B2B Email drip campaign - A teardown!
You have a 50% probability of calling a coin-toss correct. But, only a 1% chance to get someone to respond to your cold email. It is assuming you have implemented all the technical best practices and managed to reach the recipient's inbox.
Email marketing is still a potent tool for some marketers. They continue to deploy in their marketing process and reap great results. However, for others, it does not produce the desired results. And it just ends up as a wasted effort.
It's no accident that email marketing is effective for a few and not much for the rest. The success and failure of this channel are a function of the marketer's ability to deeply understand their audience and design the communication & content accordingly.
The more authentic, contextual, and personal the email is, the higher the chance of people responding to your CTAs. Successful marketers optimize for delivering value to their audience. And the rest go all out for conversions using fancy & fluff language.
Recently, I was a recipient of a drip campaign that spread over a month. The automated routine followed the playbook to the T. However, none of what the SDR was trying to communicate made sense. In the end, it was just a wasted effort for them and the organization they represent.
The closer I looked at the emails and the underlying communication startegy, the more evident it became on why this campaign was set for failure right from the time it was conceived. It also got me to do a teardown for the following reasons
- to show where the bar currently is set in mass email communication
- And how adhering to some basic hygiene & doing research can increase the probability of response rates
This is only for educative purposes and not to undermine anyone's effort. For this reason, I have removed all references to the sender and the organization they represent.
Legend: Green boxes indicate Good practice, Orange boxes bad, and Red boxes mean ugly.
With that, let's dive straight in and learn the usual pitfalls.
Email 1
Verdict: High on tricks; low on relationship building.
Email 2
Verdict: Insensitive; demonstrates lack of research.
Email 3
Verdict: Simple & Crisp
Email 4
Verdict: Creates instant mistrust with incorrect claim
Email 5
Verdict: Repetitive content; no value add
Email 6
Verdict: Impersonal
Email 7
Verdict: A joke gone wrong.
