There’s an urban legend among copywriters that somewhere, buried deep inside the dark web, is an email template that achieves a perfect 100% conversion rate.
Supposedly it has such a perfect combination of verbs, adjectives and stacked exclamation marks that no one can read it without instantly being compelled to whip out their credit card!!!
Don’t go looking for it. It doesn’t exist (and you really don’t want to go digging around in the dark web). But I get why marketers and business owners would like to believe it.
Writing great email copy is hard.
Actually… no… scratch that. It’s not hard. It just feels like it is.
Try googling “how to write email copy” and you’ll get a bunch of articles like this:
Do you really fancy absorbing 50+ different email writing tips and trying to mash them together into a plan to write a perfect email?
Nope. Didn’t think so.
What these cookie-cutter cheerleaders fail to grasp is that every market is different. Just because a particular style of email works with one audience, it doesn’t mean it’ll work for everyone.
It’s like trying to find a formula for a movie or a novel that everyone on earth will enjoy.
I was reminded of this by an article by Drift marketer, Dave Gerhardt, called What I Learned About Writing Copy From 146,693 Emails and 50 Blog Posts. It’s a good read if you have an afternoon to spare (Spoiler Alert – Dave didn’t learn brevity), but it riffs on the idea that great email copy isn’t about finding a magic formula.
It’s about writing in clear, understandable language (or as I like to call it: “Writing”).
Some might think it’s a bit of a maverick move to throw out the copywriting rule book and just write something clear and simple, but copywriting has always been, first and foremost, about getting attention.
When email was a relatively new tech and mainly used for forwarding jokes and pictures of cats (Facebook has that covered now), hyped-up sales copy worked great.
But now that everyone is doing that, reverting to simple, conversational, personable emails is a breath of fresh air.
So the next time you write an email, throw out the rule book and try the Earnest Hemingway* approach:
Start with that and then just keep writing.
And if that doesn’t work for you…
Just be a person… writing to another person.
You’ve been doing it your whole life. You know what to do.
Of course, none of this matters if you don’t have any subscribers on your email list. Luckily, TrafficForMe.com has the cleanest traffic on the planet to build your list, make sales, and build long-term relationships with your new customers with. It’s easy to get started – just sign up for an advertiser account above by clicking ‘Create Account‘ and our team will get you going right away.
*Oh, and in case you don’t remember…. Hemingway was the guy who wrote a few famous books about 100 years ago – I think he did other stuff as well but his Wikipedia page is epic, and I got bored after a couple of paragraphs.
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