Common Email Writing Mistakes that Kill Your Sales

Common Email Writing Mistakes that Kill Your Sales

Despite the surge of social media platforms such as TikTok and Instagram, email marketing still represents an important element of digital advertisement. Based on recent statistics, 54% of business owners still use email marketing to increase sales, with 60% of customers subscribing to brands’ email lists willingly. 

However, even if you converted a cold lead to your mailing list, you can still flunk your sales pitch and cause them to unsubscribe. Additional data shows that businesses send 27% more email content in 2021 than pre-COVID-19, with 78% experiencing increased engagement over the last 12 months. 

Whether you run an eCommerce store or a different online business, writing professional, personable emails is crucial for successful sales. Instead of winging it and hoping for the best, let’s talk about how you can avoid email writing mistakes that would kill your sales.

Reasons to Avoid Making Email Writing Mistakes

What is the inherent value of using email marketing for your sales efforts? Judging by reports, 59% of customers say email influenced their purchase decisions, with 91% of people opening emails daily. Newsletters, updates, announcements, and sales offer all converge in a user’s inbox and try to capture their attention. 

The fact is that you have a short window of time for that, which is why your email writing matters more than the products/services themselves. Paying close attention to the way you write an email for sales will net your business several noteworthy benefits going forward, including:

  • Control your business’ brand image through direct audience engagement
  • Nurture leads and entice them into repeat purchases
  • Introduce loyalty and referral programs to existing customers
  • Ability to segment your audience based on their purchase habits
  • Email marketing has a low cost compared to other marketing channels
email writing mistakes

1. Writing your Subject Line as an Afterthought

Given that a percentage of your customers will read through their email via mobile devices, your subject line should be written as carefully as possible. Your subject line should be 10-60 characters in length and serve to grab the attention of your customers. To do that, avoid using all caps, special characters, or emojis. 

Instead, use the subject line in combination with the opening line to start your sales pitch from the get-go. Address your recipient by name or surname, introduce yourself, and then get to the point. Don’t waste time on overly long introductions, and your customers will be grateful for your foresight, coming a step closer to making a purchase.

2. Lack of Courtesy and Personalized Writing

Personalization has slowly become the norm when it comes to communication channels such as email or instant messaging. Your email’s recipient will quickly figure out whether you personalized the email for them or sent a mass email to everyone without additional consideration. 

Start by actually addressing the person by name or surname, and include a piece of information from their interaction history with your business. Thank them for their trust with item X that they bought Y time ago and ask how well it’s serving them. 

All along, you should use personalized pronouns such as “we”, “us”, “you”, and “yourself” instead of adopting a robotic tone of voice. Using Edubirdie can help you write personalized content, documents, and papers, and format it properly for better legibility in the form of email marketing. Treat your customers as an extension of your business and show them courtesy – they are likely to respond in kind and engage your website.

3. Poor State of your Website Beyond Email Writing

Speaking of your website, your landing page, blog, and storefront must reflect the quality of your emails. Based on statistics, 90% of customers will look for a different website if the current one lacks good UX design and interesting content to engage.

Prepare your site by doing a website audit before sending email marketing content intended for sales. Refresh your visuals, add new keywords, and make sure that all of your internal links function as intended. Failing to do this will result in people bouncing off of your website despite professionally written email content. Create a uniform customer experience by cleaning up your website before introducing it to new customers.

4. Exclusively Sending Sales Offers Without Other Types of Content

While the final goal of your email marketing campaign may be to incite customers into making a purchase, you should still mix up your content. Telling your mailing list nothing else apart from “buy our products” again and again will result in them unsubscribing from your emails. Instead, introduce different types of email which you can send periodically to warm people up to your brand before pitching a sales offer:

  • Newsletters
  • Free resources (eBooks, reports)
  • User-generated content
  • Employee story content
  • Representative blog pieces

Using these and similar types of emails interspersed with your sales emails will make people far more lenient toward purchasing your products. Moreover, it will showcase that your business is professional and well-informed about the industry it operates in, so mixes up your email content.

email writing mistakes

5. Spamming your Mailing List without Rhyme or Reason

Scheduling your sales emails is extremely important to avoid being flagged as spam by both your recipients and mailing services such as Gmail. There are different ways in which you can schedule your emails, such as daily, weekly, or monthly. Likewise, different emails can be scheduled in different frequencies, with newsletters being sent once a month and sales emails once a week. 

This will not only make it easier for you to focus on writing better emails with a clear schedule but also let customers “breathe”. No one likes to receive emails from the same business two or three times a day, all of which are related to aggressive sales attempts. This can make your business seem desperate for leads, further alienating people from making a purchase. Schedule different emails in different frequencies and don’t copy/paste them in-between – write as much original content as possible.

6. Improper Mailing List Segmentation

Email list segmentation is an essential part of ensuring that a larger percentage of your leads interact with your email content. Segmenting your audience will allow you to write different sales pitches for different customer profiles. Some of how you can segment your audience include:

  • Based on geographic location and demographic
  • Their position in the customer’s journey
  • Based on topics of interest
  • How you acquired the lead
  • Based on their lifestyle, hobbies, and passions

To segment your audience, you will have to manually review each contact on your mailing list to determine their audience group. While it may take some time to organize leads into segments, the effort will pay off in sales later.

7. Lack of a Clear Takeaway or Call to Action

Writing a call to action into your email content is important to entice customers into going through with your sales offer. Whether you opt for a simple “visit our website now” or write a more creative CTA, make sure to include one. 

Emails without calls to action can appear passive and unclear, especially to people who spend mere seconds reading an email before moving on. You can also use different calls to action throughout the email as long as you don’t spam them too much. Write about your product, its value, and then present people with a CTA which will help seal the deal and lead them to your website.

Using Email Marketing to your Advantage (Conclusion)

Using email marketing to boost your sales is a cost-efficient way of nurturing existing leads and approaching potential customers with your product portfolio. However, mistakes can happen, and they can cost you precious sales if left unaddressed. 

Make email marketing a useful part of your marketing strategy rather than a hindrance by fixing the writing mistakes we’ve outlined above. Combined with professional courtesy and fair sales incentives, your mailing list will respond well to your emails and result in higher sales.