Return to winstonwrites.com | Subscribe to this newsletter
Check out my epic failure.
This is a 6-email campaign from 18 months ago. Sent to a cold list of 247 CROs.
It looks like a huge success.
It wasn’t.
(Disclosure: I wrote all 6 emails).
Check out those open rates: 84 to 101%.
Check out those clickthrough rates: 2-18%.
These are crazy good numbers for cold emails sent to C-suite people.
Of course I’d never show these stats in a pitch.
(No one can guarantee specific performance on campaigns.)
But here’s why this campaign was ultimately a failure.
The Reply rate was just 1%.
For this campaign, the focus was on getting the click.
So I wrote to get the click.
In cold email prospecting, you offer one Call to Action. In enterprise sales, that should probably be asking for a reply.
We should have focused on clicks for the first 3 emails, replies for the rest. Or we could have alternated.
Maybe some of those clickers became clients.
But so many CROs (or their assistants) opened 1 or more emails. How many conversations did we miss because we didn’t ask for one?
Be smarter than this campaign — decide beforehand what you should ask for, and ask for it.
Nobody replies if they can just click. People take the easiest path.
You don’t get what you don’t ask for.
Notes*:
- Email dashboard numbers can seem wonky. It says there were 3 replies but only two people who replied, because someone replied twice. And an open rate greater than 100% typically means people forwarded your email(s) — either to someone else, or to one of their other email addresses.
- I still look at this campaign and wonder WTH we were thinking.