“Patch” can mean a lot of things. Patch of grass. Soul patch. Patch cord. Bald patch. We could go on. 
 
Here, though, we’re talking about marketing and advertising. And the idea of a patch—which we’ll define in detail in just a minute—is an oldie but goodie you may have overlooked. It’s so simple and so obvious that it’s easy to take for granted, and thus miss. 
 
Let us explain by way of the true client story that sparked this article. 
 
We recently were helping a client to create a promotional package for a speaker’s bureau, to get them booked at lots of different live engagements targeting their specialized audience. And we needed to flesh out this package with a “sizzle reel” of their past live engagements: 
 
Video clips. 
 
Now this client had been on stage a lot. That’s the good news. The bad news is that there was precious little video to document it. We needed every shot, heck, every frame we could get our hands on. 
 
And then we found it. What looked like a veritable little silver mine. It was a short clip, but boy was it juicy. It showed our client on stage, in front of a big crowd, delivering some real rousing zingers. It was great! 
 
But this silver mine was tarnished. 
 
First, it wasn’t created by our client. It was created by someone else who had either organized that event or maybe was in the audience. We found it on YouTube. 
 
This created Challenge 1: Find that person and ask/beg/plead/cajole/bargain for permission to use/edit/re-purpose it. 
 
This turned out to be surprisingly easy. A quick Googling led us to the poster’s website, and thus to their email address, and they were delightfully generous, to the point of even directing us toward a higher-resolution version of the video clip. Now isn’t that nice? 
 
But then there’s Challenge 2. That video was stamped. Right across the lower third, it read “[Speaker Name] of ABC Company, Speaking at XYZ Event 2019.” 
 
Oh no! The “[Speaker Name]” was correct; that was our client. But “ABC Company” no longer existed; the client had since changed the name, after, um, 2019, which made this clip look positively ancient. 
 
Naturally—since of course you’re thinking of this—we’d asked the original poster of the video (the one who’d granted us access, and the higher-res version) if they had a pristine copy of the source video, with no titles stamped on top. And no, they did not. 
 
How do you solve Challenge 2? It’s right in the title of this article: You patch it. 
 
You basically build a new title bar, and overlay it on top of the outdated/offensive one. Don’t try and match the style of the old one; why bother? You want this to look intentional, as if that “title” was your idea, and was there all along—not like you’re trying to cover some mistake. 
 
Oh, did we mention Challenge 3? Turns out that the original poster had added background music to this video of our client, on stage, speaking. When it rains, it pours. 
 
You can’t patch your way out of that one. Fortunately, however, you can somewhat reduce “background noise” (!) in editing, and we’d had our own up-tempo music track for the sizzle reel, which we used to help drown out the old music. 
 
Patching, like this, applies to lots of media. You’ve likely seen tons of patches in your life and never ever realized it. They work on TV spots, print ads, web pages, brochures, trade show banners, infomercials, you name it. The only limit is your creativity. 
 
Need a creative solution to a tricky marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

We do serious work for serious clients, here at Copel Communications. We help them with marketing strategy and tactical execution, with the aim of empowering them to better serve their customers, and generate more revenue doing it. 
 
For example, we recently helped a client to develop a marketing strategy and materials that targeted what are known as HNWIs, or high-net-worth individuals. 
 
And then Archie stumbled into the scene. 
 
What? Huh? What’s this have to do with “serious work for serious clients”? 
 
Oh come on. We have fun, too. Hence this silly story—and this article. But don’t worry: there’s a valuable takeaway at the end. 
 
So. We confess: We were indulging in one of our off-hours guilty pleasures: Reading an old Archie Comics Digest. The kind you find in the impulse aisle of the supermarket checkout line. It’s mostly full of old reprints from decades past. 
 
And there we stumbled across this great story, which instantly made us think of our client. Here’s the gist: 
 
Veronica discovers one day, to her amazement, that Archie actually has a large amount of money in his bank account. Turns out, he’s proud to explain, that he’s been socking away money from mowing lawns, running errands, and so on, so he can save up enough to go to college without burdening his parents. Pretty laudable. 
 
Veronica then takes this as a green-light for her to ask Archie to take her to the most expensive restaurant in town on their next date. “Why not?” she asks him. “You’ve got the money.” 
 
Archie is instantly defensive, and offended. He explodes. He says that that money is sacrosanct. He won’t squander it on a single over-priced date. 
 
Veronica is equally incensed. She hands him an ultimatum: “Spend the savings on this date, or forget about having me as a girlfriend.”
 
Curious as to where this goes? So were we. 
 
Archie holds the line. He heads for the door, saying that “Some things are just more valuable than you think.” 
 
And here’s the kicker: During this whole argument in Veronica’s house, her multimillionaire father, Hiram Lodge, has overheard it all.
 
So he stops Archie at the door and tells him, “So help me, Archie. I want to shake your hand." 
 
Wow. 
 
How could we not wrap up this little Archie Comics Digest and mail it off to our client, who had just launched messaging to HNWIs about “earning the rewards of their diligent lifetime of smart financial stewardship”? 
 
And so, upon receiving this comic book, this client tripled their billing with us. 
 
No. Of course not. That wasn’t the case, any more than it was the expectation. Fact is, the client got a laugh out of it, and sent us an email to that effect. 
 
Because amid all the serious work we do for serious clients, we’re all people first. It never hurts to reaffirm that connection. 
 
Need help with your next creative assignment, regardless of levity level? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

Intrigued? 
 
“ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes?” Has Copel Communications completely lost its few remaining brain cells? 
 
Not yet. Stay with us on this. And learn how—no kidding—this observation can help your business make more money. 
 
Here’s a dirty little secret. While we specialize in marketing here at Copel Comms, we’re really “closet salespeople.” Think of the playwright who shudders at the prospect of getting on stage… but is completely comfortable writing a powerful speech for the play’s leading man to deliver. That’s us. 
 
Okay. Shoes? ChatGPT? Is there a thread anywhere in this story forthcoming? 
 
Sure there is. As we’d said, stay with us. 
 
ChatGPT, and all of the generative large-language-model AI platforms of its ilk, have really changed the way that people sell. The way that you can sell. And, upstream of that, the way you market. 
 
Shortly after it appeared on the scene, ChatGPT basically torpedoed email-based marketing and outreach—and thus the sales that those were supposed to generate. The reason is simple: It used to be that only reasonably intelligent English speakers could create grammatically correct outreach notes. ChatGPT eliminated that requirement. 
 
Since its advent, every mouth-breather who can click a “Generate” button has been able to churn out grammatically flawless… spam. 
 
Yep. Spam. 
 
The ISPs quickly clamped down on this. The spam filters got tighter. Even now, Google (in a related story) is tweaking its algorithms to filter out AI-generated content. 
 
But ChatGPT is old news. The platform debuted during the pandemic, for goodness’ sakes. 
 
The “old news” aspect of this story is good news for our clients and businesses like yours. We’re seeing an uptick in the effectiveness of email outreach again. Isn’t that nice? 
 
And, just like in the old days, quality matters. Remember the ol’ “three-legged stool” of email marketing? It consisted of the quality of: 

• Your list 
• Your offer 
• Your email which presents the offer

 
Guess what? That’s true again. 
 
Which gets to shoes. Specifically, “shoe leather.” We’re talking about the old days, when salespeople would “pound the pavement,” going from business to business, to the point where they would wear holes in the leather soles of their shoes. Hence “shoe leather.” 
 
ChatGPT does not wear shoes. It doesn’t understand how you can (and perhaps should) “pound the pavement” to actually generate sales. 
 
Example: We recently penned an email (is that a mixed metaphor? We actually used a keyboard) for a client of ours, directed toward their current clients, introducing a referral program for their services. 
 
Per best practice, the offer was “two-sided”: “Refer a client to us, and they’ll get a massive discount on our services. And you’ll get an Amazon gift card. Everyone wins!” 
 
So. It was a matter of taking this good offer (Leg 2), turning it into a compelling message (Leg 3), and sending it out to our client’s list of existing customers (Leg 1). 
 
Another dirty little secret: The client’s list of clients was small enough that no automation was needed. So “Dear [First Name]” was typed in as “Dear Linda,” and so on. 
 
Sure, it was old-fashioned manual labor. But it was effective. Proving that pounding the pavement, in its modern iteration, can still yield sales. 
 
And proving that ChatGPT doesn’t wear shoes. 
 
Need help with a marketing challenge? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help! 

Special news! Sure, we’ve got a good blog article here, and we’ll get to it in just a second. But first, a little announcement, which segues to this article quite nicely: 
 
We’re proud to announce that this article, these very words you are reading right now, are officially our tenth anniversary blog post. That’s right: We started publishing these in January 2015, and at that time, committed to publishing them twice a month. 
 
If you’re unaware—or simply curious—our cadence goes like this: At the top of the month, we publish articles focused primarily for our consulting/business-owner audience. At mid-month, we publish blogs focused a little more toward our “creative” audience, which includes ad agencies and other creative people we enjoy working with. 
 
Ten years! And we never missed a post. That’s 240 articles, if we’ve done our math right. 
 
And we’re not stopping now. Thanks so much for joining us for this great, long ride! Let’s dive into our latest topic. 
 
Why blogging shouldn’t be a New Year’s resolution
 
If you watched any TV during New Year’s, you were surely inundated with ads for gym memberships. It’s as predictable as sunrise. 
 
Why? Because people invariably make a New Year’s resolution to “get in shape,” and those gyms are all too happy to cash in. 
 
Be honest. How many people have you known (you may be one of them) who made one of these resolutions, joined a gym, bragged to all their friends for the first month or two… and then kind of quietly quit thereafter? 
 
Getting in shape takes commitment. In that regard, it’s exactly like blogging. Or doing social posts. Pretty much anything that has to do with your marketing outreach. 
 
Not everyone is an Olympian or an NFL star. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t whip your marketing into shape. The good news: It’s much easier than doing squats or lifting weights. 
 
You might be surprised at the trick to all this. 
 
Ready? 
 
Aim low.
 
What??? 
 
What????
 
You read right. This is counterintuitive advice if ever we’d dispensed any. 
 
Aim low.
 
Allow us to explain. 
 
The attainable cadence
 
The reason that so many people burn out on those January gym memberships is that they aim unrealistically high. So they over-do it. They can’t sustain that level of exertion. And so they just drop out. By aiming so high, they turn it into an all-or-nothing proposition. 
 
Which is exactly what you don’t want to do. 
 
So ask yourself this: How many blogs could I reasonably push out, every single month?
 
Factor into your answer disruptions like client emergencies and vacation time. 
 
Now take your answer, and cut it in half. 
 
Really? Really. 
 
The resulting number should be laughably easy to attain. And that’s the number you want.
 
For us, here at Copel Communications, we could probably turn these out every single week. But that’s pushing it. So we do it every two weeks, i.e., twice a month. And, as we’d noted above, we’ve never missed a beat. 
 
The calendar trick
 
Surely, we’ve had our share of client emergencies, vacation time, and what-not. But the trick is to create what’s called an editorial blog post calendar in which you pre-select the topics you want to blog about. 
 
Once you have that in place (we do ours in the fourth quarter each year for the subsequent year), you can then use it to write your blogs in advance so that you always have a cushion for when those client emergencies and/or vacation dates arise. 
 
Think of it. You now have two cushions: 
 
1) You cut your originally-intended cadence in half. 
 
2) You have extra blogs, already written, in the pipeline, which you can publish with a single click. 
 
When you look at it—and do it—that way, there’s zero stress. And you hit the mark every time. 
 
Again, blogging is just one type of output. You can apply this exact same approach to all kinds of marketing and business-development outreach, including emails, webinars, videos, you name it. 
 
Who’da thought it would all start by aiming low? 
 
Need help with this or similar challenges? Contact us. We’d be delighted to pitch in. 

​Boy do the months ever sail past. Time, already, for our annual round-up of our top posts for consultants from 2024. Here’s your chance to catch any you may have missed, or to brush up on others you may want to re-visit: 

• How to clone your favorite client. You already know who your favorite client is. How do you 2x them? Find out here. 

 

• Wait, what… we actually use ChatGPT? Do you know how often people ask us if we consider this tech to be an existential threat? It’s not. The trick is in how you use it… as we reveal here. 

 

• The business gift that keeps on giving… follow-on work. We credit our brilliant clients with the most brilliant ideas. This one may well top the list. You’ve got to try this trick. 

 

• What should you give your clients for free? Do you draw a line in the sand, based on billing? Of course not. Discover the tips and cool stories here. 

 

• The advantages of the hard-to-schedule on-site work session. When should you go in-person, when virtual would be so much quicker and easier? The answers might surprise you. 

 

• What is a marketing “content package”? And why would you want one? Put it this way: When does delivering more, cost less? Up your marketing game with these tips. 

 

• Wait, what… you sent a printed letter? And got business from it? Is “old school” the “next wave”? Find out which use-cases qualify for what you’d otherwise guess is an obsolete marketing technique. 

 

• Can you write a good “next steps” email? (And how much is that worth?) We spent an hour writing a single email. And made money off of it. Find out when, and why, you should, too. 

 

• You’d be surprised by how many emails we ghost-write for our clients. We had to cloak it anonymity, but this article includes the story of the email we ghost-wrote which netted our client millions. 

 

• When should—and shouldn’t—you respond to that RFP? At what point do you commit your team to pursuing that opportunity… and at what point do you conclude, “No, that would be a race to the bottom”? 

 

• The easiest marketing videos you’ll ever make. Even if you’ve never made a marketing video in your life, you’re already sitting atop a video goldmine. Intrigued? Read on. 

 
As we start working on next year’s articles, we’d like to take this time to thank you for tuning in to our 2024 entries. We love sharing the love, and your comments make our day. 
 
Have suggestions for an upcoming post? Contact us. We’d love to hear from you! 

​It’s funny how some things in business are cyclical. Way back in the day, we toiled over printed outreach, a.k.a. “direct response” a.k.a. “mailers” a.k.a. “junk mail” a.k.a. “printed spam.” 
 
Of course, all that went out the window when things went electronic. Spam postal mail was superseded by spam email.
 
Ah, progress! 
 
Yeah, we can afford to be a little snarky here. Stay tuned. Because the very recent tale we’re about to spin holds profit potential for your business, and your outreach. 
 
Dialing up the numbers game
 
First things first: You invest in direct response to drum up new business. It’s like cold-calling. (We could—and may—write another article on that topic, speaking of business cycles and swinging pendulums.) 
 
Direct response is a numbers game. If you send out to 100 people, your odds of getting a response aren’t very high. If you sent out to 10,000 people, your odds go up accordingly. 
 
Direct response is also often described as a three-legged stool. The list is one of those legs, and its quantity is just as important as its quality. You don’t want to send to people whose addresses (physical or electronic) have changed, not to mention their title… or even their company. 
 
The second leg is the quality of the offer. You’ve got to have something that’s really targeted and worth their time, ideally solving a problem they needed solved yesterday. 
 
The third leg is the outreach piece itself. That is, the email, or the letter, or the catalog or brochure or whatever. That’s the crux of this article. 
 
A matter of cost
 
Print is expensive. Postage is expensive. There’s a carbon-footprint consideration to it, too. So the whole marketing community breathed a collective sigh of relief when things went from postal to email, decades ago. 
 
And for a long time, it worked. Correction: It still does… to an extent. But things have definitely changed. 
 
You’ll cringe when we mention it, but a big disruptor here is ChatGPT. When it hit the scene, it made it easy for anyone to instantly generate a well-enough-worded email, which they could then blast out to whomever. 
 
And boy did they ever. It practically broke the internet. 
 
No, that’s an exaggeration. To put a finer point on it: it practically broke every ISP’s spam filter. We have clients now who can’t even send emails to their own, known clients without their getting trapped in spam filters. It started with ChatGPT: The clients’ clients’ spam filters have been closed down so much, to deal with so much incoming junk, that even their own trusted vendors sometimes get locked out. 
 
Some of those longtime trusted vendors happen to be clients of ours. And they’ve been switching back to postal outreach. And it’s been working. 
 
Where have all the emails gone?
 
One of these clients of ours recently sent out a catalog. Well, not really a catalog. Call it more of a thought-leadership piece that was really a very handy resource for C-level executives to have on their bookshelf. (We’re purposely being cagey here; we can’t reveal too much.) 
 
Now this “catalog” isn’t any good unless it gets opened. In other words, tucked inside the envelope with it was--gasp—a cover letter.
 
Yep. We worked on that one. Short, but vital. 
 
It teased what was in the “catalog.” It teased the benefits of working with the company that created it. And it invited the reader to book an all-important demo to learn more. 
 
Guess what? Envelopes were opened. And demos were booked. By the exact same execs whose spam filters had blocked every other form of recent outreach to them—including electronic versions of the exact same catalog. 
 
Email isn’t dead. But boy is this pendulum ever swinging toward print right now. 
 
Need help with thorny issues like these? Contact us. We’d be happy to help! 

Here we go again! Another year has zipped past… and presented us the opportunity to present you with a compendium of our top articles for consultants from this past year. If you missed any, here’s your chance to catch up. And if you have already seen, and liked, any of these, here’s your opportunity to revisit and brush up. Enjoy! 

• Where’s your sales funnel’s sweet spot? How much of your hard-earned expertise should you give away for free, totally “un-gated,” in order to drive new business? Find out! 

 

• The third time’s the charm (in email marketing). Can you name the single biggest hidden pitfall to email outreach success? No? Then check out this article to learn the bad… and the good. 

 

• How to promote… promotion. A big client mentions you in their press materials. Sounds great, right? But don’t fall into the same trap one of our clients almost did. Don’t waste an opportunity to spin this your way. Learn how. 

 

• How to (better) work with non-English-speaking clients. Discover how to bash the bias, set proper expectations, make your client happier, and win more follow-on business. We’ve got lots of experience here; learn from it.

 

• Steal from yourself to build your brand. Make yourself look bigger, not smaller, by doing less work, not more. Counterintuitive? Not if you know some basic tenets. Lotsa good tips and tricks in this one. Check it out. 

 

• How to parse your audience (and marketing) to boost sales. Who’s the “person target” within your prospect’s business you need to reach? And what about the “concentric circles” that surround them? Get the key takeaways from this essential rank-divide-and-conquer exercise for your business. 

 

• How to make the most of summer down-time. Whether you’re in the office or not, summer is a slow-down time that you can, and should, take advantage of. Get some great tips for both business-building, and work/life balance. 

 

• How to create commanding space for your brand. This is a must-read. Learn from both mega-brands and little-known startups, so you can max out your marketing effectiveness, with minimum wasted effort. 

 

• How to avoid tire-kicking, train-wrecking business prospects. These energy vampires are a fact of business life. But you can still reduce the time you spend, er, “waste” on them, with the help of a few essential tips. They’re here. 

 

• Tricks for writing great team bios. How can you make your people look great, without looking conceited? More importantly, how can you craft bios that consistently drive in new business? Get the answers!

 

• How to make your website’s “Careers” page more effective. The competition for talent epitomizes supply-and-demand. Get a leg-up on rivals by leveraging the many tips and tricks in this helpful article. 

 
Have any topics you’d like to see us address next year? Contact us. We’d be delighted to hear from you! 

​Sending out business-building emails is a tricky business. To you, it’s “outreach.” To the rest of the world, it’s “spam.” 
 
We’ve weighed in on this topic before, but in this article, we’re going to drill down to the proper way to craft a three-touch email marketing sequence, along with some caveats to help you along the way. 
 
Let’s start with the caveats. 
 
Hidden pitfalls
 
We recently worked on a campaign, for a client of ours, targeting banking executives. The offer, which our client crafted, was compelling: It was a way to avoid fraud, and better comply with anti-fraud and anti-money-laundering compliance regulations.  
 
That’s really valuable. What banking exec wouldn’t be interested in at least learning about it? 
 
But then we saw the campaign’s open-rates. That is, how many recipients actually opened the email, based on its subject line? 
 
The rates were disappointing. They fell to about half of what they’d been for previous, similar campaigns. 
 
What was going wrong? 
 
We got the answer from the in-house email expert at our client. It wasn’t that the offer wasn’t compelling. It wasn’t that the audience had suddenly changed. 
 
It was the ISP.
 
Huh? 
 
Yup. Turns out that the email hosting service of many of these banking execs is trained to filter out emails that have words like “fraud” in them. It flags them as spam, and shunts them away from the intended recipients’ email in-boxes. 
 
They never even saw ‘em. 
 
Hence the low open-rates. 
 
This is kind of a head-scratcher to us. Why would you want to “shield” a banking exec from something that helps them prevent fraud—one of their basic duties? 
 
Even crazier, if you (the ISP) are trying to stop spam, why would you filter out words like “fraud”? There is not one piece of spam out there that says “This is spam,” verbatim, in it. Similarly, an actual fraudulent email (Nigerian prince scam, anyone?) does not include the word "fraud” anywhere in it. That’s insane. 
 
It’s a crazy bit of filtering, a box that was checked by someone who shouldn’t have checked it. 
 
You can complain all you want, but that’s the way of the world. Live and learn. Don’t use the word “fraud” in your outbound emails, even if your legitimate offer will help to prevent it! Use phrasing like “boost compliance” or “adhere to government regulations” instead. 
 
(Sometimes the rationale behind the spam filtering is easier to grasp. We once wrote copy for men’s slim wallets, touting that they’re easier on your pocket than a fat one. But, oops, can’t use the word “fat” in Facebook ads. Facebook sees that word, in any context, and assumes it’s part of some body-shaming message, which is forbidden on the platform. Again, live and learn.) 
 
The three-touch sequence isn’t a sequence
 
With the caveats out of the way, let’s talk about the three-touch email sequence, and the title of this article. Why, indeed, is the third time the charm?
 
A three-touch email marketing campaign is defined as one in which the sender creates, and sends, a sequence of targeted marketing emails to intended recipients over a pre-set interval of time. That’s the case for this example. 
 
So let’s say you’re targeting executives. You have what you consider a killer offer. Then the “sequence” goes something like this: 

• A great reason to respond to this offer/learn more. 

 

• A different great reason to respond to this offer/learn more. 

 

• Yet another great reason to respond to this offer/learn more. 

 
See what’s happening—or rather not happening—here? 
 
There is no sequence to the sequence. We’ve said this before, and we’ll say it again: Never flatter yourself into believing that your recipient will remember Email Number 1 when they receive Email Number 2. You can’t pick up, message-wise, where the last one left off. 
 
Still, each touch—each mention of your name/your offer in that recipient’s in-box—makes a tiny dent in their perception. 
 
Which is why the third time is, so often, the charm. Our clients will get strong open rates on every one of the three-touch emails we create for them. But they’ll get the actual response from a prospect on Email Number 3. It just plays out that way. 
 
Call it “softening the beachhead.” Call it “sophisticated reverse psychology.” Call it whatever you like, because it’s a pattern we’ve seen time and again. 
 
The bottom line is, well, the bottom line. If you’re crafting email marketing campaigns—and have gotten this far in this specific article—you’re hungry for results that pay. 
 
Let us help. Contact us today. 

​We’ll start this article with a true—and embarrassing—story.
 
Ages ago, when computers first hit the scene, we needed to produce a couple of radio spots for a client at the ad agency where we worked. We realized that there was a lot of overlap between the two scripts, so we were able to use this exciting new feature, “copy and paste,” to help us along. It was like magic. 
 
Then, when it was time to take the playback from the studio, we had a dreadful realization: We’d effectively copied, and pasted, the wrong stuff. Both scripts were messed up—and both scripts got produced. We had to get the announcer back in the booth, and the engineer back at the board, and start all over again… only after they had to sit there and wait for us to fix (and double-check) the new scripts and fax (yes, fax!) them over. 
 
Ugh. 
 
Between the early PCs and the fax machines, the above story might appear terribly outdated, if not quaint. 
 
But it’s actually as relevant as ever. Ignore it at your peril. 
 
Bottlenecks in the spam factory
 
These days, we—and you—are tasked with sending out a lot of marketing material, to lots of different audiences. 
 
And, just as in the story from ages ago cited above, there are overlaps. Audience A likely wants about 75 percent of the same stuff as Audience B. Sometimes it’s 99 percent. 
 
But beware that last percent. It can absolutely kill you. 
 
Let us explain. 
 
As an English-speaking human being, you can tell, instantly and instinctively, when something is off. It can be off by just a fraction of a percentage point, and you’ll know it. 
 
From the “English-speaking” perspective, you’ll notice it when you get that “official” email from your bank (or utility or Facebook or whatever) saying that you need to take action immediately. The thing might look official, but it just doesn’t read right. No legitimate corporate communication would read that way. Your Spidey Sense tingles, and you’re on the alert for a scam. 
 
From the “human being” side, there’s the infamous Uncanny Valley. This is, in case you were unaware of the term, that skin-slithering feeling you get when you see computer-generated characters of people that are very realistic but are off by just enough to make them creepy looking… “The Polar Express,” anyone? 
 
So. You can perceive this stuff, innately, as a recipient.
 
Therefore, you need to be extra careful when you’re a transmitter.
 
Ain’t as simple as it seems
 
Here’s a nice concrete example for you. Let’s say you’re creating a campaign aimed at banking executives. They have customers. 
 
Now let’s say you’re doing the same campaign, except for credit unions, which are ridiculously similar to banks. But do they have “customers”? Oh no! They have members.
 
If you get that one word wrong in your search-and-replace from Banking Version to Credit-Union Version, you’ve wasted your entire campaign. Worse, you’ve offended that audience with your ignorance, to the point that you’ve damaged your brand, and they’ll look at any future marketing communication from your firm with skepticism. 
 
Now let’s say the campaign is targeting healthcare insurers. They don’t have “members.” But they don’t call the people who pay for their services “customers,” either. They’re patients. For property-and-casualty insurers, they’re policyholders. And this is just a single, single-nomenclature example. 
 
Just like the Uncanny Valley, if you get just one word wrong, you can come across as tone-deaf or just plain ignorant. 
 
So our advice is: Be careful. Proofread assiduously. Know, in the back of your mind, that you can still screw this up. Even without a fax machine. 
 
Need help with a creative marketing challenge? Contact us. We work on assignments like these all the time. 

​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.