How to control emotions through email copywriting

Email copywriting is a subtle art that can make all the difference to your bottom-line sales. It’s all about being able to tap into what people are thinking, en masse, and create urgency by presenting a solution that needs to be bought and paid for as soon as possible.

There’s a line to be walked between creating urgency, and looking like you’re too keen to make a sale. Let’s take a look at how you can strike the right balance.

There’s a line to be walked between creating urgency, and looking like you’re too keen to make a sale. Let’s take a look at how you can strike the right balance.

Decide on the emotions that you want to tap into

Emotions are a funny thing, in that they’re very easy to stir up in people, but rather difficult to channel in a coherent direction. The first thing you need to do is to decide which emotions you want to tap into; this will depend largely on the nature of your products and services.

“There’s no use in being emotive for the sake of it. All this will do, is leave your customers feeling bemused as they receive a barrage of rhetoric. I strongly recommend taking the time to decide which emotions fit with the nature of your products and services” — says Luke Thompson, Content Marketer at Resumes Centre.

Clearly, if you have a luxury product you’re selling to high net worth clients, you need to approach things in a different manner than if you were selling a low-cost product in lower-income households.

Selling luxury is all about creating desire, and then combining it with the fear of having to make do with something less desirable. Whereas selling a low-cost item is all about showing you can quickly and easily solve an annoying problem.

You want to create a sense of wasted time and annoyance, and then position yourself as the solution the reader has been looking for.

Create a list of emotive words which chime with your email copywriting

Creating a list of key emotive words is the next step, and it’s one that will be of great benefit once you start drafting your first round of content.

Always ask yourself whether the wording you’ve put together chimes with the emotions that you’re trying to evoke. You should also ensure that the words you put down fit with the core ethos of your brand.

For example, if you’re offering a time-saving product that makes people’s lives easier, you don’t want too many fearful or stressed words on your list.

You need to make people feel they need your product, but you can’t overdo things as you need to project the sense that you’ll be a calming presence in their lives.

Always keep the core aspects of your brand within your focus

Projecting your brand is the main purpose of this exercise. You may think that it’s to generate sales, and it is to an extent, but only through a long-term sustainable approach.

Stay true to your brand so that you can grow organically and provide a sense of identity that your customers can tap into.

“We always work to ensure that our brand is our focus. Experience has shown many times over, that it’s all too easy to lose sight of the big picture” — says Chris Mercer, Freelance Marketer and Founder of Citatior.

A scattergun approach that creates a memorable headline may sell you a few extra products to begin with, but in the long term, it will just confuse people.

Creating a storyboard is a great way to organize an email sequence. That way you’ll be able to ask yourself whether all of your content is pulling in the same direction, or if it’s shooting off to the sides in the hope of making a sale.

Write in a conversational tone that will connect with your audience

Most people ignore spammy emails from companies trying to sell them something, but everyone takes the time to read a thoughtful message from a friend or loved one.

The reason for this is that they know the latter will offer them something of value for little or nothing in return. You can use this simple bit of psychology to find the right tone for your emails.

A conversational tone is often the most engaging style to use. It allows you to add the human touch to your prose, be more emotive, and creates text that’s more readable.

If you’re looking for external input on how to go about this, then there are a variety of different online tools that you can make use of:

CoSchedule: Offers an intuitive way to decide on a timeline that will help your emails reinforce the messaging of your previous mailshot.

Essay Supply: Connects you with writers who will help you tap into the emotional psyche of your target audience.

Online Writers Rating: Allows you to search professional writers who will be able to find the right words to project your brand to a larger market.

MailChimp: Offers a variety of learning resources that will enable you to tailor your efforts to meet the needs of a specific market.

Create urgency by highlighting scarcity, but don’t overdo it

Any useful tool for sales will enable you to create a sense of urgency around your offering. This doesn’t mean that you want to use hyperbole and attempt to send the reader into a full-blown panic.

All this will do is lose your credibility with the vast majority of your audience.

What you need to do is paint a picture of what the reader’s life would look like without your product in it. You can do this in one of two ways.

Either by answering a question people will only ever answer one way: ‘Do you want more from life?’ Or by highlighting scarcity with phrases like ‘Only X left in stock,’ or ‘Offer must end soon’.

The key thing here is the phrasing is very definite. There are no vague promises that something might be leftover for the reader to buy. Once it’s gone, it’s gone.

Always offer a solution — it’s not enough to simply highlight a problem

One of the most important things to get across is that you’re writing because you can actually solve a problem. Highlighting it in the first place is essential because that’s what gets your readers into a buyer’s mindset.

Once they’re ready to buy, however, you need to turn to the solution and create a strong desire to buy.

“Products and services are all about doing something for people so that they don’t have to do it themselves. If you remember this key point when you’re crafting your sales funnel, then you’ll be able to get people to buy whatever you want,” says James Daily, Professional Writer and Head of Content Department at FlashEssay.

By positioning your product as the solution the reader has been looking for you can use the emotions you’ve stirred up to push a sale. You need to be subtle in the way you do this because you need to change your style of writing part way through your sales email.

Highlighting the problem is all about empathizing with the readers, but selling the product is all about creating urgency. Think about it as telling someone you know how they feel, closely followed by giving them a little bit of tough love.

Then you’ll see what this two-part process is all about.

Let the positivity of your product outshine the negativity

Always end with something positive. You don’t want to rephrase the negatives and frustrations that hooked the reader in the first place.

If you do, all that’ll happen is they’ll sit there despondent and unwilling to do anything tantamount to buying.

Create urgency right at the end, but do it in a way that makes the reader feel like there’s light at the end of the tunnel.

In school, you’re told to rip the band-aid off quickly so that you get a short sharp shock, after which point everything will be fine. What you’re offering is to take care of that for the customer, and all they have to do is part with a (perfectly sensible) amount of money to make it happen.

When you phrase it like that, it’s clear that you need to end with a positive. Just make sure it’s not so positive that it undoes all of the emotive work you’ve put in up to that point.

There’s no use in trivializing the problem at the end, just so you end with the reader in a sunny disposition. This will simply undermine all of your earlier pitch.

Final Thoughts

Controlling the emotions of your readers is vital if you want to be able to sell your products and services. Start by creating desire and need by highlighting something that you know your customers care about.

Then once you’ve created emotional buy-in, change tact and offer yourself as the provider of the solution.

Create urgency by saying that it’s only available for a limited time, and provide a simple one-click way for your customers to buy. If you can do all of that, then your email marketing efforts will ensure you see a noticeable upturn in sales sooner rather than later.