SMB Marketing Best Practices: Easy Reading Is Key to Email Success

Love it or hate it, email continues to be a strong contender in the modern digital marketing landscape. Recent studies have shown that email marketing drives $44 for every $1 spent and remains a strong, viable channel with healthy ROI¹. With some simple tweaks and insight, you can improve your email effectiveness and get a leg up on your competition. In this post, we will cover various aspects of email marketing to help you hone your skills and get better results from your email efforts. Today, we will focus on readability—keeping the email short and breaking up the text.

Keep it short and concise
This is one of the most common mistakes made in email marketing. You want to be persuasive but in doing so, you tell them EVERYTHING about your product or service.

You need to convey the benefit quickly to the reader in as few words as possible. Think about it, how many emails do you receive in a single day? Thirty? Fifty? More than 100? We are inundated with emails daily and don’t have the time to consume every word. If you can cut through the competing sea of emails with short, concise, benefit-driven copy, you have a greater chance of connecting with the reader.

Make it easy for them—if they have to work to get through an email, they will most likely delete it. Also it’s very important to limit your subject matter. Don’t tell the reader everything you have in the store or every service you offer. Focus on a product or special that will get them to come to your store or to click through to your online shop.

Look at some of the recent emails you’ve sent. Do they read like a short story? If so, consider pruning the content, focus on the main idea and remove the extra content and your chances of being read will go up considerably.

Use sub headlines and bullets to break down concepts
The other reality is that people SKIM emails. They are trying to separate the valuable emails from the clutter. Help them skim using paragraph blocks that break down information into smaller pieces with sub headlines and bulletted lists where appropriate. Compare the next two sets of copy.

First, paragraph style:
Our software provides everything you need to streamline your business, with one-time data entry. Using our software you can take orders at POS, turn those orders into projects, create purchase orders, fulfill the order, set up delivery, and invoice the customer.

Now, bulleted copy:
Our software provides everything you need to streamline your business, with one-time data entry. Using our software you can:

• Take orders at POS
• Turn those orders into projects
• Create purchase orders
• Fulfill the order
• Set up delivery
• Invoice the customer

Which copy is easier to read? Creating readable emails is an easy step for boosting the effectiveness of your email marketing. Crafting emails doesn’t have to be hard. Stay tuned for more email tips!

1. https://www.campaignmonitor.com/blog/email-marketing/2018/10/45-fascinating-email-marketing-facts-for-2018/)