15 Best practices to write effective marketing emails for chemical buyers

Marketing emails are powerful outbound tools to promote your educational content to a targeted audience. Although writing an email is within everyone's reach, you can easily and quickly fall into bad practices leading to unattractive subject lines, endless copy with unclear messages and weak call-to-actions.

At SpecialChem, we regularly send marketing emails to promote the content of chemical suppliers, to targeted engineers and formulators. Over the years, we have gathered best practices that will help you to ensure an optimal open and click through rate. Follow the guide.

How to write your subject line

The subject line is the first element that your recipients will read. This is what will influence them to open your email or not. Let’s see how you can make it compelling to encourage people to open it.

#1 - Feature the value and benefits

By showing the value of the content you are sharing right in the subject line, you increase your chances to raise the email recipient’s interest. What will they learn that could help them to solve their problems or do their job better? This is the #1 tip: trigger their interest.

#2 - Use figures, use quantitative data

Whenever you can, quantify the benefit of your product. X% or X times better than benchmark, Y% cost savings, etc.

Use that figure in the subject line to increase the open rate. It helps the recipients to picture what results they can reach while tickling their curiosity.

#3 - Keep it short, use 55 characters

This is the usual length that will be visible in your recipient’s email inbox. The rest will certainly be cut by Gmail or Outlook previews, resulting in an unfinished, vague, unclear or weak subject line.

For the same reason, always put your most important keywords at the beginning rather than the end. Put yourself in the shoes of your target customers.

#4 - Address recipients personally

Calling recipients by their first name in the subject line also boosts the open rate. By extension, this is also valid with pronouns like ‘you’ and possessive like ‘your’.

If your email is perceived as personal, you have a higher chance to be considered credible and valuable by recipients and not perceived as unsolicited email.

#5 - Start with an action-verb or ask a question

Make your subject line dynamic, compelling and attractive. Action-verbs are ideal to tease readers with your content and set them in motion.

You can also rely on short questions involving a positive answer or even use ‘how to’ sentences.

How to write your email copy

Once recipients open your email, your objective is to lead them to the call-to-action. Many people wrongly believe that once the email is opened, the job is done.

They throw everything they can in their email assuming recipients will carefully read it. But the truth is that openers don’t have the time to meticulously read your email.

Most of them will only scan it. Let see how you can optimize your email and even take advantages of this scan to guide the readers to your objective.

#6 - Follow a simple logical structure

As readers are scanning your email, you need to quickly draw their attention and involve them. They need to feel that the content you are sharing is relevant to their needs and will help them.

How?

Start by defining the problem you can help them to solve, through a question for example. Introduce your solution and its benefits for them or their customers.

Conclude with a teaser of your content and close with the call-to-action. Each paragraph must logically and naturally lead to the next.

#7 - Keep paragraphs short with a single idea

When you receive a very long email, chances are high that you will close it without reading a single word. The same goes for the recipients of your email.

Do your best to write the shortest text needed to convince readers to progress and remove the unnecessary text.

Keeping one idea per paragraph will help you to focus on the most important part of your message.

#8 - Focus on benefits, not performance

Marketing emails are not meant to describe everything about your product or introduce your entire portfolio.

These emails are about sharing relevant and valuable information that can help your targeted audience do their job better. Always keep that approach in mind when writing your copy.

#9 - Use bolded text

Highlighting the most important message in each of your paragraph is a good way to direct the focus of the readers.

You can also bold several pieces of text that when read one after the other form another sentence. This is the best trick to counterpart scan-reading.

#10 - Use a title to clarify the goal

In some cases, the email template includes a title. Use it in combination with the subject line to strengthen your message and move your reader to click on the call-to-action.

#11 - Get personal, write in the second person

Like your subject line, being personal make your message stronger. Readers feel involved as you are directly talking to them.

You can use their first name, “you” and “your”, and personalization fields such as company name, job positions or others.

However, try to find a good balance when sharing personal information, you certainly don’t want to look creepy to them. This is the big brother syndrome.

#12 - Align your subject line and email copy

There is nothing more disappointing than expecting something and receiving something completely different.

Please.

Make sure that your email content is aligned with what you teased in the subject line.

How to write your call-to-action

The call-to-action is the button or hyperlinked text located at the end of your marketing email. This is the link that readers need to click to access the content you are promoting.

This is the last step to your email objective. And the most important objective as you will certainly agree. Let’s see how you can optimize it to encourage readers to click instead of abandoning and deleting your email.

#13 - Clarify what is coming next

When reading the call to action, your prospects must get a clear idea of what will happen next.

Make sure they see the answers to these questions:

• What type of content will I be redirected to?
• What efforts will I have to take to access the content?
• Am I going to have to fill in a long form?

#14 - Use only one call-to-action

Multiple call-to-actions or hyperlinked text won’t generate more clicks. In fact, it is quite the opposite.

If your objective is to promote a specific document, linking additional resources will only lose the readers on what they are supposed to do.

Keep them focused on the document that you are promoting.

Don’t distract them. If you face a difficult time choosing the one document to offer, you certainly need to revisit your objective and review your target segment.

#15 - Use an action-verb

A call to action must always include, wait for it…, an action!

Always start with a verb. It creates motion, it’s dynamic.

One effective way to phrase your call-to-action is to use “I want to YOUR_CALL_TO_ACTION”. I want to “See the comparative data”, “Download the guidelines” or “Read the case study” are good examples on how to use it.

Bad and good examples of marketing emails

Even if the theory seems clear, it is sometimes a bit more difficult when practicing. Let's have a look look at 2 examples of marketing emails to get you started.

All the below examples have been anonymized and modified to better reflect the usual bad practices we face in our clients' emails.

Bad email version