When it comes to your messaging, the most important factor is audience-offer-messaging fit.

You need to talk in a language your audience understands and loves, and make sure your messaging and offer are actually aligned.

It’s definitely not rocket science. You don’t need any black hat dark arts stuff. You just need to get into your audience’s world, talk to them about their problems and show them a solution to it. That’s really all it comes down to. Learn the exact wording they use themselves to describe the problem you’re solving. Find out what words they respond to. Read niche newsletters, check the titles of relevant Amazon bestsellers, and read as many reviews as you can. Then use the phrases you picked up in your messages. Take note of your audience’s exact wording word for word.

After all, the most important factor when it comes to copy is accuracy. It doesn’t have to be clever or beautiful, or funny, or long, or short, or whatever. As long as it’s accurate you’re hitting the bullseye with your messaging. Imagine, for example, that instead of sending a generic message to lawyers, you send one that mentions “roller coaster income”, a problem and phrase many lawyers know all too well.

As long as you’re in their world, you’re safe. You can’t bore them. You can’t make them not interested, as long as you talk about what is interesting to them.

That second point about offer-messaging fit is even simpler. In a campaign we were running for a client we talked about saving big money in the subject line. But the offer was actually a (cheap) tool that helped users clean up a famously confusing aspect required to manage a specific kind of infrastructure.

Now we didn’t make up the part about saving money. The client’s main offer indeed was a service that helped users reduce their bills from the infrastructure provider big time. But that wasn’t what we pitching in the email.

So there was clearly a mismatch. And unsurprisingly it showed in the numbers. Open rate was great, results were not. Once we aligned our messaging with the offer, people started replying and eventually buying.

That’s really it.

If you make sure you have audience-offer-messaging fit and find a way tie it into a call to action at the end of the message, you will be fine.