 Great photo by Matheus Bertelli. 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.
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 Great photo by Antoni Shkraba. 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:
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!  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio 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!  Great photo by Andrea Piacquadio. 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!
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:
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.  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.  Some people positively blink when they ask us this question. “You get paid to write emails?”
We sure as heck do. And our clients love us for it. They keep coming back for more. Which begs the question: “Why?” We’ll answer that one, and the other, in this article. But more importantly, we’ll share some good business-building email tips that you can put to use. No it’s not dead We can’t count the number of articles and stories and pundits who all predicted the utter downfall of email, for years now. But it never went away. Kinda like the telephone. So love it or hate it, email is here to stay. Your job (and ours): make it pay. Fact is, for B2B marketing, email is still really strong. Businesspeople read, write, and send emails. Sure, there’s a lot of spam out there, but if you have a message that promises the exact kind of value your recipient is seeking, then there are benefits to be realized for both parties. And that, in case you haven’t figured it out already, is the crux of it: The value that your email offers. Different situations, different iterations We’ve ghost-written tons of emails on behalf of business owners and consultancies and other professional-services firms, addressing specific executives. It might be an informal proposal. Or a more formal one. Or the cover-note to a report. Something that needs to set the tone, to lubricate the gears. In that case, it’s a balancing act of polite finesse with some subtle storytelling, all with an eye toward the closing. Yep. Even an email to a CEO should end with a CTA, or call-to-action. Otherwise it’s just a postcard. The other types of emails we get tasked with—more times than we can count—are direct-response campaigns. This is when our client will have a big list of possible prospects, and something to offer them. Our job: Get those prospects interested enough to take action. (As in, “call-to-action.” See a theme here?) Done right, these things work. We’re seeing open-rates of 30 percent. We’re seeing responses and, more importantly, sales meetings coming from these emails. So you’re darn tootin’ that clients pay us to write these. It’s some of the biggest ROI we offer here at Copel Communications. Direct. And responsive. Those direct-response emails typically employ a three-email campaign: Original emailing, plus two follow-ups. “Original” and “follow-up” are terms only used by the knob-turners running the actual email programs for us. In other words, there’s no way that you, nor the recipient, would ever know that any of the three emails was the “original” or one of the “two follow-ups.” In other words, each one is, and should be, a standalone statement. In other-other words, never flatter yourself into thinking that your recipient remembered the first email when they read the second one. There’s a good chance that that first one was never read. Harsh dose of cold water: When you send these, they’re “direct response” or “outreach.” When the recipient gets them, they’re “junk mail” or “spam.” It’s not until you can get them to actually open the thing and hook them on your valuable offer, that they become “not spam.” And that’s a big ask. The three-legged stool Any direct marketer will tell you that there are three components to any email campaign:
None of these stand alone. We’ll have to assume, for the purposes of this article, that you’ve nailed 1) and 2). Which is far easier said than done. (By the way, “quality of the list” is right up there with “quantity of the list.” Face it: If you only have ten people to email, you won’t get many responses. If you have ten-thousand, that’s another story.) So. You’ve got a great list, and a great offer. Then you’re into the basics, the weeds, of email-writing. Here are a few pointers: Work, and rework, the subject line. This is an exercise in brevity. You can, and should, sacrifice grammar, even spelling, to make your point quickly. Don’t worry: Everyone expects this. That subject line is automatically truncated by your email app. So a long one simply won’t go through. Example: [Subject:] Exciting must-watch video about a new way to slash logistics costs Ouch. Too long. Try this instead: [Subject:] VIDEO: Logistics cost-cutter Leverage the preheader. Some mail-sending apps, such as Constant Contact and MailChimp, allow you to include this. The preheader is the little bit of text you’ll see in your “in-box” list before you actually click on the email itself. Without a preheader, it’s simply the first few words of the body of the email itself. But the preheader lets you quickly tease what’s inside, such as “Breakthrough app that’s saving millions.” Tell a story. As the adage goes, “No one wants to be sold to. But everyone wants to hear a story.” So you can grab with a story intro, and use it to frame your offer. There’s always a story to be told, because in a direct-response email like this, there’s always 1) the initial problem, and 2) the exciting solution. There’s your two-act structure, right there. Be conversational. Sure, it’s fine to open with a jarring statistic such as (and we’re making this up): “Did you know that 84 percent of recently-surveyed logistics execs cite ‘increasing automation’ as their biggest challenge for the year ahead?” But then you can shift to the more-familiar: “We understand what you’re going through.” So there’s that assumption of familiarity. Sure, the email is introducing a company, and an offer, but it’s being written—and sent—by a person. Another adage: “People don’t buy from companies. They buy from people.” That applies here. Wrap with the CTA. Whatever you want the recipient to do—whether it’s downloading a case study, watching a video, booking a demo, or writing back to learn more—that should be the last thing they read. If you say anything after it, you’re muddying your message—and diminishing your response. This isn’t easy Getting back to our original question: “You get paid to write emails?” Yes we do. And it’s not just because there’s a lot of money at stake, in terms of sales-to-be-made. It’s because not only is the writing of these things time-consuming (time which our clients don’t have), but it’s also challenging. When we were brought in to do these for one of our clients who had previously been attempting it in-house, the response rates shot up. The “two other legs of the three-legged stool” had never changed. So it was obvious to everyone what had improved. Need help with business-building emails? Contact us. We’d be happy to lend a hand.  Boy did this year ever fly past! We hope you’ve stayed productive and healthy.
In what’s become a big tradition here at Copel Communications, we’d like to offer you our annual wrap-up of creative skill-building articles for the entire year. If you missed any of these, here’s your chance to catch up; if you already enjoyed any of these, here’s an opportunity to re-hone your skills. Enjoy!
Have a creative topic you’d like us to weigh in on next year? Let us know. We’d love to hear from you. |