Top 4 Email Copy Fails (and How to Fix Them)
Not impressed with your email results?
If you’re like most companies since the start of the pandemic, you rely on emails more than ever to communicate with your audience and drive revenue to your business.
Since your emails are doing so much heavy-lifting these days, it’s essential to ensure they’re getting the best results possible. Because if your emails fail, your business fails.
Now that we’re starting a new year, it’s a great time to evaluate all of your marketing emails (triggered, transactional, drip, onboarding, newsletters, sales sequences, etc.) to ensure they have none of these common copy fails:
1. Unrecognizable from name
In the last week alone, I received three emails with the following from names:
donotreply
noreply
BCBSA_CHGO @ icims
What the what?
These were all from major companies that normally send well-written and well-designed emails. But it looks like they forgot to check the from names on their triggered emails.
Your from name needs to be unmistakable on all your emails. It’s a major influence on whether or not your audience opens them. According to Campaign Monitor, 68% of Americans base their decision to open an email on the from name. And if they don’t recognize you as the sender, it may get deleted or marked as spam.
The Fix: Write a from name for each outgoing email that is recognizable and resonates with your audience. Get from name tips here.
2. Unoptimized preview text
Even though most businesses have gotten better at including preview text with their emails, I still see “View in browser” displayed under subject lines in my inbox.
Oops, someone forgot the preview text!
Your preview text is like a second subject line and one of the factors (like from names) that affects your open rate. You definitely don’t want to skimp on it!
The Fix: Be sure to include preview text with each email that complements and enhances the subject line. Get preview text tips here.
3. Untargeted messaging
I’ve worked with many clients over the years who tried to do double- or triple-duty with their emails by targeting more than one audience at once.
Their reasons?
“We don’t have the time or budget to segment our database and create targeted emails.”
“Our list doesn’t have specific-enough data to segment by stage of awareness or buyer’s journey.”
“We’re afraid of leaving something out that may sway someone to click, so we prefer to cram all our value props into one email and send it to everyone at the same time.”
If this sounds like you, it’s time for an intervention. When you don’t target your messages, your copy can’t be effective and your emails will be dead on arrival. When you try to be relevant to everybody, you end up being relevant to nobody.
The fix: Effective email copy starts with quality, segmented data. Segment your list by stage of awareness and buyer’s journey, then craft relevant messages for each segment.
4. Unclear call-to-action
Untargeted messaging also leads to unclear calls-to-action (CTAs). If you’re sending your email to multiple audiences in different stages of the buyer’s journey, how would you know how to direct them? Because of this, some businesses persist on multiple or general CTAs due to FOMO (fear of missing out).
Their fears tend to be:
“What if the audience isn’t ready to buy/download/get a demo?”
“What if they want to learn more about the product or talk to a rep first?”
“Should we add a secondary CTA just in case?”
If you’re also worried about these things, it’s a signal you need to go back and segment your list. That way, you (or your copywriter) can craft a specific CTA for each segment that will resonate and get clicked.
The fix: Write ONE clear CTA that resonates with your target. A/B test CTAs to see which works best.
Want more email copy insights? Access all my email marketing articles here.
