Tools to Help You Write Better Emails for Your Email Marketing Campaign
Email marketing is one of the oldest (yet alive and kicking) marketing techniques in existence today. I mean, we can gauge that easily considering the fact that it is the go-to method for customer outreach of 64% of small businesses.
It worked well back in 1978 (when Gary Thuerk sent the first promotional email blast to 400 people – which incidentally got his company $13,000,000 in sales) and it works well now in 2022 as well.
However, it can’t be denied that it has lost some degree – if not all – of its effectiveness. Online users can be quite numb and cold towards promotional emails. With a simple click or a swipe, such mails can be condemned to the ‘Trash’ or ‘Spam’ folder without getting even a cursory glance.
If you are looking to get some positive results from your email marketing campaign, you have to make sure that your emails are written spot-on. And to do that, you need tools. And we're not talking about spanners and screwdrivers.
Which tools exactly then, you may ask? That’s exactly what we’re going to be looking at in this post.
Tools to Help You Write Better Emails
1. Google Docs
True, there are a lot of formatting and styling options that you can use when composing emails in the full-screen mode in Gmail…
…but they’re still not very diverse. And furthermore, Gmail is not the only email client in the world. You could be using a different one.
The point is that you will need a rich text editor or a proper word processing software in order to come up with a good email. You want to make sure that you have access to all the basic styling and formatting features that you need for composing the draft.
For example, you may need to highlight some words in the text, you may need to color some words differently, or you could need to add some special characters, etc.
Google Docs is an excellent tool that you can use for all these types of purposes.
I know you Word users out there are probably going to say ‘Hey, MS Word’s a better option.’
And it could be too. I myself am a fan of the dark mode and the smooth flying cursor that was introduced in the 2013 version.
But G Docs has the obvious advantage of being free. There can be a lot of individuals and small businesses who don’t have the capacity in their budget to cough up a monthly or one-time fee for using MS Word. For these types of people, Google Docs is the better choice.
Let’s round this part up by listing some features of Google Docs.
Features
- Free to use
- Can be used online and offline (on Chrome)
- Comes with a huge array of formatting and styling options
- Can be used to insert images, drawings, charts, and tables
- Supports extensions
- …and many more
2. Paraphraser
Yes, yes, I know what you’re thinking.
A paraphraser? What’s that got to do with writing emails?
Well, a lot actually. Paraphrasers can help you work on the most important part of a promotional email i.e., the subject line.
The subject line of a promotional email is pretty much the deal maker or breaker. When a person receives a promotional mail, the first thing that they see is the subject line. If it’s written well, it can elicit a click. And if not, then the mail will most probably get deleted.
So, coming back to our point, paraphrasers can help you make your subject lines snazzy and engaging. If you write a subject line that you think is dull or boring, you can run it through a paraphraser. The latter will change the wording and the order of the sentence to make it sound and look better.
Paraphraser.io is an excellent tool that you can use for this purpose. It’s free and it can be used even by unregistered users. It has three different modes, two of which are available for free users and one is exclusive to premium members.
Apart from the 500-word limit per query, there isn’t really any other per day or month usage limitations. So, you can try using it multiple times to get the output that you want.
Let’s look at an example.
Take this subject line:
Now, that’s terrible. I don’t think anyone (except perhaps a very discount-starved person) would think about clicking a mail that had this sort of a subject line.
But let’s see what happens if we use Paraphraser.io to change things up a bit.
See? It looks better already. This subject line will be quicker to get the attention of a shopper who frequents Walmart.
Features
- Free to start (paid mode also available)
- Generous 500-word limit
- No per-day or per-month limitations
- Intelligent functionality
- Supports multiple languages
3. Prepostseo
Suppose you receive this email from a clothing store, promoting their winter stock. Would you feel motivated or enticed enough to buy something?
No, you won’t.
There are few things that can put your readers off as much as grammatical imperfection. Grammar and spelling errors are anathema to content creators and readers alike.
And as much care you may take while writing your draft, you can always accidentally leave some errors in the write-up (I know I’ve probably left around a dozen in this post up till now).
To find and fix such errors, you have to use grammar checking tools. And that is where the grammar checker by Prepostseo steps in.
This tool is completely web-based, and it requires no downloads whatsoever. It’s also free and you can use it without even signing up.
As for the working itself, it’s quite accurate and efficient. All you need to do is enter your text and click on the ‘Check Grammar’ button. The errors in the content will be highlighted and you can click on each one to select the correct suggestion.
There are multiple languages supported by this tool as well. There are around 32 different ones that you can select from the drop-down menu at the top right corner of the input box.
One feature that we enjoyed in particular with this grammar checker is the ‘Resolve All’ button. If there are a ton of errors in your draft, you can sort them all with just one click.
That’s as far as the features of this tool are concerned. Now let’s see an example of how it can help you when writing an email.
So, we wrote a bunch of grammatically-incorrect lines at the start of this section. Let’s see what the tool does with them:
From the four errors, the tool found three. It missed the fact that we had to put an apostrophe in 'Winters' but 3 out of 4 is a pretty good score.
Features
- Free to use
- No limitations whatsoever
- Convenient ‘Resolve All’ button
- Color-coded results for easy visualization of the grammar/spelling mistakes
4. Hemingway Editor
Hemingway is a popular name in the content writing biz. The main function and perk that you can enjoy with Hemingway is readability assessment.
Once you enter your content into the input space, the tool evaluates your writing and gives it a readability grade (from 1 to 'Post-Graduate'). It also points out the various elements in your writing that make it difficult to read such as the number of passive voice sentences, long sentences, complex words, and adverbs.
How can this help you in writing better emails? Here’s how.
Suppose someone, in a fit of linguistic enthusiasm, was to come up with a promotional email that read thus:
(I'm going to give you a second to go and search up "ubiquitous" and "moccasins".)
Now, this abomination of a sentence would be too hard to read. No casual reader would get it. It’s just a really difficult way of saying:
“Stand out from the crowd with these shoes. Get a 30% discount by clicking the button below.”
When writing a promotional email, you have to make sure that it is easily understandable by everyone. This is where you can use Hemingway.
Here is what Hemingway has to say about the overly-complex sentence above:
It instantly pointed out the long sentence and the adverb used at the beginning and ranked the overall content with a grade 6.
On the other hand, if we were to run the simpler sentence in the tool instead, we would get this:
A simple grade 1. Easy-peasy.
To sum it up, you should make sure to run your completed draft through Hemingway in order to see whether it is too difficult to understand or not. Your recipients may include non-native English speakers, and they could have trouble understanding your email if it is ranked at grade 10 or 11 on the Hemingway scale.
Features:
- Free to use
- Available as a web-based tool and also as a paid, downloadable application for desktop
- Excellent readability assessment features
- Real-time, instant working
5. Canva
When’s the last time you received a promotional email that consisted of just plain text?
That’s right. You probably never did.
Promotional emails almost always have some sort of graphics in them. If the message is brief enough, then the mail may only consist of a poster or a large image that has the text written inside it.
The point is, when creating a mail for your email marketing campaign, you have to make sure to use high-quality, engaging visuals in it. And to do that, Canva is an excellent tool that you can use.
The reason we like and recommend Canva for these types of light graphic designing tasks is that it offers a lot of features to free users. Even if you don't want to upgrade to the 'Pro' plan, you can keep on creating all sorts of graphics and visuals using the vast library of elements, templates, fonts, charts, backgrounds, etc.
You can create a design in your required dimension and resolution. If you want to add a wide banner at the top of your mail, or maybe a narrow poster, you can make it using Canva…kind of like this: (By the way, look at the below image only for getting an idea of how posters can look in your mails…don’t follow it practically…)
Features:
- Free to start
- User-friendly drag-and-drop interface
- Available online and also as a downloadable application
- Vast gallery of icons, symbols, images, graphics, templates, GIFs, and much more
Conclusion
So, the next time you want to write a promotional email blast, try using these tools to make sure that the final draft is free from grammatical errors, readable, and engaging to the recipients. That’s it. Have fun writing your emails!
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