Words, words, words: maintaining the right tone in marketing emails

Published December 10, 2013 at 6:56 am

When you start sending out emails to help promote your brand, lots of care needs to be taken in order to make sure there is no confusion and that the mission of the company wins the recipient over.

There’s nothing worse than a boring or unclear subject line in an email, and a really poorly worded one might have your message sent straight to the spam folder or deleted simply as a matter of course.

A post on Inc.com, based off of information from MailChimp, focused specifically on the way marketers phrase this important yet seemingly simple part of the process to appeal to the most amount of people without losing anything that might help your particular brand to stand out.

Some of the tactics suggested by article author Erik Sherman include choosing language that is specifically chosen to communicate a positive message that isn’t too generic. For example, he suggests that your brand avoid the word “free,” as it doesn’t statistically seem to do much in the long run.

“The use of free varies widely in effectiveness, with recruitment and staffing, restaurant, and beauty and personal care enjoying the most benefit,” Sherman writes. “The industries where it did badly, actually lowering response, were surprising–travel and transportation, real estate, and retail saw drops in their response rates.”

So much depends on tone. Don’t be too automatic or too “personal,” and when it comes to designing the kind of campaign that will see this mailed to all of your potential customers, take it seriously.