How to Write Better Email Campaigns
The Relational Selling Email Campaign Framework
Ever feel like you’re hitting your head against a wall with email campaigns? You have the perfect copy. Your emails are so well written they deserve an award.
But the analytics tell another story.
Your open rates have flat-lined. Your click-through rates aren’t what they used to be. Sales is hungrier than ever for some inbound activity from your campaigns. But your emails aren’t delivering.
It’s time to try something different.
In this post, I share a different approach to writing email campaigns. It’s a framework that requires you to take your marketing hat off and replace it with a sales hat (just for a little while).
I call this approach the Relational Selling Email Framework, and it’s been a game changer for me.
Let’s rewind for half a minute. I’ve been writing email campaigns for decades. I’ve built some great ones and some not-so-great ones (they sucked). What I’ve learned over the years has formed my approach to writing email campaigns that are more authentic and straightforward. I now write campaigns like I’m speaking with someone I know well. Since I’ve started using this approach, my open rates have improved. My click-through rates have increased. Everything is better.
Why Should You Care?
Think about it. It’s a lot more fun to dive into Canva and start creating beautiful Instagram carousels. Or maybe you’re a Slack geek like me, hoping all your clients and prospects will join your group. No more subject lines. No more agonizing over copy. Maybe one day, but not anytime soon.
According to Hubspot, 77% of marketers have seen an increase in email engagement over the past 12 months. And despite changes in major mobile platforms, like Apple’s Email Privacy Protection capabilities, email is thriving as the dominant source of lead origination.
The bottom line is that you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better way to generate ROI than the traditional email campaign engine.
According to Litmus, email drives an ROI of $36 for every dollar spent, higher than any other channel.
But that doesn’t mean you must do what everyone else does- you must do the opposite. There’s only so much time in the day to devote to checking emails. And your email has more competition than ever. To make email campaigns work, you need to pivot from traditional, promotion-heavy campaigns that suck to a more personalized style that moves the needle.
So why don’t your email campaigns move the needle?
Most marketers and salespeople struggle to write copy that is interesting enough to open. Their headlines are crap. Their copy is sales-heavy.
Most campaigns fail for one (or more) of these reasons:
Laziness. Your marketing team got lazy and copied the style and tone of others in your space. Generative AI platforms like ChatGPT are making it worse. Everyone is writing “Corporate Copy,” which sounds like everyone else’s.
No Value. Your salespeople wrote copy that is all about them and not about the client. These emails have no value and stand little chance of getting read or acted upon.
Product First. Your campaigns lead with the value of your product or service. They jump straight to “Product/Benefit” rather than explaining how your problems are solved.
However, the relational selling framework keeps you safe from these traps and helps you stand out from the crowd of mediocre email campaigns. Here’s how it works …
The Relational Selling Email Framework
A relational selling approach to writing email campaigns is all about making it personal. You need to understand the problems that your target audience faces. You need to understand what keeps them up at night. What solutions do they have in place to solve these problems today? But rather than going into “corporate copy” mode, you must write your first draft content as if writing to a close friend. All the BS and jargon that’s difficult to understand needs to go out the window. When you do this, your campaigns become more relatable. They are more authentic, and they are going to perform better.
Here are the five steps to leveraging a relational selling campaign strategy in your email campaigns …
Step 1: Understand and segment.
Before you take pen to paper or fingers to keyboard, you must get to know your target audience well. This is a critical first step. If you don’t take enough time here, everything else will fail. Let me repeat that. If you skip over this step, your email campaigns will continue to perform suboptimally. Don’t let that happen. Do this step really well.
Don't try to talk to everyone. When you do that, it's like not talking to anyone. You need to segment your audience and define well-crafted messaging for each group. Start with a few clients that you know well. Ask them why they purchased your product. Ask them about the problems that they faced before implementing your solution. Ask them why their life is better today.
Figure out what your messaging needs to sound like for each targeted segment. If you have a fancy, high-powered marketing department, they call this exercise “persona building.”. It’s essential to go through this, but for most organizations, it doesn’t need to be a complex process that entails hundreds of hours of research for most organizations.
Instead, take a relational approach. Talk to some of the prospects and clients that you have in your existing network. Get to know them better - at both a business and personal level.
If you don’t have many clients yet, look at the data that you do have. See who's opening your emails and who's clicking on them. Look at their titles, company sizes, and industry types. Reach out to them through LinkedIn and get a discussion going. Ask for their opinions. Ask for their take on the industry. Learn how they see the world. And, most important, don’t sell (yet).
Understanding your audience, segmenting them into groups, and tailoring your messages to these groups make your emails more authentic and personal. This process makes the probability of making a connection with a new prospect much better. More people will not just get your emails; they will read and engage with them.
Step 2: Start with a strong subject line.
Your subject line is the star of the show. There are many schools of thought on what makes a great subject line. But in my experience, I’ve seen the best results when I’ve followed the relational approach:
Focus on what you learned from Step 1. Ideate on subject lines for each segment that you’ve identified. Use the knowledge gained from your conversations with your target audience to begin to ideate on ideas.
Leverage generative AI, like ChatGPT, to help you build out possible subject lines. At this point, don’t worry about their length, brevity, or content - work on creating a lot of candidates. I like to generate at least ten before starting to wordsmith.
Be very specific when working with ChatGPT to help you generate subject lines. For one of my clients, Townhall.pro, I used the following prompt to help develop several candidates. My prompt was very specific and included information I learned directly from our target audience:
After brainstorming with your generative AI partner, leverage the ones you like and replace the wording with words that you heard during your discussions with prospects and clients. Remember that what solutions like ChatGPT provide will look and read like what everyone else is doing. Use this output as a starting point and apply your knowledge gained from your client and prospect discussions to optimize it.
With nearly half of all emails being opened on mobile, brevity is your friend. Keeping your subject lines to around 50 to 60 characters will help performance for many segments.
Experiment with personalization. Depending on your target audience, personalizing can often improve open performance. If you elect to personalize your subject line with first name, company name, or another data element you’ve collected, scrub your email lists. Make sure that your fields are clean and accurate. Misspelling someone’s name is an easy way to land in the recycle bin - perhaps forever.
A/B test within each of your segments. This is an important one. While it’s easy to provide general recommendations on email subject lines, your north star needs to be what your analytics tell you. If your best-performing email subject lines exceed 50 characters, follow what works, not what best practices dictate.
For a great read on email subject lines, check out this Hubspot article, 20 Tips to Write Catchy Email Subject Lines. But, in keeping with the relational approach, use these as starting point guidelines. Always default to what your target audience and analytics are telling you.
Step 3: Develop a killer opening line.
If the Subject Line is the show's star, your opening line is the Emmy-nominated supporting actress. The opener heavily influences whether you will receive click-through on your content. To build a good opening line, follow the steps outlined above for creating Subject line candidates. But here, you have more flexibility with length.
Make sure to:
Develop several opening lines and circulate them with your team for feedback.
Ensure that your opening lines match the voice of your customer. Use the intelligence gained during your discussions with clients and prospects.
Build your openers for the specific segments that you are targeting. Your opening lines should not be one size fits all.
As with the prior step, generative AI is your friend. I use a variety of tools, including Grammarly’s AI text generation tool, to improve on content and suggest different directions.
Step 4: Take a relational approach to writing your copy.
Next up is your body copy. This part should be easier than the subject line and opener ideation. Here are some good guidelines that have served me well in the past:
Don’t lead with your product or service. Lead with the problem. Emphasize the struggle that the problem presents and how solving the problem is paramount. Once this has been established, you can move into selling.
Offer something of value with each email in your campaign. Your offer should align with what your prospects and clients told you would be of value. Give something away that’s valuable to begin building trust with your target audience. Some of my SaaS clients offer a free trial (no credit card required) to help prospects get up and moving quickly. My consulting firm clients often offer free whiteboarding sessions without strings attached. The session provided value for the prospect while giving the firm valuable discovery information to understand the issues better.
There are very few one-hit wonders. It’s rare that single email campaigns, or “blasts,” perform as well as multi-email campaigns. This means that the development of your copy should include unique value in every email in the campaign series.
Get some feedback. Send your finalized copy to the prospects and clients that you spoke with earlier in the process. Ask the folks that you learned from to give you feedback. You’ll be surprised how many will continue to support you. This is called the Ben Franklin effect. It’s a psychological phenomenon in which people like someone more after doing a favor for them.
AI is still your friend here. Follow the earlier steps to leverage tools like ChatGPT and Grammarly to help you ideate on your text.
Write personal emails. Stay away from jargon and corporate copy. Write your content like you’re writing to a friend. Once you remove all of the junk, your emails will become more authentic and generate more interest from your prospects.
Employ a soft-sell approach early. In the early stages of your campaign, use a soft-sell approach. It’s essential in every email to have an ask and a next step. However, you don’t lead with it. The ask is subtle early in your series, but more up-front once trust has been established later in your campaign series.
Leverage strong landing pages. Each email should have a specific call to action that takes your prospects to a page that provides value and tracks activity. Measuring form fills, time spent on the page, and other web-based analytics you can control will give you essential data to continue improving your campaigns.
Make your emails easy to read. Short sentences, simple wording, and proper spacing are key elements in making an email readable and engaging. No one wants to read through long-winded paragraphs or decipher complicated jargon. A pattern also plays a significant role in creating a good email. Using bullet points or numbering important information can help break down complex thoughts into organized chunks of information. This makes reading easier and helps ensure that nothing gets missed.
Proofread. It’s easy to fix spelling and grammatical errors on the fly with the tools available in your email campaign tool. But take another step and ensure you haven’t missed something that spelling and grammar check might easily miss. Recently, I made the mistake of misspelling a friend’s name that I mentioned in a newsletter. Not my proudest moment. I was embarrassed, apologized profusely, and we both moved on. Lesson learned - always proofread your stuff and get a second set of eyes on your campaigns to catch what you miss.
Following these guidelines will help your copy drive more click-throughs for your email campaigns.
Step 5: Benchmark, watch and pivot.
Last but certainly not least, you need to watch your numbers. Almost every email campaign tool that I’m aware of will report on the basics:
Open rate - The average open rate is between 15% and 25% (Google), but you can do better than that.
Click-through rate - The average click-through rate is 2.5% (Google) but varies widely by target industry.
The key here is for you to track your performance over time. Watch what your campaigns are doing, set goals for upcoming campaigns, and continuously improve.
Additional tracking metrics that I like to use for my relational selling email campaigns include the landing page and funnel metrics:
Bounce rate - What % of your audience leaves without consuming another page on the site?
Form-fills - How many form fills are completed with each of your emails in the campaign?
Time on Page - How long is spent on the landing page (and subsequent pages consumed)?
Deals by Source - How many deals originated from your email campaigns?
These metrics are easily tracked in Google Analytics from your website. Using UTM parameters in your links will also provide you with more information to track email and campaign performance.
Last but certainly not least, be prepared to adjust your campaigns over time. Watching your analytics closely will help you gauge when this needs to happen. Having multiple campaigns in the can, ready to go, is a great way to stay ahead of the game.
Need some assistance building your next email campaign? I’m a data-driven fractional CMO focusing on growth marketing and go-to-market activations, including Content Development, Email Campaigns, Social Automation, CRM Optimization, and Analytics. When the time is right, I welcome the opportunity to connect and discuss your goals.