Email prospecting is getting more sophisticated, but it’s seldom smart. Why? Because it doesn’t consider context

Cold email marketing is getting very sophisticated. You could call it smart, but I shan’t, because, for reasons I’ll explain, I don’t believe it is.?

Let’s start with a cold email that I received last week.?It started thus:?

'Good morning John, happy Friday!!

I came across Write Arm a while ago and have been following your agency ever since.

According to my research on LinkedIn, it looks like you are maintaining a relatively small team of in-house developers. Have these staffing levels influenced your potential for scaling operations?'

There are two problems with this. The first is glaringly obvious: Write Arm – my company – is not a web design agency. We only offer copywriting services, so would never need developers. But we’ll let that one pass. The second is less obvious, but much more thorny. It’s the sender’s failure to recognise the wider context in which the email will be received.??

It's all about the context

Context is all. Think of that email as a finely tailored new suit. It looks fantastic when you gaze at it in the mirror, but it’s not much use if you have to run an obstacle course. In this case, the obstacle course is the proliferation of AI-driven email marketing platforms, which has resulted in your prospects receiving a lot more finely tailored cold emails than they did a couple of years ago. They generally open with statements like: ‘I’ve been following Write Arm for a while…’, ‘Love what you’re doing at Write Arm…’, ‘Really enjoyed your blog/LinkedIn post about…’?

If you only received once such email a quarter you might find it convincing, but when you receive a few every day you know there’s AI at work. Put politely, they represent a triumph of sophisticated tech over common sense. Put less politely, these days when someone I’ve never met tells me they’ve been keenly following my agency, then I’m 99% sure it’s bullshit.?

Does this mean you should give up on email prospecting? Absolutely not. It’s Write Arm’s main source of new business, but that’s only because we really consider the context in which our emails land. The growth of ‘smart’ email prospecting is part of that, but we also allow for two givens about the recipients themselves: the first is that they are probably super-smart and the second is that they are almost certainly time-poor. Unless you’re offering something truly new and different, they will know within the first couple of sentences whether your service is of interest. If it is, they’ll want to know more; if it isn’t, then why tell them things they already know and/or aren’t interested in?

First and foremost, be honest

So, Write Arm’s approach to email prospecting is to simply set out what we do and trust the recipients to work out how we could solve their challenges. Honesty is key: we don’t say we love what they do or congratulate them on their recent blog. We keep it simple and super-short. I used to advise 150 words max, but now, given the proliferation of ‘smart’ prospecting, I'd say keep it below 100.?

This is our current opener:

'Hi [NAME],

A very quick note to put Write Arm on?[COMPANY NAME]’s radar. We’re a flexible copywriting resource for marketing teams, custom matching writers to briefs in the twinkling of an eye.?

I shan’t waffle on about features and benefits, except to say that 1) we work in all major languages, 2) we also offer human-edited ChatGPT/AI content and 3) we don’t charge agency fees or retainers.

That’s it – told you it’d be quick.

Worth a chat?

Very best,

John.'

It’s honest, does very little selling and tells the reader all they need to know in just 80 words. And it works: it has a 10.15% response rate and a 4.65% positive lead rate. Replies often start along the lines: ‘I never usually respond to cold emails, but yours was different…’

Lessons from the master

Most of what I know about prospecting I learnt from Ryan Welmans , CEO of Sopro , which I reckon remains the best email marketing service in the business. He agrees that the short, sharp, honest approach is the best one. Moreover, his day-to-day experience is that personalisation can be deadly.?

He recalls, “Eighteen months ago, OpenAI's GPT was the most impressive on-the-fly situational writing toolset on the planet.?A few quick tests and we were blown away.?The extent of personalisation that could be woven into every message, instantly and effortlessly seemed miraculous.? In 2023 we integrated the ChatGPT API into our core OSS, refined our prompts and launched generative messaging across our own brand outreach just days after GPT-4 landed.? But in less than a week we learnt some hard truths about AI-generated email messaging.? Those hyper-personalised intricately-situational metaphor-loaded masterpieces killed every campaign we tried them on.”?

In other words the sharp end of the personalisation spectrum is as much of a performance trap as the blunt end. Ryan draws an analogy with the performance of generic HTML emails a decade ago: “Recipients spot your low-effort, mass-marketing approach a mile off.?It doesn't pass the sniff test.”??

But that was no reason to give up on AI. Sopro has now developed a prompt model that consistently out-performs their in-house writers.?Its nested prompts cleanly summarise the company’s 10+ years of B2B wisdom and frontline email marketing experience, while every brief passed to GPT feeds off hundreds of situational data points and niche instructions.??

“We took a performance-led approach to prompt iteration,” Ryan says. “Counter-intuitively this quickly led to dialling back the gratuitous personalisation common to most LLM messaging outputs, response rates rocketed reflecting a preferred tone and style that’s very much like Write Arm’s. To summarise: the more human the better.”

A final thought. Whether consciously or not, your prospects will assume that the way you do your email marketing reflects how you do business. So, before you start your next campaign, ask yourself: do you want to be seen as a waffling bullshitter who doesn’t consider your prospects’ real-world experiences and challenges? Some questions answer themselves.?