About This Episode

Your emails aren’t working.

How much time and effort have you spent trying to craft what you thought was the perfect email campaign? You edit and re-edit, and finally, you are ready to put it out into the world, and you hit “send.”

And nothing happens.

Is your company that uninteresting? Not at all. Odds are, you’re just going about your email all wrong. And it’s not your fault, it’s probably just that nobody has ever taught you how to write emails well. After all, how many terribly written emails do you get every day? And what do you do with those emails?

Straight to the trash.

Patricia McLaren, Co-Founder & Head of Customer Operations at CopyShoppe, was a guest on the Sales Engagement podcast recently, and her and the team at Copy Shoppe are doing some great things around copywriting, email marketing, and she was kind enough to share her thoughts with our audience.

1. Be The Experts in the industry

Whether you hire a copywriter or not, you’ve got to know the field. Odds are your company is reaching out to folks in lots of different types of industries.

Whether it’s construction, telecom, airlines, or hospitality, what works for one customer won’t always work for another. So do your market research up front.

What are the trends in the industry? What has changed in the last year? The last five? What are the industry challenges and how can you specifically help solve those challenges for the customer?

2. It’s All About Persona

Take a minute and do some deeper research on the people you’re reaching out to. Head to their LinkedIn and find out a little more about them. How does your message change based on their role?  

What emotions are they feeling throughout their day, and how might you use your email messaging to tap into those emotions. Emotions drive decisions, and the information you provide will reinforce the decision that is made.

3. Consult The Experts

You’ve already done a deep dive into the industry, but before you are ready to launch the campaign, bring in five to ten leaders from each type of persona that you’re looking to reach out to, and run your campaign by them.

Is this something they’d respond to? Does it make sense? Did you miss the mark, or did that first line grab them? Leverage that expert panel and take their feedback and implement it into the campaign.

4. It’s Go Time

Now that you’ve done the work, it’s time to launch the campaign.

You’ve done your homework. You’ve done your deep dives, you’ve considered the persona, and you’ve consulted the actual experts, now it’s time to trust your abilities and hit send. Trust your work.

5. Test, Test, Test

You can never really know 100% whether or not your campaign will work. The world just doesn’t’ give us those kinds of odds. Things change quarter by quarter, and your messaging better be keeping up with that.

Test new subject lines, calls to actions, tone, and everything else about your messaging. Don’t ever assume that just because it worked before that it will work again. That’s a guaranteed way to miss the mark. Besides, who wants the same type of communication over and over again?

One More Thing

At the end of the day, Patricia and her team at Copy Shoppe had one overwhelming tip to improving your email copy.

Stop talking about yourself.

Everybody is talking about themselves, what they’ve done, and what they can do for your company. But step back and take a moment to reflect.

Go back and remove every instance of “I”, “WE”, and even your company name. Rewrite that email with the customer in mind. Make it all about them, their unique problems, and let them be the center of attention.

Now sit back, and watch your email engagement grow.

This post is based on a podcast interview with Patricia McLaren from CopyShoppe. To hear this episode, and many more like it, you can subscribe to The Sales Engagement Podcast.

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