14 writing tips - how to write like a pro on the web and in newsletters

How should you write and formulate yourself to keep your website attractive and relevant? In this article, we take a look at just that. Here you get a lot of tips on how to become a professional at writing for the web. 1. Start with the most important  You only have a few seconds to capture the attention of your readers and you compete with thousands of other websites, blogs and posts.   When we read on the web, few of us read from beginning to the end. Common to us all - after just a few seconds we decide whether to stay on the site or not. Therefore, you should say the most important first. And you need to be relevant and clear.   A good website has short introductory texts for those who quickly want to find the most important information. Further down in the structure, it’s okay to have more detailed information for readers who want to delve deeper and know it all. Here you can add brochures, instructions and descriptions of various kinds. 2. Be concise  It’s more difficult to write short than to write long. Therefore, it’s easy for a novice to write both too long and too detailed. Feel free to clear the text in several rounds before you publish it. Think about which paragraphs, sentences or words you can delete. Delete everything that is unnecessary. Three rules:   The text should be at most 1500 characters including spaces The most important thing should be visible on the screen without the reader having to scroll A web text should be about half as short as text to be printed on paper   3. Get to know your target audience Before you start writing, decide once and for all which target group or groups you are writing for. Is it for potential customers or for existing ones? Hopefully you choose to write for both. Find out what your prospects and old customers want and need to know. And deliver that.  Potential customers want to read about what you have to offer and what sets you apart from your competitors. They want to know if your product or service is affordable, if you know your stuff and if you are serious, experienced and nice to deal with. You should try to keep existing customers at all costs. It’s expensive and time consuming to get new ones. Give them a reason to look at your website from time to time or to read your newsletter.  Also think about what perspective you are writing from? Is it from yourself and what you are passionate about or from the perspective of your readers? It’s easy to start from oneself and tell, for example, everything that has happened in the company since the start from an inside perspective. Instead, make sure your texts have an outside perspective. Tell your web visitors interesting news and highlight various offers. Share what you can in the area that interests your customers.   4. The headlines - among the most important on your site Put as much energy into thinking about the headlines as you do into designing the website. The impatient web reader needs the support of clear headlines and keywords to orient themselves. Keep in mind that the headlines should attract clicks. Above all, the headings must be clear. Also think about which keywords that may interest your readers and put them early in the headline. Your headlines also affects how your site ranks in the search engines, especially on Google. It’s not enough that important keywords are in the body text. The result will be better if the keyword or search phrase is in the title. Google has tools to help you choose and evaluate keywords, search phrases and headlines.   5. The preamble attracts further reading  Almost all texts need an initial summary, except for very short texts. The preface gives the reader a chance to understand what the page is about. If it’s well written, it attracts further reading.   6. Informative intermediate headings facilitate reading on the web  The intermediate headings highlight important information and, like the introduction and the main headline, attract further reading. They also make it easier for the reader to find the right information. Think about what function the middle heading should have and who’s interested in what’s in it. If you don’t find something in the text that serves as a subheading, it’s time to think about the content of the text. The reader expects to find information about what’s in the subheading under the current subheading, not elsewhere.   7. Gather the most important information in fact boxes or bullet lists Feel free to gather important information or break down long listings in fact boxes. It gives the reader a quick overview. You also relieve the body text by freeing it from long and cumbersome enumerations. Fact boxes and bullet lists attract reading Feel free to number the bullet list Don’t make the bullet list too long    9. Bold style, cursive or underline? If you want to highlight particularly important information, it’s best to use bold style. Avoid cursive style and underlining. The bold style helps your readers to orient themselves in the text and to find the right information. You can use bold style in the body text even though you have intermediate headings in the same style.  Use bold style only to highlight important information.   10. Capital letters?  Contrary to many people's beliefs, the capital letters make the text difficult to read.  Capital letters may be okay in headings and possibly in intermediate headings, but in a body text it’s best to avoid them. They tend to tire out your readers.   11. If it's easy, it's the way to go The main purpose of writing is to be read and understood. Therefore, skip difficult words, clauses and long, complicated sentences. If you can choose between an easy and a difficult word - choose the light. If you must include technical terms - then try to explain what they stand for in a comprehensible way that even non-professionals can understand.   12. When you have finished writing  Once you have removed unnecessary words and sentences, and corrected spelling, grammatical and spelling errors, it's time to: Read the text loud to yourself. Then you will notice if the text flows in a good way. Use the spelling program. But remember that you can never trust it 100 percent. Let the text rest for a day or two. It gives you distance, which makes it easier to discover more things that need to be corrected. Have someone else read your text and ask for help with proofreading.   13. Make use of journalistic tricks and methods To increase credibility and create interest, you can use the grip of journalists. Build your text around one or more interviewees who speak out. You use the quotes to support your story and to take it forward. Also refer to surveys, statistics, research, reports and other things that support your story. Bring with you these questions when you’re about to write: When?                              When did it happen? When will it happen? When should it be fixed? Where?                             Where did it happen? Where will it happen? How?                                 How did it happen? How could that happen? What are you going to do now? Why?                                 Why did it happen? Why did it not happen? Why do/did you not do anything?  What?                                What happened? What has happened? What will happen?   14. Remember - when you write texts for your newsletters, the same rules apply as for other web texts.  

How to Build Your Email List

Email marketing offers an excellent impact for minimal effort. However, it all depends on the quality and size of your email list. How do you ensure its relevancy and help it grow?

6 Reasons Why Customers Are Ignoring Your Emails & How to Change Their Mind

Despite your best efforts, sometimes it seems like no matter how often you send an email, your customers are completely ignoring you. They seem to just scroll past your message or even worse, hit delete. Marketers cannot afford to have their emails ignored, since emails drive a majority of the revenue for e-commerce companies. If your email metrics are suffering, it’s time for a revamp. Here are six reasons why your customers are ignoring your emails and what to do about it.

Best Practices for Successful Email Marketing Campaigns

Are you new to email marketing? Or do you know you’ve got a powerful tool with it if only you could use it better? If so, this article is for you. We focus on 10email marketing best practices all businesses should follow if they want to maximise their marketing bang. Let’s start with the five most basic email marketing best practices which you should master first:  Know your audience, build that list Contrary to popular opinion, email marketing isn’t about whacking out the greatest number of emails to the greatest number of people. This isn’t a numbers game. This is even more important now we’re in the realm of GDPR (more on that in a moment).  When it comes to email marketing, you should always think quality over quantity. Therefore, profile your audience and work to build a list which is powerful, not simply vastly populated. This means build your own list, don’t buy one. Do this by actively encouraging visitors to your website and social media to sign-up. This way engagement will be higher. Use personalisation If you’ve taken the time to build a top-notch customer list, then you need to use the tech available to you to really target each person as an individual. This means, as a basic rule, doing things like getting the individual’s name into the subject line or salutation. However, it goes much further than this. It’s also about thinking carefully about purchase history and their browsing behaviour. It’s about understanding what makes them tick and feeding into this.  Do this by sending out emails that are personalised based on information you gather.  Never forget a call to action (CTA) Email marketing is all about enticing the customer in. However, what you reallyneed is for them to act. Don’t miss a trick by failing to make this easy for them. The CTA is a critical part of the email, so spend some time structuring it carefully. All the content of the email should be leading to this one moment. Do this by making clear, simple, easily actionable CTA’s. Make it meaningful. Manage the opt-in For 2018, we’re putting this best practice right with the basics because of the impact of the GDPR. Find out more about this here. No sneaky way of getting and using email addresses. It’s not just illegal thanks to the GDPR, it’s not a good practice and won’t deliver the best bang for your buck. You want genuine opt-in because these are most likely to become conversions. For email marketing best practice to go one step further: be brutally honest with yourself. Have you made opt-in in such a way that truthfully these people are only giving you their permission for a freebie they get once and job over? If so, that’s engagement over.  Do this by always seeking permission for exactly what you want. That way you’re not wasting energy, effort or resources. Make it visual Your email will be one of a bunch received in one day. Therefore, if you get over the first hurdle of it being opened, you need to capitalise on that achievement. You do this by making your readers actively want to delve into your newsletter with varied content, excellent graphics and interesting stuff. Furthermore, this needs to be doing some hard work on your branding for you. It should clearly reflect who you are and what you’re about.  Do this by using customisable email newsletter templates. Following these email marketing best practices should get you targeting the right people in the right way. You’re on your way. However, what if you want to go a step further and really reach for the email marketing stars?  Here are five more email marketing best practices you should now consider: Test, test and test again, then measure You’re not going to get things right first time, every time. So build this into how you structure email campaigns. Start off withA/B testing each element of an email from start to finish. Run one test at a time, discover what works, then move on. Then, get measuring. In real terms, what works and work doesn’t? You’re not going to know how successful you are, or importantly, how you can improve if you don’t measure your engagement. Do this by completing A/B testing on all new campaigns and measuring the metrics such as click-throughs. Segment Never take a one-size-fits-all approach to email marketing (see ‘personalisation’ above). Your secret weapon here is segmentation. This is how you ensure that you’re sending the right email to the right person and not simply spamming them with a generic message which will end up…you guessed it…in their spam folder, bin or even worse – they click unsubscribe. Engagement will be considerably higher if you take a good look at the individual in terms of various parameters such as their demographics, purchase behaviour, location and past engagement into account. Do this by choosing email marketing software, such as Postman, which enables you to segment email lists easily. Give something Never go into an email campaign thinking solely about what you want to gain without thinking about what you’re prepared to give. Therefore, tone down the promotion and turn up the volume on the value you’re offering. For example, offer them something they want before you expect them to give something to you. Think of your emails as primarily being for the purpose of building relationships. This will be the springboard to engagement. Do this by offering things such as discount codes occasionally or valuable information in the form of a link to a useful article or ‘how to’ guide. Keep it clean Yes, people may have opted-in but have they proved valuable? If not, why are they still on your list? You won’t be doing yourself any favours by heading off to be ignored again. This also isn’t good when it comes to algorithms in email providers who will learn to automatically flag you as ‘graymail’ or spam. Not a good place to be. Remember you want quality over quantity when it comes to who you are sending your emails to by heading to the inboxes of those who actually open your mail. Do this by taking time to clean up your list from time to time. Remove the unengaged or move them over into a specific re-engagement segment. Don’t let it gather dust It’s easy to leave your email campaigns to simply run with nothing more than the occasional nod to fresh content. This is poor form and bad practice and it harms your business. Your email campaign should always be driven by your own active interest. Revisit your approach, keep testing, keep reviewing your lists, come up with fresh ideas, chop and change things around. Do this by scheduling in periodic reviews of your email marketing strategy.  Email marketing best practice is considerably easier if you have the right tools for the job. Use email newsletter templates to help you with the legwork, backed up by integrated functions such as testing and engagement metrics.      

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