How to catch a salmon in a river of shit

“Is the humble email dead?” was the question I put to our content performance director, Neil, last week.

“Of course it bloody isn’t, ya idiot,” he said, looking at me with genuine reproach. “The trouble isn’t email, it’s the river of shit emails are floating in.”

“How so, Neil?” I asked.

“Ok, I’ll tell you what,” he said, settling in. 

I waited as he crossed his arms and nudged his glasses up his face with a finger.

“Do you like fishing?”

I explained that I didn’t. 

“Well, I do,” he said, casting another reproachful glare in my direction with the singular grace of a fly fisher. “And you know the funny thing about salmon?”

“Go on,” I said.

“The place we most like to catch them, in rivers – is where they’re least hungry. Because salmon do their feeding out at sea, right, and they only come up-river to spawn.

“So if you’re fishing for salmon on a river, which you generally are, then you need a fly that’s so flamboyant that it appeals to more than the salmon’s hunger; it has to pique their curiosity.”

I liked what Neil was saying. Say more stuff, I said.

“Well, that’s the same as email. There was a time when people were hungry for emails, when we used to have 70% click rates, when people would actually share emails amongst friends and colleagues.

“But that hunger no longer exists,” he went on. “We’re saturated to fuck by the river of shit from marketers in our inboxes.”

So the humble email is dead, I said.

“No!” said Neil with palpable exasperation. “It’s just that all you bloody idiot copywriters are fishing with flies that look like food and getting yourselves off over phrases like palpable exasperation.”

“I see,” I said. And I saw.

And what happened next was that Neil taught me to tie flamboyant flies. That is, he taught me to write emails that would catch salmon in a river of shit. 

What follows is a record of that lesson. From breaking the format and doing more within the email, to harmonizing the nurture flow with the format and using performance data to make the content experience better. And by reading on, you too can learn to catch salmon. Big, beautiful, juicy ones.

The existing format is broken, <Name>

Every B2B marketer knows how to write a nurture email. But just in case you’re a confused fisherperson who’s landed here wondering what the heck is going on, this is what I’m talking about…

[Subject Line] <Name>, question/teaser/product
[Preheader] Unpack what you’re offering a little

[In-email headline] Bold hero line, continuing the theme but not repeating the phrasing from SL/PH.

[Body copy]
Hi/Hello/- <Name>,

1-2 sentences setting the context for the thing you’re flogging. Open with a question? Or do what 40% of us do and use a statistic.

Introduce the actual thing you’re flogging, be that an eBook, an event, a fishing rod. 1-2 short sentences. Use italics for the name of the thing.

A bulleted list of:
– the things
– that thing
– contains.

A summarizing CTA line, if you’re feeling kind.

Ta very much,

<Sign off>

[CTA Button] Download now/Learn more/Let’s fish etc.

Writing emails like this is actually quite smart in a wily, cunning sort of way. Because nothing this safe will get you fired. And your clients will probably like it because it’s what they’ve come to expect.

But all B2B marketers know that this format feels tired. So tired in fact, that we can write them in our sleep. And we can write them so fast that we’ve got tons of time to go and make a nice strong coffee to wake ourselves up afterwards.

The elephant in the room is, we also do it knowing it won’t actually work. Would any of us click the emails we write?

Then there’s the elephant’s elephant in the room – we also know that the basic emails we write could quite easily be written by ChatGPT. In fact, that’s what’s about to happen.

Or, as Neil would put it: the river of shit is about to become a torrent of shite. And if there’s one thing Neil hates more than shit, it’s shite.

So what to do about all this?

“Go bold, go different – and subvert the format,” says Neil.

It’s time to get subversive

Subverting the format means more than wearing sunglasses while you write and only using one hand to type. Alas, there is no such quick hack here.

Because what’s really needed is time to think creatively about the nurture campaign as a whole. About how each element of the campaign can reveal something different and unique about the product or service you’re marketing.

But for those in search of a quick tip to get started, here are a few suggestions:

1. Vary the length and style of emails across the campaign

   A nurture campaign is designed to build interest, so an excellent way of doing that is by keeping your audience guessing about what’s coming next.

   Try changing the length of emails at different points of the campaign, going into more detail for one email and using just a couple of lines of copy in another. And experiment with style. If the brand voice is playful yet informative, then show these characteristics across different parts of the campaign. Variety is your friend.

2. Harmonize the nurture flow and the product

   In an ideal world, the nurture flow of a campaign should reflect something of the product or service it’s marketing.

   When we did a nurture campaign for CleverTap educating targets about the importance of timely user engagement in order to increase app adoption, the cadence of the emails in the nurture flow followed key adoption milestones. So on day one we told targets that they were now in CleverTap’s automation flow, and that if they were their own app user then there was a 30% chance they would already have abandoned their app. The email they received on day 2 said that had increased to 70% and so forth.

   The key is making sure there’s synergy between the subversion of the format and the payoff or relevance of the product or service.

3. Do more within the email

   The classic approach says that emails are merely a conduit to a landing or campaign page. But if that’s all you’re aiming for then you’re missing a trick.

   Because creating emails that people actually want to interact with should be the gold standard for a nurture campaign. It is the true essence of engagement.

   So ask yourself how you can bring more interactivity to your campaign. Are there curious or inspiring stats that you can create a binary poll around? Try asking your targets to guess the answer to a yes or no question and offer the answer at the next stage of the journey. What other tech can you embed in the email to gamify or enhance the interactivity of the experience for readers?

4. Test, test, test

   Working in some innovative A/B testing metrics at different points of your campaign is a way not just to break the format, but to keep reinventing it.

   You can test along many different lines: length of emails, use of statistics, placement of the CTA button etc. Just make sure your testing is centered around a specific goal and take the findings of the test and feed them back into your campaign. So if you find that a 2-sentence email outperforms a 4-paragraph version you send out at the same time on the same topic, then consider using shorter formats for subsequent phases of the campaign.

5. Or use a platform instead of an email…

   While we’re not saying that email is dead, we’ve got to acknowledge that it’s only for certain times and places now.

   There’s a clear move at the moment from email to platforms like LinkedIn, particularly when it comes to bottom of the funnel content. So consider using remarketing strategies based on different ad types (static, motion, carousel, conversational etc.) to deploy case studies or product information to reflect different areas of engagement. And use messaging and InMail if you’re looking to create omni-channel outreach processes that aim for as many touches as possible.

   Then of course there’s ABM. We’re actively looking towards ABM personalization as target accounts cross a threshold from broad to personal targeting. Which will mean working on account plans with research to create generic assets that sales teams can tweak with content or other angles to win attention.

Let’s catch some salmon

So, it’s time to dust off your fishing tackle, pour a whole ton of creative thought into how you thread The Most Bombastic Fly Ever™ and drop a line into Neil’s proverbial river of shit.

A sentence I never thought I’d write. Nevertheless, I think you get where I’m coming from. And ultimately, this is about writing things that we wouldn’t have expected to write, isn’t it.

“Ah, there you go again, copywriter writer boy,” I hear Neil mutter quietly from a distant chamber of my deepest subconscious. 

“You’re right though,” he adds. “That’s exactly what this is about, Joe Boy: doing the unexpected. Because by doing the unexpected, you might actually nurture some interest in the things you’re trying to sell.”

Hopefully this blog has inspired you to break from the shoal and make your next nurture campaign as unexpected as it is unforgettable. But if you’d like to chat about how we can help, then Neil would love to talk. He’s actually a very nice man.