Writing great email content is by no means easy. After the brain-frying task of actually coming up with a topic, you still have to write.  Quality content is key to your marketing campaign and will determine whether readers spend more than a goldfish-sized attention span on your email or give it the time it’s really worth. To create great email content, try out these tips.

1. Tell a Story

We’re human. We love a good story. If you can capture your audience with a simple story in your email content, they’ll be more likely to open your emails and to keep reading past the first few words. Tell a story about your brand, about your product, or, better yet, about your customer.

2. Be Relevant

Keeping your content relevant seems like a no-brainer, but we all have inboxes filled with emails that don’t really apply to us. Target the exact audience who will buy your product, perform market research, and then create content that is relevant to their pain points and to their goals.

Create and Send Engaging Newsletters From Gmail

3. Be Concise

In the 21st century constant barrage of social media and email, few people have time or will take the time to read lengthy email content, no matter how fantastic it is. Choose your words carefully, and only say what needs to be said.

4. Include a Call to Action (CTA)

Let’s face it, you’re not spending all this time creating an email newsletter for people to read and stand in awe of your content creation skills. You want them to act on your content: read a blog post, subscribe to a podcast, or buy your product. Even in a newsletter with calls to action in every section, Ginny Soskey of Hubspot recommends highlighting a “head honcho CTA,” or one call to action that you want your readers to do even if they ignore all the other calls to action scattered throughout the newsletter.

5. Proofread and Edit

Yet another obvious tip, but one so easily forgotten, saving time to proofread and edit your content before you click send will bump you to the next level of marketing. Proofread for grammatical errors, and edit to make your content more readable. If you’re pressed for time, grab a coworker to be your second set of eyes.

6. Include an Image

Your readers like pictures, so humor them and throw in a good one or two to catch their attention. While stock photo subscriptions are nice to have, you don’t have to pay an arm and a leg for images. Plenty of websites offer free high-res images at no cost.

7. Use a Content Curation Tool

For those days when content creation is not your thing, consider using a content curation tool. FlashIssue offers just such a tool. Our content curation feature allows you to enter the URL to your blog or a keyword to search and then generates content for you based on your search. Simple as pie.