Opinion: ‘Set it and forget it’ never works in email marketing

Photo credit: Pixabay.

Set it and forget it—if only everything worked this way.

These days, even if one out of 10 prospects reply to your cold email (with automated follow-ups and essentially no degree of personalization apart from addressing the first name or the company name of the recipient), it’s a big deal. Because honestly, who still checks the promotions folder? And if you’re lucky enough, you won’t get marked as spam.

As appealing as it sounds to get the process started and not having to check on it until it shows results, this doesn’t impress (only exception: if you’re slow cooking beef stew, then trust me, it’s impressive).

The problem with automation

In the marketing scenario, be it social media or email, parts of your process can be automated. There are a lot of tools out there that do the work of an SDR (sales development rep). But a few months in marketing will make you realize that these are just tools for your marketing. They are bots. They don’t have their own voice and not a lot of cold automated emails are heard. They aren’t loud enough to disrupt the crowd of thousands of other companies who are playing pretend-humans.

GIF credit: Tumblr.

Cadence, which is essentially a sequence of automated emails and follow-ups, is actually very selfish. I call it selfish mostly because the emails are sent for the sake of sending it. The sender is aware that there’s a huge chance that it will get marked as spam. Everybody hates being spammed, but manually sending each mail and extensively personalizing it isn’t feasible. So what are a few ways to make your automated routine more human?

1. Broadly personalize it

What I mean here is, make it personalized for each company, geography, or whichever broad parameter you use. If you’re picking a company, one way to personalize it is by congratulating them on any recent news like funding, mergers, and acquisitions. This is becoming quite common. Another way is to geographically personalize it by, say, mixing languages. Here’s what worked for PipeCandy‘s clients:

What we did was, we reached out to a company in Singapore and included a bit of Singlish (a mix of English and Singaporean slang) in our template. This worked for us.

2. Pay attention to time zones

3. Don’t be a Smart Alec

4. Engage in light conversations