How to Learn Email Copywriting in 5 EASY Steps

Are you trying to figure out how to learn email copywriting?

Email marketing is still one of the best ways to drive more revenue to your business. But only a small percentages of small businesses find success with this sales channel.

Why? Because email copywriting can be tough to master – especially when you’re pressed for time, energy, and resources.

That’s why, in today’s post, I’ll teach you 5 steps to improve your email copywriting FAST.

Ready to get started? Let’s dive straight into our tips.

How to Learn Email Copywriting

1) Save Emails That Sold Something to YOU

One of the best ways to get better at copywriting is to start a file of the copy that YOU love. That means going through your emails and seeing what marketing messages resonated with you.

The goal is to compile a list of the successful messages you’ve seen and start a “swipe file.” This is a consolidated file (usually an Excel spreadsheet) of the types of email copy you found powerful. That could include:

• Subject lines
• Preview text
• Calls to action
• “Hooks”
• Post-script sections (P.S.)

Or anything else about the body of the email that you found persuasive. Here’s what it would look like if you were pulling out subject lines you like:

As time goes on, you can use your swipe file to stop struggling with the blank page and write more profitable emails in less time.

Note: Swipe files are a common strategy for professional copywriters. But what you don’t know is that most copywriters (even the pro’s) don’t actually take the time to make and use one. By starting your file early on in your career, you’ll have a huge advantage over your competitors.

2) Learn How Customers Talk About Your Product

If you want to be good at copywriting for emails, then you don’t just need to know what you audience thinks about your product. You also have to know how they speak about your product.

And for that, you’ll need to roll up your sleeves and do some audience research. Fortunately, this is fairly easy.

The best way to learn how your audience is talking about your business is by reading online reviews. You can search on places like Google My Business, Yelp, Amazon, and other 3rd-party review sites.

If you don’t have a bunch of reviews to look through yet, that’s not a problem. You can simply check out how people are speaking about your competitor’s products/services. The goal is to identify the language that’s used for both the pain-points felt by your audience and how they feel once that problem is solved.

I personally like to make a spreadsheet with two columns:

• Good Descriptors: how people talk about the good parts of the product/service
• Bad Descriptors: how people talk about the bad parts of the products/service

From there, you have a couple of options.

First, you can manually sift through the reviews and pull out the best words/phrases your target audience uses. While you should definitely read every single review, manually plucking out themes can be exhausting and time-consuming.

That’s why I recommend a second strategy: building a word cloud.

You can copy and paste reviews into an Excel spreadsheet. Then with a free tool like MonkeyLearn, you can create a word cloud around all the reviews you collect:

This will help you quickly pull out common themes and phrases that appear in customer reviews (and, for the record, this is one email copywriting tip I haven’t seen elsewhere).

Pro-Tip: Focus on reviews with either 2, 3, or 4-star reviews. That’s because reviews with 1 star are too negatively biased, and reviews with 5 stars are too positively biased.

3) Write Emails in Reverse Order

I’ve known a lot of copywriters who approach emails in the order they write them. That means they write in the following order:

• Subject line
• Preview text
• Hook
• Body
• CTA
• P.S. section

Personally, I think you should approach them in this order:

• Body
• CTA
• P.S. section
• Hook
• Subject line
• Preview text

Why? Because you should save the most important piece for after you’ve gotten clarity on the email’s content.

Here are the advantages of writing email copy in the order listed above:

• Body: Gets you clear on exactly what you want to say.
• CTA: Positions your offer.
• P.S. section: Ties up the email, usually with a second CTA.
• Hook: Now that you know what the email is actually about, the “hook” usually comes up organically (while drafting the “body” section of your email).
• Subject line: Becomes MUCH more interesting once you have your hook.
• Preview text: An extension of the subject line that boosts open rates

The key here is to save your subject lines for last.

The subject line is hands down the most important part of your email, but it’s often written first. But remember, the best copy on the planet won’t do anything for you if no one reads it.

So make sure you know exactly what you want to say in your emails. Then use that knowledge to create a great “hook” to open that email.

And from there, you should be able to craft an email subject line that ties into your hook to increase your open rate.

Pro-tip: Make sure you A/B test your subject lines! For every email I write, I have the following categories of subject line options:

• Dry
• Fun
• Punchy
• BoB (breakthrough or bust)

I’ll typically test “Dry” and “Fun” or “Fun” and “Punchy” with new clients. Then, for people who didn’t open anything, I’ll resend the email with a BoB subject line (“BoB” is where you push the limits of your brand’s voice to really encourage engagement).

4) Add Multiple Links to the Same Call to Action

This is a tricky one and, frankly, is something that I see a lot of disagreement with.

So here’s the question: how many CTA’s should an email have?

In my opinion, it really depends on the type of email you’re sending:

• Monthly newsletters: Include multiple CTA’s for various pieces of published content, digital event registration forms, user surveys, etc.
• All other emails: Include a single CTA.

Monthly newsletters are interesting because they’re really designed to increase engagement with your brand. For that reason, it’s OK to give your audience a lot of different options to engage.

But for every other type of email, you should have a single CTA repeated multiple times throughout the emails.

For shorter emails, you might have the same CTA appear 1-2 times: once in the body and (maybe) once in the PS section.

For longer emails, you’ll likely have the same CTA appear 3-4 times throughout the body. This is important because many people “skim” emails and will only click on one of your links:

Once you add the same CTA in various places throughout, you can expect to see higher click-through rates.

You might get a comment or two asking why all the links go to the same landing page, but this is rare. When I was sending weekly emails to 80,000 subscribers, we only got a handful of these responses (but LOTS more conversions).

5) Test, Track, & Tweak Everything (Based on Reliable Data)

This last tip is something that I cover for EVERY aspect of copywriting. The formula is simple:

• Test a campaign
• Track the results
• Tweak the original campaign
• Repeat until your copy is optimized

If you can consistently complete each of these four steps, then you’ll have a huge advantage as you’re improving email copy.

Why is this so important? Because otherwise you’re just taking guesses with how effective your copy is. 

One of the biggest mistakes copywriters (even professionals) is that they judge the success of their copy base on personal preference.

In other words, if they like it, it’s “good.” If they don’t like it, it’s “bad.”

But “personal preference” is about the worst metric you can use to judge your email copy. Instead, set concrete KPIs in terms of:

• Opens
• Clicks
• Conversions

Once you have a baseline goal (like, “I want 22% opens from this email campaign,” for example), then you can determine if your copy is on the right track. The closer you get toward your goal, the more your messaging resonated with your target audience.

And the further you are from your goal, the less effective your messaging is.

With all that data in your corner, you should be able to optimize your email copy over time and start to get a “feeling” about the best voice for your company.

That’s all for today! I hope you enjoyed this post on how to learn email copywriting. If you’re looking for more resources, you should definitely check out the following:

• 9 Lead Generation Copy Tips to Convert
• Become an Ecommerce Email Copywriter That (Actually) Sells
• Breaking into Copywriting: 7 Tips to Get You Started

These articles will have even more resources that you can use to improve your copy, boost conversions, and watch more leads pour into your funnel.