How to send emails that turn readers into buyers

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Most people send emails and receive them. Of these newsletters are popular. Most newsletters don’t get read and of the few that get read the majority don’t result in improved sales numbers.

If you create email newsletters then you must master the art of turning your subscribers into customers. Here are a few things to do to improve sales from email newsletters. Email newsletters are the holy grail of B2B marketing.

As humans, we are extraordinarily lazy with regard to things we don’t necessarily have to do.

People tend to ignore things that require any effort from them. If the offer is confusing or the buy button is shrouded in mystery, they leave. It’s easier to do that.

The goal then should be to reduce friction between your reader and the action you want them to take like a click. That’s email marketing done right. With emails, you can send traffic to your landing pages, product pages, a page for booking a meeting, or a website.

The reason why most people would order from a restaurant than cook is because of this basic trait in us. You can have all the leads in the world, but if you don’t target them right with your emails you’re not winning.

With newsletters, you must turn the passivity of reading to action-taking.

Here are the specifics of what you must do to help readers overcome their state of inertia.

1. Have a Clear Call to Action

CTAs tell readers about the action you want them to take. It should be easy to see and click on. You can repeat the CTA twice or thrice in an email, but don’t link out to different CTAs.

CTAs shouldn’t be ambiguous and if there’s so forget action taking. They won’t even read your emails.

Clear writing trumps over clever phrases in the CTA. Go for BUY TODAY, or SEE THE WEBINAR instead of something clever and confusing.

There are sections and parts of the email that make things confusing for the end reader by making simple things unnecessarily complicated.

The clearer your CTA, the higher your conversions.

The best thing to do at this stage is A/B test different CTAs by sending emails with different CTA buttons to different sets of your audience.

2. Have a Single Offer

Most companies go for offer overload. They stuff their emails with so many offers in the hopes that at least one would appeal to their target.

It can be a course, product, webinar, or link to a blog post.

Kill that. What happens with an overload of choices is people don’t tend to take even one choice seriously.

If your readers are reading and want more of your emails then continue providing value with more valuable content. An offer is valuable to the reader if they are signing up for the same. Someone signing up for a productivity blog doesn’t have to be hammered with emails promoting courses right at the start. Instead offer them help motivational quotes for the morning.

And that means it has to be relevant to them.

For example, this Sleepless Job Chart from Amerisleep is a perfect piece of content that can be repurposed into valuable newsletters. It has stats, deeply researched information on sleeping habits and how sleeplessness affects your wellbeing.

Notice the visual elements of the email. It’s clean. It doesn’t have large blocks of endless text or unending lists.

3. Be Specific About Your Offer

I told you that as humans we are born to be lazy. And if there’s work to be done inside an email, people would generally shy away from taking the desired action. Reduce the amount of friction between readers and the action we want them to take.

You can improve your offer by gathering feedback from past emails you sent or reading through product reviews. Access their pain points.

To keep their attention and keep them around for your desired action, make the offer crystal clear. One way I learned over the years to do this is by talking about the benefits and not the features. If you have a sweat-blocking product, talk about how the product blocks sweat and don’t say jargon like the aluminum chromate in it helps block sweat. It should be simplified.

Conclusion

What do you think of our short post on making sales with newsletters? Let us know in the comments below.