Email marketing is alive and well with US marketers spending over $350 million dollars in 2019. However, not all email advertising is effective. Marketing that blasts consumers with sales messages without understanding their needs falls flat. Email is meant to build relationships and facilitate conversation, then sell to potential customers. To succeed at this, you need to design your marketing emails to be more conversational.

Change Your Call-to-Action

When your friend sends you an email, their goal is for you to hit the reply button. When marketers send an email, their goal is for you to click a link, download free content, or purchase a product. Creating more conversational emails requires you to change your CTA. Ask your audience to “reply with your thoughts” or “tell me about [current problem].” You can still include links that are valuable, but the primary goal for your email marketing is audience response rate.

Use Open-Ended Questions

Open-ended questions are great conversation starters. They encourage long-form answers instead of a simple yes or no response. These questions can help you qualify leads, understand your ideal customer’s pain points, and build a relationship with your audience.

If receiving hundreds of email replies seems like a marketing tactic that can’t scale, you’re not wrong. Managing a messy inbox with high volumes is difficult on your own. However, there are AI email response tools built to simplify the task. These tools make conversational marketing through email scalable once you learn how to use them.

Focus on Your Audience

Great conversational copy uses the second-person voice. This means your email copy should have more “you” statements than “I” or “we” statements. After all, your audience is more interested in themselves than they are in your product, service, or company. Like all marketing, your emails should focus on the benefits of the solution you offer to your audience.

Conversational email only works if you know who you are trying to start a conversation with. Before writing your email, understand the person you are writing to, what their interests are, how old they are, even imagine their favorite foods or music. This will help create a narrower message that can increase the response rate. If you aren’t already, you should use list segmentation to create targeted audiences for each of your marketing emails.

Email marketing has always been a great tool to grow your business. However, your email strategy needs to adapt to continue to engage your audience and convert them into customers. Using conversational email supported by AI technology is the next phase of email marketing.