In order to become a top email marketer, you’ve to practice every day, master storytelling, and most importantly, know your audience very well. 

You should know how to spark curiosity in a reader to know more about what you’re saying, and how to seduce them with intriguing subject lines, eye-catching images, and compelling CTAs (call-to-actions). 

This article will walk you through the best tips and tricks to learn the foundations of email marketing and get a solid start. 

The Real Truth about Email Marketing 

The truth is, email marketing is much, much more than just writing emails and sending them to your list. 

It involves strategically segmenting your audience based on their demographics and interests plus having a full view of what to sell them…

And more importantly, how to sell them. 

In my journey of digital marketing, I’ve seen business owners encounter two main problems. They either: 

• Completely ignore email marketing.

• Or suck at coming up with an effective marketing strategy on their own

Either way, they’re leaving loads of money on the table. 

Businesses that understand the importance and power of email marketing and execute effective marketing have seen significant increases in revenue. 

To give you a solid start, let’s start with the basics. 

Email Copywriting

Email marketing is a broad term encompassing many areas – copywriting being at the top. 

Copywriting is about choosing the right words that make people want to do something right away. 

This action could be downloading a report, signing up for an email list, taking a quiz, or buying something. 

Copywriters draft headlines that call out pain points and promise a solution, emails that lead people to purchase a product, and landing pages that convert visitors into customers. 

What’s the Difference between Copywriting and Content Writing?

Both forms of writing are used for marketing, but they serve different purposes.

Content educates, while copy persuades. 

On one hand, content writers create various forms of long-form, SEO-optimized content such as articles, blog posts, and white papers. 

On the other hand, email copywriters make sure their emails turn indifferent visitors into raving buyers. It can be your product or someone else’s business that you’re promoting as an affiliate. 

These emails are usually short (100 – 300 words) and are generally looser than writing Facebook or YouTube ads. 

The reason being, your email subscribers are familiar with you to an extent. Therefore they don’t need hard selling compared to stone-cold traffic, whose only interaction with you is your ad thar that popped up in their fed. 

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Regardless of the length, the real challenge for you, as an email marketer, is to increase the click-through rate using a specific email sequence. 

This prompts a question… 

…What’s an Email Sequence? 

It’s a series of 5-7 emails written for a very specific reason.

For example: 

• Welcome Sequence – 3, 4 emails that you send to your new subscribers when they join your club. Their purpose is to make them familiar with your brand and your values. 

• Abandoned Cart Sequence – sent when people put your product in the cart but don’t finish the purchase. This sometimes has a special discount that they can avail if they checkout within a limited time.

• Post-Purchase Sequence – after someone buys your product or services, these emails walk them through how to use the product and what to expect, etc. 

Types of Emails 

Two types of emails are widely used in digital marketing. 

• Ecom-style, short emails with captivating images, mostly used in branding. Like this…

• Longer, text-heavy emails, normally used in Direct Response marketing. For example…

Now, let’s move to the meat of the article…

How to Become an Email Marketer? 

To answer this in the best way, let’s take a look at a few email marketing tips:

• Write Every Single Day

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Sounds quite basic, but it’s very important. If you want to leverage email marketing in your business and you’re a one-man army, you’ve to commit to writing daily.

You might have a hard time coming up with ideas for emails when you’re starting out. So, the easiest way to overcome this is to just let the ideas flow and write a few sentences on whatever comes to your mind first. 

Alternatively, you can write to your family or friends…even better, start writing a journal. 

Write about how your day was, what you had for lunch, maybe an interesting story from your day, or anything bizarre as how your neighbor’s cranky kid kept nagging his mama for something. 

This will help you write better and allow you to send great emails to your list in no time. 

• Use Short and Snappy Sentences

The general rule in marketing is to write short sentences because they’re easy to read. Big blocks of text look cluttered and become a burden on a reader’s eyes.

The harder it is to read, the more quickly people would bounce off the page.

Besides, as the attention span has decreased a ton in this day and age, people want to get an idea of what you’re saying by skimming the whole thing. 

Short and snappy sentences do a phenomenal job of making your content look skimmable. 

A fantastic tool to help you with writing is the Hemingway app.

I ran a text from another website through the Hemingway app to exemplify it.

This tool grades your text and gives you a detailed analysis of your copy. Ideally, you should seek for a grade under 5 or 6.

The lower the grade, the better your readability score is. Meaning, it’s easier for people to read it quickly. 

• Know Your Audience by Studying Your Competition 

One of the crucial elements of your email marketing is knowing your audience like the back of your hand. 

If you’re selling a keto diet plan, your audience would be people struggling to lose weight.

If you’re selling acne products, your audience is folks looking to get rid of acne. 

If you’re selling a course on managing personal finances, your audience would be people who want to manage their finances. 

Now it prompts a question…

How to Know Your Audience? 

One way to know them is by answering the following questions. 

• What are their pain points? 
• What do they want? 
• What keeps them up at night? 

Another way to understand your audience is to conduct extensive research. And the best way to do research is to study emails of giants – or as someone would say, highly successful competitors – in your industry.

Also, pay attention to their marketing strategies. 

• How do they run a promotion? 
• What time of the day do they send out emails? 
• How often do they give discounts? 

Find the high achievers in your industry, sign up for their newsletter, and buy their products.

This alone will give you enough data on what a high-performing email marketing campaign looks like.

• Nail the Subject Line and CTA

Much like a headline is an important element of a blog post, a subject line also makes or breaks your email marketing.  

When done right, it piques people’s interest, they read it, and you make money. 

And when done wrong…well, people ignore your emails and move on with their day…

And your emails collect digital dust sitting in their inbox. That explains why there are plenty of unread emails in your own inbox. 

Therefore, keep your subject line shorter than 10 words or under 70 characters. Plus, make it interesting so that people would want to read it to satisfy their curiosity.

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Moreover, having a clear CTA is just as important as a subject line. It tells your reader how to take an action (for example, how to buy something, book a demo, etc). 

You shouldn’t have CTAs that lead to different websites or invite a user to do multiple things at once.

For example, asking them to do 4 different things in one email is a big no-no. 

• Design and Layout

A picture speaks a thousand words. 

So, the visual appeal of your email is just as important as the above-mentioned metrics. Adding relevant images in your email to make them more engaging and responsive. 

• List Management and Deliverability 

You’ve got a list, great! But how often do all of your subscribers open your emails? 

As a matter of fact, your open rates start tanking over time. The reason could be deliverability issues or the mere fact that your audience has lost interest in what you’re offering.

So segmenting your email list based on their interests and gender is the key here. 

Send different emails to different segments and tweak your messaging according to which segment of your audience you’re talking to.

• Analytics and Reporting

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Lastly, analyzing and tracking your emails is important at all stages of marketing. 

Keep track of important metrics like open rates, click-through rates, conversion rates, and unsubscribe rates to measure how your email campaign has performed so far. Additionally, create marketing reports outlining the performance of your campaign. 

This will help you make informed decisions and optimize everything for future email flows.

Got anything to add? Feel free to drop some love in the comments below.