Create better automated emails

Create better-automated emails

Vital Agency shares some ideas about the importance of trying new things and how to get away from habits when working with clients.

You don't have to have worked in an agency for long to discover that experimentation makes clients nervous. And can you blame them? Who wants to pay money to waste time with unproven strategies? You hire an agency for its expertise.

Of course, this puts agencies in a bind. How to test new tactics or ideas without risking the client's money or the relationship? For digital marketing agency Vital, the answer is quite simple.

"We're the guinea pigs," says Doug Ridley, consulting director. "When we show an idea to the client, we know it will work because we have executed it."

That willingness to experiment with themselves has played a big role in Vital's growth and has also led to new ways of thinking about email, marketing automation, and the art of copywriting.

Throw away the standards

With hundreds of new subscribers joining Vital's email list every month, it may seem strange that Ridley isn't satisfied. The problem, however, was what happened after someone subscribed.

"When a new subscriber joined our list, they received a standard welcome email," says Ridley. "And ours were no different than anyone else's. It said, 'Welcome to our list, here's what you're looking for, here are some links to our blog, here are some resources.' You've seen it hundreds of times before."

Even the subject line was predictable: Thank you and welcome to the newsletter.

"We started looking at our welcome message through a strategic lens and thought, 'We have a ton of people subscribing monthly. What are we doing? This is a huge missed opportunity,'" Ridley says.

Instead of sending a standard message to new subscribers, Ridley and his team decided to see what to do to turn that first email into a stronger engagement piece. After some initial trial and error, they discovered that the best way to get an answer was to simply ask the right question.

"With automation, one of the issues is making sure you're still ready to engage with your subscribers," Ridley says. "You can't just set it and forget it. What we realized was that we could use that first automated email to ask our subscribers about their biggest pain points and explain how we could share useful content to help them with their problems."

It was this shift in thinking that led Vital to use automation to talk to people instead of at people. And the results speak for themselves.

“Our welcome email has a 41.4% open rate,” says Ridley. "People respond by telling us what they need and our team is ready to give it to them. The strategy has worked so well for us that we have started using it with all our clients who use Mailchimp."

"The goal became trying to get a response... It's changed the way our writers work."

Be yourself

One of the keys to the success of the new welcome email, Ridley says, was good writing. But it forced writers to start thinking a little differently about the goals of automation.

“The goal becomes trying to get a response to every email,” Ridley says. "When someone reads it, it should feel like it was sent to them by a real person who took the time to sit down and write them a message. It's changed the way our writers work."

With the new goal in mind, writers began including that personal approach in every email they wrote.

"There's always an invitation, a line that says, 'I'm a real person writing this and if you have a question, feel free to answer.' This message always gets a great response. Just inviting people to respond draws them in," Ridley says.

Vital assigns writers to specific accounts to create a continuity of voice that reinforces the idea of ​​a real person behind the email.

“Our writers are engaged with clients from the beginning, so they understand what the client wants and what they are trying to achieve,” Ridley says. "The success of our automated campaigns comes from a collaboration between the writer and the client."

Clients are also strongly engaged in the writing process, providing us with information not only on objectives and comparative analysis but also on the particularities and idiosyncrasies of the company.

"We'll respond to our customers with more text and ask, 'How do we make this more like you?' "We want to know how they use language, how they talk to their customers, what makes them unique," says Ridley. “Getting that information to the writer leads to better emails.”

Requested response

The success of this approach has changed the way Vital treats email as a marketing channel.

"As a digital marketing agency, our goal has always been to drive traffic to the website to convert through a form," says Ridley. "But suddenly we realized that we don't have to do that. If we want conversion, we just have to make the reader click Reply."

It's one less step customers have to take without losing service. They can still request an appointment or more information, or simply contact. Now the whole process is much more personal.

“It worked so well that our entire email campaign strategy changed,” Ridley says. "Instead of sending emails every time there was a blog post or focusing so much on the website, we started sending automated content a couple of times a week. And since our writers have done a good job creating those emails, our subscribers want to interact with them.

5 Quick Tips for Writing Interesting Emails

Whether you have a team of writers at your disposal or not, there are some things everyone can do to write more effective emails. Here are 5 quick tips you can start using today.

1. Coordinate the style with the client. “Our writers follow a style guide that is tailored to the client they are writing for,” Ridley says. “It helps maintain brand consistency and leads to better engagement.” Bad styling can cause subscribers to ask if they've made a mistake.

2. Watch what everyone else does and then do the opposite. "When your subject line is the same one everyone is using, you get lost in people's inboxes," Ridley says. If you say something unique, you're more likely to be considered.

3. Be smart about rewording. “Mailchimp is great for testing,” says Ridley. "And that the data unquestionably substantiates our corrections." If a campaign doesn't seem to be working, test, rewrite, and test again.

4. Be direct in your writing. Ask what you want. "It was important to let people know we wanted to hear from them," Ridley says. "People aren't used to responding to a welcome email." If you can make it clear to your reader what you want, you'll be more likely to get it.

5. Write with a goal in mind. "Our writers knew the goal was to get a response," Ridley says. "That informed everything they wrote." If you're having trouble figuring out what to write, a well-defined goal can help you clarify things.