 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.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |