Interested in a crash course on cold email copywriting?

There’s much more to effective email copywriting than just writing an on-brand email copy. You’ll also need to personalize your email copy based on the recipients’ interests and AB test it for optimal engagement.

In this guide, I’ll cover what email copywriting is, including the three key components of an email copy. I’ll then share nine practical tips to help improve your email copywriting skills.

As a bonus, I’ll mention a powerful tool you can use for email marketing at scale.

This Article Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

• What Is Email Copywriting?
• 9 No-Nonsense Tips to Help You Excel at Email Copywriting
• Level Up Your Email Copywriting Results in 2022 with GMass

Let’s go!

What Is Email Copywriting?

Email copywriting is the process of writing an email copy for an existing or a potential customer to convert them.

However, conversion in this context isn’t limited to closing a sale.

It can also be about getting a response to your email, a sign up for your newsletter, a download for your ebook — essentially, any goal you’re trying to achieve with the email message.

Before we dive into how you can master email copywriting, let’s look at the main components of an email copy.

3 Key Components of an Effective Email Copy

All effective email copies share three key components:

• Subject line: it’s your first touchpoint with the recipient and heavily influences your email open rate. Research shows that 47% of recipients open emails based on just the subject line. We’ve written an entire guide on writing cold email subject lines if you want a very deep dive.
• Email body: your email body is the bulk of your message. It can tell a story, share details about your product or service, showcase social proof, or provide valuable information.
• Call to action: it tells your reader what to do after reading the email message — sign up for your webinar, download a report, etc. A study reveals that a single, clear CTA in your sales email can increase sales by 1617%.

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Now that I’ve covered what email copywriting is, let’s go over some email copywriting tips you can start using today.

9 No-Nonsense Tips to Help You Excel at Email Copywriting

Here are nine practical tips that’ll help you ace your email copy:

1. Be Clear about Your Email Copy Goals

You can use emails to accomplish a variety of goals:

• Sell your product or service.
• Build brand awareness.
• Get more subscribers for your newsletter.
• Invite people to your webinar.
• Drum up interest for a new product launch.
• Introduce new industry best practices, and more.

However, there’s no one-size-fits-all email copy you can use to achieve these diverse goals.

For instance, if your goal is to nurture an inbound marketing lead, your email marketing copy should focus on slowly nurturing the sales lead and shouldn’t sound too salesy. But if your goal is outbound sales, your sales email copy should quickly build interest in your offerings.

My point?
Have a specific end goal in mind before you start email copywriting.

Once you do, craft your email copy in such a way that every word in your email drives the reader towards fulfilling your end goal — be it sales, newsletter sign-ups, and so on.

2. Know Your Audience — Their Niche, Pain Points, and Aspirations

In email copywriting, “who” you write to must inspire “what” you write.

This means that you’ll need a thorough understanding of your target audience to develop a strategy for effective email copywriting.

But how do you understand the target audience?
At the most basic level, you’ll need a clear picture of the recipients’:

• Industry or niche.
• Pain points.
• Goals or aspirations.

Once you’ve nailed that, create detailed buyer personas showcasing some specific qualities your ideal buyers share. Buyer personas offer a deeper understanding of your target audience and help you create relevant email content that’ll capture the recipients’ attention.

I’ve used the plural personas here because your business may serve multiple customer segments.

For example, let’s say you’re a marketer in a content marketing agency.

One of your buyer personas can describe a CEO at a fintech company in San Francisco earning $1 million annually. Another buyer persona might be a small eCommerce business owner from Austin with $40,000 in profits.

3. Evoke Interest with Crisp, Clear, and Candid Subject Lines

No matter how good an email you’ve crafted, it’s not going to accomplish anything if the recipient doesn’t even open your email in the first place.

And there’s a high chance that even your best email will go unnoticed because the recipient’s inbox is probably flooded with emails just like yours.

That’s why your email will need to stand out from the crowd.

How do you do that?
Simple! You should write subject lines that are:

• Short and sweet: since many recipients will likely read your email on a mobile device, keep the subject line length between 6-10 words. Otherwise, it could get cut off.
• Personalized: include the recipient’s name and any other relevant details in your subject line to make it look tailor-made.
• Clear: paint a clear picture of what your email is about in the subject line and avoid using bait-and-switch tactics that damage your credibility.
• Intriguing: use a hard-to-ignore email subject line to capture the reader’s attention and get them thinking about what’s inside your email.

Remember, the subject line is your first touchpoint with the audience.

It not only makes the first impression but also gives the prospect a preview of what to expect in the body of the email. Besides, your subject line sets the tone for the rest of your conversations with the recipient.

Wondering what an excellent email subject line looks like?

Here are a few examples you can use for inspiration:

• Learn how [client name] improved their email deliverability by [X]% in a month
• Struggling with managing investor relations, [prospect’s first name]?
• Here’s a blog post revealing my secret behind [digital marketing milestone]
• How I made [company name] $[X] profit in [Y] months
• [Prospect’s name], here’s my complete guide to SEO in content marketing

Take a look at 43 cold email subject lines that get your emails opened.

4. Keep Your Email Body Aligned and Relevant

Your prospect will form some expectations about the email body based on your subject line.

For example, let’s say your subject line talks about how you helped a client increase their revenue by $100,000 with a single email marketing campaign.

When the recipient opens your marketing email, they expect to discover the tactics and email marketing strategy you’ve used to accomplish that goal. In other words, your email body copy should align with the promise made in your subject line.

But aligning the email body copy with the subject line is only the first step.

You’ll also need to:

• Establish credibility: if you’re sending a cold email, establish at the get-go why you’re the right person to approach about a specific topic. Also, featuring customer success stories in your outreach email goes a long way in building trust.
• Add value: use your unique experiences and insights to enrich the prospect’s life. Share a great example from your personal life, a relevant case study, or a helpful blog post in your email body.
• Eliminate objections: your recipients won’t readily agree with everything you say, so proactively address any possible concerns or objections in your email body.
• Personalize your message: since generic messages look spammy and feel irrelevant, personalize your message based on the recipient’s interests to resonate with them.
• Segue into the CTA: your end goal is to make the recipient do something (for example, click a link to your landing page), so transition smoothly from the email body to your call to action.

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5. Craft a Compelling Call-to-Action Your Recipients Can’t Resist

Your call to action can make or break your conversion rate.

If your CTA isn’t compelling enough, a potential customer will move on to the next thing after reading your email message. And all the effort you put into crafting a valuable email goes down the drain when that happens.

Here are a few pointers to help you create CTAs that can’t be ignored:

• Stick to a single CTA: many marketers add several different CTAs, but that can overwhelm your reader. Instead, use a single, clear CTA in your email copy.
• Use actionable language: a CTA should prompt action, so use a clear action word in your CTA. You can use an action word like “explore”, “access”, or “generate” based on your needs.
• Make the CTA personalized and specific: a specific and customized CTA like “Start your free trial today, [prospect’s first name]” speaks directly to the recipient and inspires action.

For example, here’s an email copy with a compelling CTA:

6. Ensure That Your Entire Email Copy Stays On-Brand

Every conversation you have with your audience is an opportunity to showcase your brand.

That’s why it’s crucial that your entire email copy — the subject line, email body, and CTA —  reflect your brand voice.

And this brand voice will vary across businesses and industries.

For example, if you’re a fun soft drinks brand, your brand voice can be edgy and witty. You can insert a few cheeky jokes or playful puns in your email newsletter, and your audience will love it! It’s exactly what they expect in your brand’s email content.

However, you can’t use the same tone when email copywriting for a law firm. You’d be expected to adopt a serious and professional tone in your email marketing campaign.

7. Create Personalizable, Ready-to-Use Email Copy Templates

Crafting a great email copy from scratch every time you need to send an email campaign is impractical.

A more efficient alternative is to create email templates you can quickly customize with personalization data.

This way, you can:

• Save time.
• Keep your email marketing copy on-brand.
• Deliver personalized experiences to your prospects.

To help you out, here’s a sample direct email template you can use as a reference:

Quick plug! At GMass, we’ve built our cold email platform so it automatically saves your past emails as templates which you can use in the future without any hassle.

8. Edit Your Email Copy for Accuracy and Readability

After you’re done writing the direct email copy, don’t send it out immediately.

Instead, take a break and come back later to do a thorough round of editing.

You should look for:

• Stray punctuation.
• Vague phrases or sentences.
• Confusing repetitions.
• Inconsistencies in the brand voice.

Essentially, ensure that your email content makes sense, has no errors, and reads well.

Otherwise, you risk confusing the recipient, leaving a poor impression, and failing to achieve your end goal with the email copy.

9. Use A/B Testing to Fine-Tune Your Email Copy

You may follow all the best practices — research your target audience, write clear copy that’s on-brand, and edit your emails to the last letter — and still end up with not-so-great results.

But that doesn’t mean you should give up.

Smart email marketers and copywriters know that email copywriting is at times guessing.
Some things you write just click, while others don’t.

Is there a way to predict if your email copy will work?
Sort of.

Just AB test different versions of your email copies till you find a version with the kind of results you’re aiming at.

What is A/B testing?
In A/B testing (or split testing), you split your audience into two groups and send them two different versions of an email copy to see which one performs better. You then choose the copy that brings the best results.

If you use any cold email AI-written content in your emails, it’s especially important to A/B test to see if they are effective or not.

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Next, I’ll show you an easy-to-use tool you can use to scale up your email copywriting.

Level Up Your Email Copywriting Results in 2022 with GMass

GMass is a robust email marketing and marketing automation tool you can use to send personalized email campaigns at scale.

Its ease of use and advanced capabilities have made it the perfect email marketing solution for copywriters, marketers, and small business owners. It’s also popular among employees at social media powerhouses like LinkedIn and Twitter.

The best part?
GMass works entirely inside Gmail, so your email copywriter doesn’t have to get familiarized with a new UI.

With GMass, you can:

• Automatically personalize your sales or marketing email copies at scale, including the recipient names, subject lines, paragraphs, links, images, and attachments.
• Save your email copy as a template to reuse in a future email campaign.
• Perform A/B tests to efficiently identify which email copy works best with your email subscribers.
• Build an email list of your target audience directly from your Gmail search results.
• Use sentiment analysis to understand how your email subscribers feel about an email copy, and more.

To use this tool, download the GMass Chrome extension and sign up for a free trial with your Gmail or Google Workspace account.

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Email Copywriting Guide: Final Thoughts

As an email copywriter, you’ll first need a clear goal in mind and an in-depth understanding of your target audience before writing the email.

Once that’s sorted, craft an intriguing subject line, an engaging body, and a compelling CTA for your email copy.

But don’t stop there.
Test your email copy with a small segment of your email list to see if it’s converting.

You can use an email marketing automation tool like GMass to easily perform your A/B tests, automatically personalize your emails at scale, save email copies as templates, and do so much more.

Download GMass’ Chrome extension for free and take your email game to the next level!