![]() Here at Copel Communications, we’re tasked with writing tons of email campaigns for our clients. They keep coming back for more—evidence that they’re profiting off of the endeavor. These emails (to prospects and former customers, for example) lead to replies, calls, meetings, and sales. What’s not to love? So how do we go from all this goodness to the “Abuse yourself” verbiage in this article’s title? Hint: It might’ve been better to phrase it as “Disabuse yourself.” But we’re getting ahead of things. Who are you emailing to? Our religion here at Copel Communications—and one we’re not shy about proselytizing—is taking a customer-back approach to all we do. We don’t simply “get assignments” from our clients. We probe the heck out of them first. We want to know what their customers are going through: wants, needs, what’s keeping them up at night, and all that. Once you know that, you can “work backward” from the customer’s problem to how you present your own (or in our case, our client’s) solution. For the scope of this article, we can’t dive into all the specifics of our different clients, what they offer, and who they’re offering them to. But suffice to say, our clients are all toiling in the higher-end B2B space, with consultancy-style offerings generally targeted to business leaders such as execs or the C-suite. These audiences are incredibly time-constrained. You think they sit down to read the emails that we’re tasked to write for them? You think they look forward to this? Do you think they regard them as anything other than spam? So disabuse yourself. No matter how valuable you think your email offering is—and it may well be incredibly valuable—your target audience will see it as junk mail. Simple as that. Which begs a simple question: How do you un-junk-ify it? The stakes here are high. If a lot of your recipients flag your emails as “spam,” their ISP can flag you as a “known spammer.” In which case, even your non-spamming, business-critical emails will get sent straight to your recipients’ spam folders. Yes, we’re talking clients. Imagine that: You send a routine email to a client. They don’t respond. You email again. They don’t respond. You pick up the phone. They then discover that all your emails were automatically routed to their spam-box. We’re not making this up. This has happened to businesses we know, when they weren’t careful. So be careful. In other words, make your emails “less spammy.” So how do you do that? Yeah. How do you do that? Well, if you’re trying to get the attention of a time-constrained executive, do it properly. Respect their time. That means: “Keep it short.” It means: “Don’t beat around the bush; get to the point quickly.” Speak their language. That means: “Don’t be cute. Don’t be hard sell. AVOID ALL CAPS. And resist that temptation—and it’s tempting!!—to use lots of exclamation points!! In other words, if your email to this executive looks a lot like his or her routine business correspondence, it won’t get flagged as spam. They might not read it right away, but they won’t lump it in the same category of emails for fake Viagra. Some made-up sample verbiage: Dear [First name], A recent survey of logistics executives revealed that their two most pressing strategic priorities are automation and improving customer experience or CX. You might be surprised to learn that a single solution can address both of these challenges at the same time, with remote implementation possible in a matter of weeks. As we said, we made up everything in that passage above. But it’s still illustrative. Ask yourself: Does that read like spam? No. Of course not. It reads like a business correspondence. But you can see—and that targeted exec can sure see—that it’s building toward a hook, a teaser, a sales pitch. But it’s doing it nicely. Politely. Professionally. Respectfully. And thus it skates past all the ISPs. What about the abuse part? Glad you asked. We recently worked on an email campaign for a client that wanted to tease, over a span of weeks, a huge new initiative they were launching. Spoiler alert: It was a re-branding campaign, because the company itself was pivoting in terms of what it chose to focus on, and the subset of businesses it would target. Now you know the answer, the “big reveal.” But our audience didn’t. Our job was to get them interested in what was brewing for this company. The audience, incidentally, was comprised of current and former customers of this business, as well as some very well-placed targets (read: “potentially very lucrative accounts”). We came to this assignment armed with the information about where the business started. We knew about the owner’s epiphany, in which they realized they wanted to chart a new course, and why. We knew all of the wonderful things about this to-be-launched company (largely because we also wrote the copy for the new website that was soon to be revealed). We knew how those potentially very lucrative accounts could benefit. So. How do you stretch this out over a period of weeks? And what on earth has this got to do with self-abuse? Storytelling Given the information we had, we knew we had to inject a decent amount of storytelling into it. No one wants to receive a bullet-list of changes to an upcoming business. But everyone wants to hear a story. And we had the makings of a good one here: The prior business. The owner’s epiphany. The problems which the targets are facing (remember: “customer-back”). The hint of something big coming soon. While we could write that as one huge narrative, that’s not what the assignment called for. Remember it needed to be strung out over the course of several weeks. There were about a half-dozen installments in this campaign; each recipient would get them all, in order. Now we get to the self-abuse part. Email 1 was easy to write. It set up the story, set the tone, and ended on a cliffhanger for the upcoming Email 2. It got progressively harder from there. Here’s why. Despite our delightful storytelling chops, we knew that there’s no way on earth that any recipient on that list would remember the contents of Email 1 by the time they received Email 2. And so on down the line. It’s true for us. It’s true for you. It’s true for any business that’s doing direct response (read: “spam”) emailing. Beat yourself up when it comes to gauging just how much your recipients will recall, retain, or even grasp in the first place, when it comes to that email you send them, which they will undoubtedly skim in a distracted hurry. There’s probably a mathematical equation for this, but since we’re not numbers heads here, we’ll describe for you the way this went: The overall narrative was not evenly carved into six installments. Rather, each subsequent installment contained less information than the one before it. Why? Simple: We needed to open each email with a recap of “the story thus far” before proceeding into the new material, and since each subsequent email necessarily required a bigger recap at the beginning, there was less room at the end to reveal new information. This is due to the simple fact that the reader is time-constrained; the emails couldn’t get longer with each installment. So it was a way of compensating to keep them all about the same length. And yes, this was baked into the strategy when we set out to write them all. Note that each recap had to be a fun, exciting read unto itself. Easier said than done—especially when you’re, say, at Email 5. Anyway. The campaign was a success. It all led up to a big live-reveal event, and the attendance numbers were based in large part on the success of the email campaign. Attendance was strong; the event went over well; and we considered ourselves properly self-abused, given the turnout. Get help Most consultancies do not have the time to delve into the tactical considerations of what we described above. And the results—or lack thereof—show up in the response (or lack thereof) to the emails that they do create. In other words, offload this work. To us! Contact us today for a no-obligation initial consultation. We’d love to boost your response, and your sales.
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![]() Here at Copel Communications, we create a lot of content for our clients. Videos. Blogs. Case studies. You name it. Most of this ends up on their websites (as well as other places). So while this may seem like “the water’s edge” in the content-creation biz, we do often get insights from our clients' website and email traffic reports. It helps us raise our game, and continually improve, as we see what works, and what doesn’t work as well. In this article, we’ll share some info we’ve seen from some of our clients, in order to help you profit from it. Naturally, we’re going to anonymize everything we discuss, but you’ll easily detect the patterns in the noise. An SEO caveat Before we dive into these weeds, we’d like to be nice and clear: Here at Copel Communications, we are not SEO experts. We doff our hats to those who are; indeed, we often work shoulder-to-shoulder with our clients’ SEO teams. That said, we specialize in the human side of the equation. We can’t tell you if Google will rank a certain paragraph higher than another, but we can easily discern whether or not it engages the reader, and compels them to, oh, make a purchase decision. So. We were screen-sharing with a client of ours recently, and they dove into their website analytics dashboards for us. What we saw was very interesting. All you need to know about this client of ours is that they toil in the high-tech B2B space. And they blast out a lot of content (which we help create), extolling their virtues and showcasing their ongoing successes. In any good website dashboard, you’ll be able to sort visitors by the platform they use to visit your site. In other words, “mobile vs. desktop.” Now, in this day and age, everyone’s gone mobile, right? If you judged only by the volume of Verizon and AT&T ads on TV, you’d assume that cords, and big computer screens, have all gone the way of the buggy whip. Well guess what we saw when this client clicked the tab? Turns out that 90 percent of their visitors were on desktop machines. It wasn’t even close. Ninety percent. Think about that. It tells you a couple of very important things:
This one data-point alone dictates a ton of strategic and tactical considerations for our client:
If you haven’t checked this one little point of info in your own website dashboard recently, it’s time you should. Globe hopping Here’s something else we discovered with this client: The majority of visitors, not surprisingly, came from the U.S. But quite surprisingly, these Americans accounted for only 44 percent of all visitors! Granted, our client does provide global offerings, but they are definitely U.S.-centric. Fortunately, the number-two country for visitors, clocking in at an impressive 27 percent, was the UK. It wasn’t enough for us to change all the spelling on the site to the Queen’s English, but still. Incidentally, drilling down to the top cities of visitors yielded London as number one, and New York as number four. Very interesting. Dwell time Here was another interesting insight. One particular blog article which we created for this client was consistently at the top of the hits. That’s fine; perhaps it simply has some good keywords in it. But no. It was more than that. Much more. Whereas most pages would be visited for one minute, this blog entry held readers for seven minutes. That means they read every single word of it. That’s huge. This helps to dictate other good (read: “similar”) topics for future blogs. It also provides indisputable data on how much time an interested reader will spend on valuable content. Nights and weekends Last bit of data porn from this deep dive: Traffic on the site would spike early in the week… and then again on Saturday nights. WTF? Turns out that this company (our client) sends out weekly emails (yep, we help with those, too), which go out early in the week. So, many recipients click on those emails’ links when they get them; thus the early-week traffic spike. But the website dashboard revealed a subtler, more interesting pattern. Many of the targeted email recipients are busy executives. Know what this means? It means that they get the emails from this company, early in the week. They don’t open them. They don’t delete them. They don’t mark them as spam. Rather, they save them for later reading, you guessed it, on the weekends. That’s how time-constrained these targets are. Knowing that helps us to craft focused content. It’s also reassuring to know that these people consider our materials “worth the wait,” too. Good content works The takeaway here is that diving into your dashboard data will provide actionable insights and feedback. This is clearly a link-in-the-chain scenario: If, for example, the materials we provided this client sucked, then all the numbers would tank, too. That’s clearly not the case here. We’ve helped this client. And we can help you, too. Simply contact us today to get started. |
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