So much care goes into writing an email campaign that you can sometimes get “stuck” on the exact wording of parts of it. It’s almost like a weird form of writer’s block that affects you finalizing your email rather than writing it in the first place.

Likely you realize that sometimes it’s just one word that can completely change your entire campaign. Knowing this fact can sometimes totally paralyze you into never sending the email even though you’ve gone over it two dozen times.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve drafted up an email only to change one word before I sent it and realize the whole thing was wrong. At these times you have to make a decision whether to push through or start from scratch.

Connotation 

One important aspect of an email campaign is tone and feeling – you want to convey a certain “air” about your company when sending emails (or any message). For example, if your company is a financial institution, you may not want to come off as jokey or silly in your email. Similarly, an email campaign from a toy company probably doesn’t want to be overly serious.

Can one word totally change that? Sometimes it can. For instance you could be editing your email and change “bank” to “institution.” This makes you look at the rest of the email – is the rest of the email that informal? Should you make it more formal by changing up the wording?

This could then make you look at past email campaigns – were they formal enough? Have your email campaigns made customers feel like you aren’t taking their money seriously enough? This is how one word can change everything; it makes you take a look at everything you’ve done in the past.

Repetition 

Sometimes we get stuck on a word and it just won’t go away. You’ve fallen in love with the word “institution” for your financial company’s email campaign and made sure to put it everywhere. You think it makes the emails that much more believable and consistent.

However, that’s only true to a point. Repeated words can make your campaigns boring and unimaginative, so much so that even your biggest fans will stop reading them. Even if your information is useful and creative, repeated language can make it all seem like yesterday’s breakfast!

Usually it’s a good idea to limit repetition of less common words to three, maybe four times per email depending on length. This goes for even your most important buzzwords.

The Message 

Similar to connotation, sometimes one word can go completely against your message. If you’re not careful, you could completely undo everything you’ve accomplished up to that point.

Imagine you represent a company that prides itself on “family values.” One day you send out an email campaign that has a cussword in it, just sitting there in the middle like a festering boil. Everyone is going to see it and you know it’s going to turn your readers off, yet you hit “send” anyway.

It may not be that drastic, but one word can derail your entire PR campaign in no time flat. Try to approach all your writing like this – how does each individual word affect what I’m trying to say? Does it represent my brand as a whole? I guarantee it’ll increase the quality of your writing.

How much time do you spend editing your emails for a campaign?

This article is written by Mickie Kennedy, founder of eReleases (http://www.ereleases.com), the online leader in affordable press release distribution. Download your free copy of 8 Shocking Secrets Press Release Distribution Firms Don’t Want You to Know here: http://www.ereleases.com/landing3.html