Even in the social media age, email marketing remains a powerful growth tool. Its average ROI dwarfs that of PPC, social campaigns and even SEO. In this light, surely any spending on email marketing must be a good investment?
Sadly, no.
A poorly run outbound email campaign can do more harm for your brand than good. Especially in the current tough marketing climate. Consumers and B2B prospects are wary. Brand authenticity is in crisis. What’s more, the proliferation of automated email marketing platforms has turned potentially effective copy into background noise.
So, where do email marketing efforts go wrong, and how do automations exacerbate the problem?
Glad you asked.
Let’s take a look at what often goes wrong and how you can do automated email marketing better.
Digital marketing veterans get an involuntary shudder when they read the words ‘on blast’. Email marketing’s vast reach is deceptive. It’s easy to see it as a megaphone to amplify your message. Especially if it’s paired with a long lead list.
But strong volumes are no substitute for a solid strategy.
Without the latter, every outbound message is likely doomed to the spam folder.
Common strategic errors include:
You may, understandably, see automation as the key to email marketing success. However, implementation is key.
Email marketing isn’t simply a numbers game. Without a clear-eyed strategy and a genuine knowledge of the target reader, you’re simply multiplying the number of unread or deleted messages.
Two years ago, our CEO and founder John Ashton remarked upon a fairly typical cold email he had received. The copy praised our company and mistakenly referenced our ‘team of developers’. A team that we, as a copywriting agency, don’t have.
Every year we receive thousands of similar emails. They reference one of our case studies, say they’ve followed us for a long time, and try to strike up a conversation about something statistically likely to affect our agency.
Every one of them betrays an AI platform that’s scraped our website for a couple of data points on which to build a cold email.
It’s a trend that speaks to the dilemma of personalisation. Too little and your email reads as irrelevant boilerplate; too much and it looks dishonest.
For email marketing to work, there has to be a balance between tech and common sense. And, crucially, the tech must do more than scrape websites. In fact it needs to understand way more about recipients than conventional AI is capable of doing.
Fortunately, a new form of AI is available that is up to the job.
Most email automations are constrained by the software platforms’ parameters and the guesswork of their users.
The biggest constraint is that the platform’s AI systems don’t understand the relationship between linguistics and decision science. That’s because they’re based on LLMs, which scour vast datasets and stitch sentences together based on which word is statistically most likely to follow the last.
SDCI™ (Synthetic Deterministic Cognitive Intelligence) works fundamentally differently. The product of 11 years’ R&D, the tech is rooted in decision science and behaviour-mapping. It understands the mostly unconscious triggers that govern buying decisions and is equipped with all the nudges needed to maximise the likelihood of a conversion.
Each email is individually shaped by a huge range of variables, ranging from previous buying history, to postcode, and weather data. It understands such things as who buys when it’s raining, and who buys when it’s sunny; and which buyers are tempted by discounting, and which find it a turn-off.
What this means in practice is:
All of this makes SDCI a game-changer when it comes to marketing automations. Combined with top-tier writing talent, it has the potential to revolutionise email marketing campaigns.
While we love talking about SDCI in blog posts, we know the golden rule of good writing is ‘show, don’t tell’. Why not see for yourself how SDCI can give your email marketing a leading edge?
Call on 0845 862 4646, email info@writearm.co.uk or book a meeting here.
