Automation stirs in some that common, illogical fear that robots are taking over human jobs. We know that’s just not true. A robotic tone of voice in email campaigns will never cut the cake, although this seems to be hard for a lot of marketers to grasp.
Just because your emails are going out left right and centre without any on the spot prompting from you, doesn’t mean you shouldn’t bother putting the effort in. If you want your subscribers to engage with your emails, you need to oil up your cogs and get that robotic clang out of your system.
Write emails to the individuals, not to the masses
Before the actual content of the email itself, it’s important to remember that how personal your email is will immediately determine how mechanical you sound. You want to make sure, first off, that you’ve segmented your data as narrowly as possible. Look at what data you have and compare individuals – you want to make your email lists as targeted as possible.
Create email campaigns for any buyer’s journey
Next, you should study your buyer journey and lifecycle, then create email campaigns that cover every single inch of them. The amount of segments you have, as well as how many contacts you have access to, should determine exactly how thorough you should be. You want a campaign for absolutely any point in the cycle.
It might not sound like this would affect your email voice, but it all has to do with how individual your emails are. Creating only four campaigns for four separate sections of your buyer journey, as opposed to creating a marketing workflow that covers eight or twelve sections, will cover a lot less ground. The more your email is targeted toward a particular audience, the more personal it’s going to sound.
Make your email tone of voice…human.
If you want to avoid the impression that you’re a company run by machines, the main body of your email needs to sound like a one to one conversation. That is, after all, what email was created for. To communicate with one another.
The biggest thing to avoid? The clichés of professional writing. This includes unnecessarily complicated language, and especially the use of uncommon or unexplained acronyms and abbreviations.
Not only will these make your email hard to read, it’ll make you sound as though you’re carrying around an overinflated ego. You know that friend that uses fancy words and waits for someone to ask “What does that mean?” before responding “Oh. You don’t know? I thought everyone knew what that meant.” Yeah. That’s the impression you’ll make.
Make things easier for yourself – and your audience – and just write the way you speak. Be friendly, and keep the focus of your emails on helping your contact rather than helping your bank account. If you do use any lingo that might not be understood, just introduce it before you abbreviate.
For example, type “Customer Relationship Management (CRM)” the first time it appears in the copy, then just “CRM” ever after. It’s easy to be accommodating for other people and not make them feel like idiots.
In summary, following a template will make you sound like a robot. Be fluid, and write with feeling rather than rigidly believing “This is how it’s always been, this is how I’m going to keep at it.” If your email tone of voice isn’t working for you, it’s your choice whether you change it – but over time that robot clang is going to drown out the quality of your email marketing.
