gifs here.

Engage: When in Doubt, Use a Bold Color Palette

These days, we use all kinds of color palettes, but let’s be real:

Nothing works as well as black and yellow.

In psychology, that color combination is meant to stimulate feelings of alarm and alertness. In interior design, these combinations are perfect for industrial spaces. At the end of the day, they’re very creative, and they stand out in inboxes.

Other color combinations you can work with include:

  • Black and orange
  • Grey and lime green
  • Blue and orange
  • Black and white

Let’s not forget the good old B&W.

These days, emails are so chock-full of colors that going Audrey Hepburn-style can really differentiate your brand. Especially if your customers love timeless elegance.

Peak Email Creativity: Interactive Content

Interactive email content has twofold benefits:

First, it’s interesting because not that many brands use it.

Secondly, it’s creative to see, and helps customers shape a good perception of your brand.

So really, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, but it’s not always that easy to use. Let’s call this an intermediate strategy (although we’re hoping that even beginners will start playing with it).

Interactive email content comes in many forms:

  • Surveys, polls, quizzes, and questionnaires
  • Videos
  • Zoom and rollover effects
  • Animated buttons and content

Let’s see how our brands did it!

Handy: A Handy Quiz

Often, brands add CTA buttons that link to third-party polls and quizzes. This isn’t bad, but it’s definitely not engaging. It creates friction, and puts you in a place where you have to convince your customers that clicking through will be worth it.

But embedding a quiz or a poll into your email body?

Golden.

If you embed a quiz directly into your email, there’s nothing standing between your customers and the target action. Forget about friction. It adds dynamism to your standard content and instantly makes it more creative.

This kind of email marketing is perfect for performing customer research. You can even use it to send personalized suggestions.

Harry’s: Create a Wonderful and Creative Experience

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Speaking of quizzes and interactive, creative content, we can’t get enough of this email example from Harry’s.

Why is it so wonderful our team can’t stop talking about it?

Firstly, it fits the brand style. Look at the colors, the copy, and the visuals. Everything is perfectly calm and relaxed, creating a soothing atmosphere that customers can immerse themselves in.

Secondly, it’s a very creative take on interactive content. Quizzes, in particular.

Again, the whole quiz is integrated into the email body, and customers can simply take it right there to receive product suggestions. It flows intuitively and naturally, creating a seamless experience.

The main lesson we want to impart on you here is that visuals aren’t the be-all and end-all of creativity.

A creative email has to offer a certain atmosphere. It could be an artsy atmosphere, or a soothing atmosphere. And you can create it with a careful combination of:

  • Visuals
  • Colors
  • Copy
  • Content

The New York Times: Personalize with Interactivity

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Instead of just linking to an article or taking your readers to a place on the web, try embedding useful content into your email.

This example comes from the New York Times. They’ve created a handy calculator that shows their readers whether it’s better to rent or buy, based on the parameters they insert.

And the readers can get all the calculations they need right there in the email!

We admit that this is an ambitious example. But it just goes on to show that creativity can be repurposing a useful resource in a native way.

One simple example of this creativity tactic off the top of our heads: turn your most popular blog or video content into infographics.

Quick and Dirty Email Creativity Examples: Pen It Like Hemingway

Finally, you don’t have to be an email marketing whiz to create a darn good email.

Just ask yourself: What do you do before checking out an email that landed in your inbox?

You scan the subject line.

If the subject line isn’t working, well... Your email could be the most creative peach in the marketing orchard, but no one will get to see it.

So how do you improve your copywriting even if you’ve never taken a course in it?

Our friends have a few tips:

Let’s see how they do it!

Loaf Creative: Say What Your Customers Would Never Expect You To

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A marketing agency that says nobody cares about advertising right there in the title?

Sign us up, because we have got to read this!

Of course, that’s the power of totally opposing what everyone would think you stand for. It’s shock value, right there in the headline. You see a subject line like that, and you’re immediately intrigued.

Promoting shoes? Our headline idea would be: “We hate shoes.”

The content could then go on to explain that all the shoes you had were so darn uncomfortable. And eventually you gave up on the search for a comfortable pair. This is something your customers can definitely relate to. But they should give your shoes a whirl, because you’ve been through the uncomfortable-shoe hell.

Promoting software? Our headline idea would be: “An email marketing tool your mom would hate.

Because it’s rebellious. And It’s challenging. And it’s as sexy as Elvis Presley in his hey-day. When all mothers bemoaned the horrible rock music that made their kids twist and shout instead of going to bed at 9pm.

Think about what no sane business owner would say in your position. Then forget about propriety and put on your dancing shoes.

Honey Copy: Tease Your Audience with Unexpected Headlines

What does coffee have to do with marketing?

No one has a clue, but you can bet that’s exactly what’s going to make them click through.

The man behind Honey Copy, Cole Schafer, is notorious for his engaging and surprising subject lines. But, at the same time, they offer a different perspective for the reader who’s expecting him to drone on and on about marketing.

Instead, he likens asking a girl out for coffee to the idealism we just have to have as business owners.

A surprising subject line will definitely improve your open rate, especially if you follow up in the same tone.

P.S. See that GIF? Scroll up and remember what we told you: gifs are golden for email marketing.

Dorsia: Reference Pop Culture

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Dorsia’s email is creative because it took a pop culture reference (“Say hello to my little friend”) and put a unique spin on it that serves their brand.

Instead of just saying: “Book your next trip with us,” they gave their audience more emotional value with this headline.

When you’re using pop culture references, you’re establishing a point of connection between you and your audience. It also makes them feel like there’s an actual human writing that email.

You can pick pop culture references that fit your industry. For example, an obvious choice for a fashion brand would be a quote out of The Devil Wears Prada. But you can stray from the path more traveled by.

You can also use quotes and references in their original context. For example, the following movie quotes always work well:

  • Louis, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. (Casablanca)
  • Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn. (Gone with the Wind)
  • I’ll be back. (Terminator)

To drive the point home, you can even use a GIF from the source material (especially if it’s a movie).

After all, creativity is all about taking the known and turning it into the exciting unknown.

(You can bet we’d click on that!)

Monday, March 1, 2021

Customer.io Email Verification is here!

If you’re looking for a Customer.io email verifier, look no further because mailfloss has you covered with our Customer.io integration. Email verification for Customer.io is important mainly for three important reasons, all related to maximizing your email ROI and profits. email verification helps you get your emails delivered to more real people because it increases […]

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Customer.io email verification options using mailfloss

If you’re using mailfloss for Customer.io email verification, you have five options at your disposal. Before explaining the five options, make sure you have properly connected Customer.io to mailfloss. You only need to do this once and from then on mailfloss will be able to automatically perform email verification for the connected Customer.io account. Here’s a screenshot of […]

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How To Clean Email Lists With Customer.io

Getting started cleaning your email lists with Customer.io is easy with mailfloss. Once Customer.io is connected, you can let mailfloss automatically clean your emails lists with Customer.io going forward. Here’s how to do that.         Step 1. Visit the integrations page Visit the integrations page by clicking on “Integrations” in the left […]

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Remarkety email verification options


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Remarkety email verification - How to connect Remarkety to mailfloss


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