There’s something safe, I guess, about using the same words everyone else uses. Maybe that’s why businesses keep using and over-using words like innovative, industry-leading, top quality, expert and experienced. Or maybe there’s simply no other way to say what we really mean? Maybe those words are it?

I hope not, because the over-used words are now nothing more than clichés that mean nothing to the people we’re trying to persuade—the prospects.

And I doubt it, because the English language is rich with words. Dripping and oozing with endless possibilities, unusual yet meaningful words you’ve likely heard before but aren’t top of mind.

How’s your email copywriting? Would you rank it among the email marketing best practices you’re adhering to?

When you find your email copywriting leans towards clichés, ask yourself, “What do we really mean by innovative?” If the answer is, we really mean we want to sound like everyone else, you have serious flaws in your email marketing message! If the answer is something else like, we have developed solutions unlike any others available on the market today, then why don’t you simply say that instead of innovative? And back up your claim, of course.

David Meerman Scott was recently interviewed for a MarketingSherpa article on improving copywriting with help from social media. He presents seven tactics but there are two I want to point out in particular as relevant to email copywriting and email marketing best practices:

Tactic #1: Read what your audience writes
This is first and foremost, I think, because it helps you to learn your customer’s language so you can use their words, not clichés. Scott suggests looking to social media sites, blogs, user-generated review sites, and the like, any place people are talking about your company, product or service. What words to they use?

Tactic #3: Eliminate empty language online
Once you know different words, use them. Scott says to remove the empty words from main entry points like your home page, and also any outbound marketing material.

Remember, you can adhere to every other email marketing best practice, but if your email marketing message is the same as everyone elses, so will your campaign, at least to a degree! The words matter. Get them right, without trying to just “play it safe.” Hey, break away from the crowd and sound different and you’ll at least get noticed! Which is the first step to getting a sale!

Need help with your email copywriting? We’re here!

So it’s not that we’re anti-Twitter. It’s just that we want to make sure the walls are up before we start painting the house.

According to eMarketer, only 7.4% of the U.S. population over age 18 is using Twitter. And you only have to use it once a month to count as a “user.”

Compare that to 80% of Americans using email.

That means less than one-tenth of the email users are using Twitter. Knowing that, where do you think you should invest your time and money?

Our advice to you as an email solutions provider: Make sure your email best practices are up to speed before you jump on the Twitterwagon. Below are some resources to help:

• This email marketing blog
• Our email marketing library of whitepapers and reports
• Our email marketing newsletter
• Our email marketing consultants

Tap into these resources and make sure your email best practices are the best. Then you can use Twitter to support your email marketing campaigns!

There’s something about picking up a pen or sitting at a keyboard that brings out another persona, it seems, even in the email marketing world. But in email marketing, we’re not interested in pretty prose or stuffy statements. We want results. Period. And if you’re not careful, your email copywriting can decrease your email marketing results.

It’s email. People don’t need to be impressed. They need to be moved to act. Immediately. They’re don’t need big words or long sentences. They’re not going to pull out the dictionary when they don’t know the meaning of “riparian.” They’re going to open (you hope), scan, and either click through or move on to the next email. You want the click through. And your email copywriting helps to make that click through happen.

Write like you talk. It sounds simple, but isn’t. So here’s a trick: Read it out loud. Even if you didn’t write it as the email marketer, your copywriter did. Simply read it out loud. Does it sound natural? Conversational? Like something you’d really say to an email subscriber? If so, go with it.

Does it sound stuffy? Do you stumble over a word or two? Send it back and ask for the email copywriting to be revised.

Your goal is email marketing results, not email marketing resistance. Your email copywriting is key.

Email can also be pretty, flashy and showy, but it’s the words that drive the action. And the whole reason you do email marketing is to get email marketing results! So driving action, i.e. conversions, is critical. Making your email copywriting critical, even on your buttons.

As a follow up to our recent blog post on which words will encourage the most sign ups  to your email marketing or email newsletter campaign, let’s tackle the words on your buttons next.

“Buttons? We don’t need no stinkin’ buttons.”

Yes you do. For those email recipients with images turned on, the button can offer a strong call to action. But not if you’re email marketing ingenuity is lacking and your buttons say only “Click Here” or “Submit.”

Your button text can be a strong motivator by being urgent, relevant and/or specific. Consider these possible word choices:

• Start saving now
• Get the latest issue
• Join the club
• Don’t miss the discount
• Sign me up

But two caveats about using buttons in your email marketing:
1.    Don’t rely on buttons alone. Remember that most people have images turned off in their emails, meaning your button won’t even show up, no matter how snazzy your email design.
2.    Include more than one call to action. Usually a mix of buttons and text works. You can include text calls to action within the body text of the email, and in other places as standalone text.

Have you used button text that outperformed boring words and brought better email marketing results? If so, let us know at blog@clickmailmarketing.com! As an email solutions provider, we love to learn from and share your success stories.

If you guessed subject line and email body, you’re right…or maybe you already got a peek at this month’s ClickMail Marketer.

Although there are other ways to measure the effectiveness of your email marketing, email marketers still do need to pay attention to open rates and click throughs. And the two factors which will influence those metrics the most are 1) email subject lines and 2) email copywriting in the body of the email.

For some email best practices on improving your email subject lines and the email copywriting in the body of your emails, see the latest ClickMail Marketer by clicking here.

There you’ll find five email best practices to consider when writing your email subject lines, and four to consider for the email copywriting of the body of the email.

Even if you only tweak one, you can improve your email marketing ROI, so take a look!

With 43 inspiring email marketing award winners’ examples and descriptions, you could consider this an email marketing best practices tutorial. Seriously. Take some time to skim it, then go back through and learn from tried-and-true techniques for:

• Testing
• Auto responders
• Opt-in campaigns
• Lead generation
• Relaunch
• Welcome emails
• Triggered emails
• Email newsletters
• List growth
• Email for internal promotions
• Email contests

Email marketing ROI can always be improved even a little by tweaking your email marketing best practices. Take advantage of the lessons learned by other email marketers to get better email marketing results. MarketingSherpa does a fabulous job of explaining each campaign and why it was a winner. Perusing the winners’ samples will inspire you to improve your email copywriting and email design too.

See the winners’ email marketing results by clicking here

The author’s point was, be careful about these types of headlines because they often lead you to articles that lack substance. The articles are usually just recycled information, he claimed.

What the author failed to mention is: Numbers in titles work. And in headlines and email subject lines too. They work. That’s why we use them.

Perusing a bunch of unopened emails just now, we noticed two—one on top of the other—that both had subject lines starting with 5. One started “5 Ways…” and the other started “5 Must-Have…” imagine looking in your inbox and seeing two bolded subject lines, one on top of the other, both starting with the number 5. Odd, right? Not really. Numbers work.

Writing email subject lines is a tricky business, and an important one. After all, the email subject line is one of two factors recipients consider when deciding whether or not to open your email (the other is the From address). Ironically, in the world of email copywriting, it’s probably the part of most email marketing campaigns that gets the least attention, but arguably has the most impact.

It might seem trite. It might seem overdone and overused. It might seem too easy. But numbers in email subject lines work.

Not to say that author might have been right! It could be that the bulk of articles headlined with numbers are recycled, irrelevant information. But in the email marketing world, numbers work in email subject lines.

But it’s still up to us to make sure our email marketing content is relevant, timely and useful, even if with a killer email subject line.

…including email design.

With a list like that, you can see why we as an email marketing vendor keep talking about all the moving parts. Even your email design has loads of parts to pay attention to and modify for best email marketing results. The challenge is, marketers are often at the mercy of their designers to do the email design, and it might look great, but that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s going to work great, i.e. translate into email marketing ROI.

Now Lyris has a guide that can help. The paper called “Email Design No-No’s Guide for Non-Designers” includes the top 10 things both you and your designer need to know about email design. Don’t worry, it’s not complicated information. It will help you and your designer avoid the all-too-common trap of approaching email design like print design.

And don’t think it’s going to be blue works better than green. This guide goes into just enough depth to help you get what you need from your designer, and even gives you some input into the parts you control, like the email address and From line.

Download this guide to email best practices in design.

Chances are, with all the moving parts that make up email marketing, there are some moving parts of your own email marketing campaign that can use some refinement. Rather than look outside of your existing email marketing program to try to up your open rates, click throughs and conversions, like adding video or a link to Facebook or something like that, first look inside to see where you can tweak and improve…and increase your email marketing ROI.

As an email marketing vendor, we at ClickMail help clients figure out where and how to improve their email marketing campaigns by improving parts of them. Below is by no means a comprehensive list, but here are some major parts to analyze first, within your email marketing program, before looking outside of it for some quick fixes:

1.    From address
2.    Email subject lines
3.    Email design
4.    Email copywriting
5.    Call to action
6.    Landing page
7.    Transactional emails and welcome emails

Remember as an email marketer you have one huge advantage over other direct marketers: the ability to quickly and easily test! Any of these seven parts above can be tested, and testing should be a regular part of your email marketing process.

ClickMail strives to be an email marketing vendor that offers plenty of useful information to help. We offer tips on improving these email marketing pieces in a variety of ways, including:

·    In the resources section of the ClickMail Web site, you’ll find links to a variety of useful email marketing whitepapers
·    Our monthly email marketing newsletter offers succinct tips for improving email marketing ROI
·    This email marketing blog continually serves up useful tidbits that are short and actionable. Read through past posts and be sure to subscribe

And as an email marketing vendor, ClickMail Marketing can help by analyzing all your email marketing parts to help you figure out where to improve. Working with an email marketing vendor means improving your email marketing ROI faster so you can feel free to dive into the cool new shiny stuff everyone’s talking about. With one major difference: You’ll be way ahead of your competitors on the email side before you dip your toes into the social media side.

It’s also time for a reminder of upcoming email marketing events that will get you up to speed and in the know about email marketing tactics and techniques.

As an email marketing vendor and the Gold Sponsor of the Northern California chapter of the Direct Marketing Association, we’d love to see you at the upcoming DMAnc event, “Integrating Campaigns: Leveraging email as the link between your media buy, your advertising and your marketing message.”

Join us January 21 in Burlingame, California, as speakers Jeanniey Mullen of Zinio and Brian Ellefritz of Cisco show how your email marketing campaigns hold the key to opening new sources of revenue. During the lunch and the bonus workshop that will follow, you’ll learn about integrating your email marketing with banner ads, prints ads, Web sites, and even social networking. Jeanniey is the author of Email Marketing An Hour A Day. Invest a couple of hours just one day to hear from these email marketing and social media experts…and improve your email marketing ROI as a result.