Use email preview text

 

Set your goal

How can you tell if your email does well if you don’t set a goal?

That might seem like a trick question, but it’s not. There’s no way to tell if your email worked—or if a copy change worked better—if you haven’t decided on what success means.

Every email should have a specific target, whether it’s free trial sign ups, blog post views, content downloads, or demos booked. Having this goal set is the best way to measure whether or not your email was successful.

That’s also the best way to ensure your email copywriting is all working towards the same goal. Take this automated email that I got from Semrush after signing up for a free trial.

 

All of the copy here is working towards a demo focusing job function email list on a specific component of their product. The email subject link is engaging, the copy is casually asking about progress, and there’s some supporting information. Now, I wouldn’t recommend hiding a link in the signature, but we’ll talk more about how to improve your CTAs soon.

2. Edit all email copywriting

You know that content editing is important. Editing your copywriting—including your email copywriting—is just as important.

Your emails should be written clearly without stray punctuation, grammatical errors, or stilted sentences. But this round of editing should also ensure that all of your emails, well, make sense.

Take this email subject line that stood out in my inbox recently.

 

As opposed to …  those dog walks by yourself? An edit would have caught this needless and, worse, confusing repetition. You don’t want your emails to stand out for mistakes, so make sure to look over all your email copywriting.

3. Be brief—very brief

Over 300 billion emails are sent each day. That number is mind-boggling. Until you actually think about it, that is. I get about maybe a dozen emails to my personal inbox each day, at least a few dozen to my work email, and then that’s not even taking into account my promotions tabs that Gmail filters out of view for me anyway.

So if that’s just me, then it completely makes sense that there are literally hundreds of billions of emails sent every day.

The point here? With that many notifications all day long, we know that the shorter, the better. Keep it brief, and get to your point quickly. That’s the best chance at making sure your email copywriting actually gets read.

For help, check out these copy and paste email templates for small businesses.

4. Stay on brand

When you’re writing an email, you need to keep in mind that the person opening it on the other end will be interacting with your brand. That interaction should be meaningful, and your brand should be recognizable. That means it should be written in your brand voice, feature your brand colors, and follow your brand guidelines.

For email copywriting, it’s the brand voice that you need to keep in mind.

If your brand voice is formal and authoritative, your emails should include crisp, professional language. If your brand voice is playful, then fit in a joke or pun. Here’s a great example from Madewell.

 

This “seams” wordplay is a perfectly executed little wink. It feels effortlessly cool and playful, and just a little aloof. Just like Madewell’s brand.

5. 

You’re working with a lot of constraints for email copywriting—subject lines can’t get too long, the body of the email should be short. That’s why it’s so important to use all of the space available to you, including the email preview text.

This is a snippet of text that appears next to or underneath your email subject line in your inbox view. Most email marketing tools, including HubSpot and Marketo, let you input this text to take advantage of this space.

One of the best ways to take full advantage of the extra space is to treat it as an extension of your subject line that gets more explicit about the body of the email, answers a question in your subject line, or simply follows up on a thought.

Here’s a great example from Drybar.