 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!
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 Great photo by Beyzaa Yurtkuran "Ghost Email Writer.” Kind of an odd role to put on your resume, no?
It’s on ours. More importantly for you, however, is the answer to this question: Which business emails that you need to send are so important that they would warrant having a pro step in to pen them? That’s what we’ll explore in this article. Touchy subjects There is a common thread when it comes to emails that we ghost-write for our clients. It’s generally what we’d call “the big ask,” which kind of goes hand-in-hand with “the humble brag.” Both of these are hard to do. They put you, as the writer, in an uncomfortable situation. Err in one direction, you look like a jerk. Err in the other, you appear too meek. And in both of those situations, you don’t end up getting what you’d wanted. Talk about a fine line. First things first: You don’t really need to hire a professional writer, like us, to write an email like this. You can really work your tail off, and polish it, run it by colleagues, and even push it through ChatGPT if you want it to sound generically-correct enough. The question is: Is that worth your time? If you’re reading this article, chances are, it’s not. (Spoiler alert: We charge a mere pittance for things like these, for our clients, especially considering the upside ROI they deliver.) But so far we’ve been dealing with generalities. Let’s dive in and give you two real-life examples. Ghost-Written Email Example 1: To a former client We recently helped a client create a series of marketing videos for their B2B consultancy. On their website, they’d had an ancient, but great, testimonial from an old client of theirs. They hadn’t spoken to this client in ages. Can you guess where this is going? Of course. A written testimonial, on a website, doesn’t do you much good when you’re creating marketing videos. Talk about a big ask: We wanted this former client to record themselves, on camera, giving a testimonial about this company that they’d worked with, a long time ago. Yikes. And so our client asked us to ghost-write the big-ask email for them. Confession: It wasn’t easy. But the finished product went something like this: It opened with a “Hello, old friend, we hope you’re doing well,” followed by “we’re so glad that our company has helped your company succeed.” We also thanked them for letting us use their written testimonial on our website. And that was the segue to the videos we were making. We’d already had the first one produced by the time we ghost-penned this email, so we included a link to it, so that the former client could watch it and see how good it was. Then we got down to the big ask: Could they simply read that same testimonial on camera, and send it to us? We even included its text in the email, like a script. We noted that, “By our estimation, this should take about, well, 15 seconds! So hopefully it’s not a huge ask.” And we closed by saying, “Just as we have helped your company, you’d be doing us a huge solid by helping ours.” The email worked. The old client was flattered by the request, and promptly obliged by recording and sharing a quick video. Bonus: Our client’s firm suddenly became top-of-mind for this former great client. Talk about a nice dollop of biz-dev! Ghost-Written Email Example 2: To “the secret handshake club” Whereas the previous example was written to be sent to one specific, known person, this next one was intended to be sent, one-to-one, to a select number of very exclusive recipients who were all total strangers to the sender. We need to be very cagey here, as this one is super sensitive. That said, it’s one of the best emails we’ve ever written, and it’s ended up netting our client millions. This client of ours had carved out a profitable B2B niche doing technical “cleanup work” for large enterprises. But they longed to broaden the business, and their client base, to include the specialists who helped those enterprises create the situations that inevitably required cleanup afterward. Those specialists were the targets of the email. We can refer to them here as “the secret handshake club,” because that’s how close-knit, clubby, and insular they are. Our pitch, which we ghost-wrote for the owner of our consultancy client, went something like this; note how it combines the Big Ask with the Humble Brag: “Hello Mr. or Ms. Secret Handshake Club Member. I would like to help you as you advise big enterprises as they embark on big initiatives. Full disclosure: I’ve never done this before. But I have helped numerous enterprises with the ‘clean-up’ that’s come from all the overlooked issues in these initiatives, which I’m uniquely qualified to spot, given my experience. Would you have time for a quick call this week?” Guess what the response was? It was awful. That’s right. It’s a secret handshake club! Most of the sends ended up with no response whatsoever. The few that did respond, had some choice suggestions for our client, which we can’t reprint here. But then one—just one— Secret Handshake Club member wrote back. “Okay,” they said. “I’ll bite. Contact my assistant to book a call with me next week.” And that was all it took. That call led to a test project. That test project turned a toe-in-the-water tester into a new client. That client effectively provided entry into the Secret Handshake Club. Fast-forward to today, and that consultancy client of ours now splits their billing, 50/50, between their classic “cleanup” projects and Secret Handshake Club assignments. And it all started with one inexpensive, yet really well-crafted, ghost-written email. Have a challenge that warrants a ghost-written email? Contact us. We’d be delighted to help.  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 Alena Darmel. Here at Copel Communications, we get tasked with lots of different writing assignments. There are video scripts. Blogs. Case studies. Email campaigns. Sales decks. Landing pages. Social posts. You name it.
Thing is, a lot of these overlap. And therein lies an opportunity—for you—to approach your marketing outreach more effectively and cost-efficiently. Learn from our experience and evolved best practice. It’s actually pretty simple, but it requires both foresight and discipline. Signed, sealed deliverables Our clients will typically want to promote something (a product, a service, an announcement) to as many people/prospects as possible. Which requires leveraging various media, such as web pages, YouTube, email, and so on. And here’s where the “package” concept originated. We realized, early on, that all of these deliverables-centered-around-the-same-story were basically all parts of the same, bigger thing. Thus we coined the phrase “content package”; you might not see it described that way elsewhere. The idea of “packaging” these, however, is powerful. First of all, it’s hugely efficient. If you’re going to create one of these things, create all of them… at the same time. Note that we said “create.” Not, say, “post” or “publish.” That might be staggered, depending on your media plan. But you do want to create them all at once. It’s going to be easier and more efficient for your writing resource, since they’ll need to align their proverbial ducks just once. That will translate to more consistent content across the package’s discrete elements—and lower costs, too. Here’s another advantage of packaging these assignments together: It’s effectively a marketing checklist. By green-lighting a package, you eliminate the possibility of later discovering that you’d inadvertently left one element out. What’s the core asset? The components of any content package will be dissimilar, not in terms of facts or messaging, but rather in terms of sheer size. The package might include, say, an 800-word blog, along with a 280-character tweet (or X-chirp, or whatever it’s called nowadays). The point is, if you’re going to create all this stuff, know that it’s always easier to cut than to add. That matters, whether you’re creating the materials yourself or assigning them to someone else. In other words, you don’t start with the tweet. Identify the biggest, most detailed, and labor-intensive element in the package, and create that one first. Once it’s nicely honed, you can use it as a feeder for all of the others. It’s not quite as simple as doing a “Save as…” and then chopping down, because there are other constraints and style and audience factors to take into consideration. But still, all the heavy lifting should be done for the “core” asset. Example: We have a client who publishes case studies in a tightly-defined three-tab format (“Client,” “Team,” “Solution”). But they’ll also push out a more narrative-style blog about the same story—and the blog always has more detail, captioned illustrations, and little behind-the-scenes anecdotes baked into it. So we always do the blog first. Then the case study. Then the three-touch email campaign. Then the social teasers for the blog and the case study… you get the idea. Packaged goods As we’d mentioned earlier, creating content packages requires foresight and discipline. Foresight, in that you must often delay gratification, knowing that one element of the package may well roll out at some time in the future. And discipline, in that you must remember to employ the content-package approach, and stick to it. But, like any best practice, once you get used to doing this, you’ll find it becomes second nature… to the vast advantage of your marketing outreach, and your production budget. Need help “packaging” up any content, or creating the elements thereof? Contact us. We’d be delighted 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 see it a lot. Younger people enter the creative-services workforce, and are invariably disappointed when they don’t get to express their full genius on every assignment. Look at their killer portfolio! Look at the awards they won in school! What gives with the real world?
In this article, we’re going to focus in on some of the (seemingly) most creative-crushing assignments, with an eye toward helping your client succeed. And our parenthetical comment above is spot-on, because if you believe there’s no room for creativity in that assignment, you’ve already painted yourself into a corner. SEO... as creative? We worked on an assignment recently, featuring a slew of social ads aimed at executives in a particular vertical; let’s say it’s “logistics.” And we were told—it was a mandatory—that we had to feature the word “logistics” in the headline. Mind you, these are social ads. As we’ve written before, they’re a lot like freeway billboards. In that there’s hardly any room for copy. You get a few words, max. And now you’re telling me that I have to use the word “logistics” in the headline? It’s enough to frustrate any creative pro. But there’s a sound method to this madness. And there is most certainly a creative solution to this challenge. First things first. If this ad, on a cluttered web page, is targeting logistics executives, it needs to cut the clutter of all the other ads that don't. Yes, you can show a picture of a long-haul tractor-trailer (and likely should), but nothing says "logistics” like, well, “logistics.” It gets worse. Or, depending on your perspective, better. We were also told—another mandatory—to get the word “exec” in there. We’re targeting logistics executives, right? Execs are a special, elite group. Again, think about it. You’ve got a genuine logistics exec, looking at some cluttered web page. He or she sees the word “Logistics” and takes notice. But there are tons of offerings in the world of logistics; it’s like manufacturing or insurance or any other huge vertical. But then you add the word “exec” to the ad, and it’s undeniably focused. This is what we might call “the SEO approach to creative.” It’s using the kinds of words that the audience would search on, to populate creative elements such as the headline. Which might read something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! Exciting, huh? Well, maybe not to you. And therein lies the rub. This is what so many of the new-to-the-workforce creatives fail to grasp. You’re not trying to score points for cleverness. You’re trying to help your client make money. Simple as that. Deeper geekery Notice the mention of “LTL” in that made-up headline above? It stands for “less-than-truckload,” which is an acronym that’s very specific to logistics. So while you would never use an obscure, and undefined, acronym in a headline to the general public, here, in this case, it slices through the clutter even more sharply. It tells that logistics exec, “We know what you’re up against.” It tells them that you speak their language, both literally and figuratively. Sounds crazy, but little ads like this work. We’ve jammed in some intense, industry-specific jargon, and whereas it would be death at, say a cocktail party, it works quite well when you need to cut through the clutter toward a very focused and time-constrained audience. So where on earth is the room for creativity here? If you’re in the tightly-constrained realm of a social ad, think of your remaining elements, besides the headline:
Not much, but it’s there. What if you did something like this: Logistic Execs: Boost LTL Throughput Now! ABC Enterprises Helps You Keep On Trucking [Button:] Accelerate Your Performance And what if there’s a totally outrageous, grabber image, such as a tractor-trailer... with a rocket engine and wings? The heat from the engine could even be scorching the call-to-action button. Well whaddya know. All of your college portfolio work paid off after all. The important thing—the discipline—is to know when and where to add the creative “spice” to an assignment, vs. letting the “untouched ingredient” stand on its own merit. The qualifier here, as always, is what the end-client/prospect/customer will respond to. Viewed through that lens, the decisions get much clearer. Need help with these kinds of assignments? Contact us. We’d love to answer the call.  It’s that time of year again: time for our annual year-in-review wrap-up of our top articles from Copel Communications. We do two of these each December: one for our “Creatives” audience, and another for our consultants audience.
This one (although it's posting first) is the latter. Here are the top articles we’ve published for consultants, chock full of counterintuitive tips and business-building tricks. In case you missed any of these, here’s your chance to get some fast, free pointers. Enjoy!
Have suggestions for topics you’d like us to cover next year? Contact us. We’ve love to hear from you.  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. |