Fixing Fatigue: How Dusk’s last minute lightning bolt landed a 62% form fill rate from a burnt out list

Heather 0:00: So we said, maybe, I know this hurts to hear, maybe they’re tired of you, frankly. 

Nikki 0:06: Welcome to email swipes, where we peek behind the scenes at the emails that catch your attention and earn their place in your swipe file. 

 0:13: Every other week, we’ll talk to an email expert about an experiment they ran, and in the following episode, we’ll dive into the strategies and methods used in the email so you can Form and inspire your own email work. 

 0:23: I’m Miki Elvas, the copywriter behind winning emails for 8 and 9 figure sassin e-commerce brands like Shopify, For Sigmatic, and Sprout Social. 

 0:31: And I know that hearing the background stories to these emails will help you turn pie in the sky insights into plug and play actions. 

 0:37: Ready to make inspiration tactical? 

 0:39: Let’s go. 

 0:40: First, let’s read today’s email. 

 0:44: Security, you can’t afford not to try. 

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 0:50: Hi Heather, your clients count on you to protect their endpoints. 

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 1:13: Here’s a success story from another MSP and sign up now for your free, fully functional 30 day trial. 

 1:18: Trying is believing. 

 1:20: Start your free trial. 

 1:23: Heather, thank you so much for joining. 

 1:24: Tell us who you are and what you do. 

 1:26: Absolutely. 

 1:27: My name is Heather Her and I am the CMO of Dusk Marketing and essentially Dusk Marketing works with businesses to help them tell a better story, is the short way of doing it. 

 1:37: What we focus on is brand and content marketing and just establishing or maybe reestablishing brand fundamentals for companies so that they can get out there and tell their story in the right way and really engage with their audiences and maybe new ways. 

 1:51: In the past, I’ve worked in agencies. 

 1:53: And on the corporate side, but always focused on brand and content marketing. 

 1:57: So maybe not as direct a connection to email except that when you start thinking about it, email is the perfect vehicle for not only creating and reinforcing brand recognition but also for furthering those content strategies. 

 2:10: So for me, I have always found that email is the way to create goodwill for brands and to get all of that content that your team is working so hard to create out into the world in the fastest way normally. 

 2:23: You have that elevator pitched down pat. 

 2:25: I am jealous. 

 2:27: Yeah, I practiced a little. 

 2:29: That’s amazing. 

 2:30: I really need to practice mine every time it’s like, oh, I have to say my bio. 

 2:33: No. 

 2:34: I don’t know. 

 2:35: I do some stuff. 

 2:37: Exactly. 

 2:38: It’s really great when it rolls off your tongue and I love the phrasing that you had of helping brands tell better stories. 

 2:43: Yep, that’s my bite-size snippet. 

 2:44: If you know nothing else, I’m gonna help you tell a better story. 

 2:47: That’s awesome. 

 2:48: OK, so basically, day to day you are are working mostly on content and branding, but then obviously that also touches through email as well. 

 2:56: Yeah, and I think for me what it ends up with normally is that sort of we’re walking into a situation where people either don’t have a content strategy built out or don’t have a brand identity stood up, or they do, but it’s been a while since they touched it, maybe some really significant things have changed and of course in going through all of that work, you end up heavily into email as well because that’s one of the key ways that most brands are. 

 3:17: Telling their stories. 

 3:19: So it’s the opportunity to kind of dig into not just literally what are you saying in your emails, although that’s a huge part of it, but how are you sending them? 

 3:26: Who are you sending them to? 

 3:28: What do they look like when they go out? 

 3:30: Are you segmenting your audiences in any way? 

 3:32: You’d be surprised how often the answer to that is no. 

 3:37: So yeah, it’s always surprising to me walking into situations with clients where sometimes these are large established businesses that have been successful. 

 3:45: Fully growing for some time and you dig in and so many of these things that marketers consider fundamentals, things that, of course, everyone is doing are not happening. 

 3:54: It’s wild. 

 3:54: In some ways, it’s very validating because it’s like you can grow a business without doing the fundamentals. 

 3:59: Absolutely. 

 4:00: The flip side is also interesting because then it’s like, hey, you’ve already created some growth and this is awesome. 

 4:04: I love that this is here for you and that you clearly have a great product, you have great people, you have really good things working for you. 

 4:12: So if we You can just get these fundamentals sorted. 

 4:14: There’s even more that you could do. 

 4:16: So that’s also a fun story to be able to tell. 

 4:18: It’s much better than, much easier to than walking into a business that maybe is struggling and say, OK, let’s figure out if we can fix this. 

 4:25: But to be able to come in and say, Hey, you’re already doing so many things right, we just need to tweak a few things. 

 4:30: We need to fill a few holes and then build on that success. 

 4:33: So that’s more fun for sure. 

 4:35: And what you were saying before in terms of the brands that come that they had that strategy in place. 

 4:39: But then things have changed. 

 4:41: Those are always really fun when things have changed and you’re like, OK, let’s adapt. 

 4:44: This is great. 

 4:45: Yeah, exactly. 

 4:45: OK, so tell me a little bit about this client, the work you were doing for them, and then we could segue into this particular email. 

 4:52: Yeah, actually, so this one was interesting because it was work that we were doing for a client who was an agency. 

 4:58: Initially, we came on as overflow for the agency to just take on extra work as things happened and they got handed this particular work with, they were working directly with. 

 5:07: Web route to try and pull things together for the agency’s client base and just we’re kind of struggling with making it work, you know, we’ll dig into it, of course, a little bit more when we talk specifically about the email, but just really looking for, it was very specifically in the tech space, which is where a lot of my background already was just by luck of the draw that they didn’t know that coming in. 

 5:27: And so it was really fun for me to dig into with them working with how the tech space is different and how working with and Audience that is focused on technology and in sort of managed service providers and that sort of environment is a little bit of a different space than maybe some of the, a lot of the people that they were working with otherwise were in the retail space or there were even a few like in education. 

 5:50: So it was a much different feel. 

 5:52: And so it was fun to dig in and talk through with them how a tech audiences is. 

 5:57: I mean, we’re all people, and we’re all looking for the same things to some degree, but how the tech audience is a little different. 

 6:02: That’s always fun when you are cross industry and getting to show your expertise. 

 6:07: Exactly. 

 6:07: So were you the lead on this particular project? 

 6:10: Yes, I was the lead on the project. 

 6:12: I worked really closely with a really fantastic, super talented graphic designer who helped support me through it. 

 6:18: Sadly, she is no longer working in graphic design, which fills me with sadness, but she has gone on to do some really cool other things. 

 6:24: That were aligned to some of her other interests, so super happy to see her happy. 

 6:28: But yeah, we got a really minimal creative brief on it. 

 6:30: So that’s not always a good thing. 

 6:32: But in this case, it was a fun opportunity because it didn’t really tie us down to anything. 

 6:37: So we had a lot of flexibility to kind of play with ideas. 

 6:40: Nice. 

 6:41: OK. 

 6:41: Sometimes that is not a good thing. 

 6:43: Yeah, it’s usually not a good thing. 

 6:45: But in this case, I think the scope was limited enough that it was OK. 

 6:48: And I love how generous you are with her leaving, how you’re happy that she’s happy because that’s so disappointing when you find a vendor that you like. 

 6:56: It was, it was so sad. 

 6:57: And it’s funny too because I think we had such a good connection and it’s hard to find those people. 

 7:01: But yeah, she’s gone on to work in costuming and you can just see how happy she is. 

 7:05: So I can’t begrudge anyone that amount of joy. 

 7:08: Oh, that’s amazing. 

 7:10: So let’s talk about the evolution of this email. 

 7:11: How did it get started? 

 7:13: Yeah. 

 7:14: So initially, like I said, I was working really heavily in tech. 

 7:17: So initially it was really just a conversation around how do we work in the tech space in an agency that wasn’t really used to working so much with tech. 

 7:25: So we were talking a lot about, you know, in my experience, what we had seen sort of work or not work in the space and kind of had a good idea of some of the parameters, knowing that we had to be really focused on value add, which I don’t think is unique to tech, but I think it’s just a much heavier lean there. 

 7:41: But then in the end, honestly, the final approach was kind of a last minute lightning bolt sort of situation because we had gone through so many potential iterations when you’re working in tech marketing in particular, it’s really easy to fall into sort of a, a comfortable space of this is how you talk about tech products because they have the unique challenge in some ways of being something where it’s difficult to show. 

 8:04: Like, I can’t say like, here’s this delicious hamburger. 

 8:07: There’s not something tangible. 

 8:08: And even if you can show a screenshot or some in-app experience or something like that, it’s not always pretty sometimes, or even if it is, it’s not something that’s gonna resonate well with the audience. 

 8:19: So it definitely ended up being sort of like, we kind of gone through a lot of the other things that the client had tried out. 

 8:26: There were a ton of emails that they were sending out around the ways that switching over to using Web root, which was the initial point of the email to get them to use Web root, that this would benefit them, that they would have have a better experience, that they would get a better experience from working with the agency, and they just had almost no engagement, essentially zero open rates, and we kind of figured out through the brainstorming process that the issue was, or at least we thought that the issue was that the agency itself had gone through a ton of changes and they had been putting out a lot more communication through email than they had in the past. 

 9:02: And so essentially, none of their emails were being opened. 

 9:05: It wasn’t just these. 

 9:06: And so as we dug in and got to Talk about it more, came to the conclusion that there was a really good chance that this was just communication fatigue. 

 9:14: Their audience was tired of hearing from them. 

 9:17: There had been brand changes, there had been changes to their product portfolio. 

 9:21: There had been some leadership changes and all of those things in just a few months had gone out via email campaigns, and for the most part, all of them had gone out to their entire database because these were all high-level overarching changes being made. 

 9:35: So we said, maybe, I know this hurts. 

 9:38: To hear, maybe they’re tired of you, frankly. 

 9:41: And so we took a different approach with it and we branded everything web root. 

 9:45: We had permission from Web root to do it as well. 

 9:47: So we branded everything web root. 

 9:49: The emails came from a web root email inbox instead, and it wasn’t until it funneled down to the end of the content that it said, Hey, this is also through this agency. 

 9:59: This is how it’s gonna make your agency experience better. 

 10:01: So we still were able to reuse most of the messaging that we had, that had been created. 

 10:08: in previous campaigns that had not done well to tell that same story around these are the user benefits. 

 10:13: This is the value you’re going to get from this. 

 10:15: But by leading the way with Web root and really leveraging all of the brand equity that Web root had with this audience, it made all the difference and we got some pretty crazy results. 

 10:26: It’s such a unique story. 

 10:28: It really validates your hypothesis because you reuse the same content, you just branded it differently and you just sent it from a different sender. 

 10:35: So clearly you are on. 

 10:37: Of all, yeah, frankly, we were relieved to see it because coming in with a new client, it feels like a big risk to say like, hey, we think maybe it’s just they’re tired of you. 

 10:46: Yeah. 

 10:48: so we were taking kind of a risk. 

 10:49: We said, let’s play with it. 

 10:50: And the great thing about email is that worst case scenario, if we sent out the campaign and it also didn’t work. 

 10:56: OK, we can just try again. 

 10:58: We have other options if this isn’t the way to go. 

 11:00: But we were really lucky and we saw some results really quickly. 

 11:04: So it was very, very validating from our perspective. 

 11:07: So what was your strategy afterwards for this brand that everyone was so tired of? 

 11:13: How did you get people that is definitely the bigger story. 

 11:17: So we ended up working with them on a long term drawn out communication strategy, content strategy that went way more into, you know, here’s what needs to go into email, here’s what can stay on your website, here’s what’s available for social because their strategy up to that point was essentially just scattershot, put everything everywhere, and then that way, the people who need to see it will see it. 

 11:37: And leading up to this season of change for them, they had really not been putting out a ton of communication. 

 11:44: And so it worked out all right for them because even though everything was on every possible channel, there wasn’t that much going out and the clients that they were working with, they were bringing so closely with that most of the communications felt intentional. 

 11:58: Most of the clients were only seeing them on a channel or two, so it worked out all right. 

 12:02: And I think that they were also very much in the mindset that a lot of marketers fall into. 

 12:07: I’m tired of seeing it because I see it all the time, but the audience doesn’t see it that much. 

 12:11: So it’s probably fine. 

 12:13: It’s probably gonna work. 

 12:14: So we kind of had to back them all the way out of it. 

 12:16: And essentially, we rebuilt their content strategy to start from beginning to say, what do you really want to say? 

 12:22: What are you really here to do? 

 12:25: What is your story? 

 12:25: What are you really here to do, to say, to help people do? 

 12:29: And then from there, we’re able to build out a much more intentional and targeted content strategy, making sure that they were really using. 

 12:37: You know, intentionally, I think for them in the beginning, it was very much, almost like the way that a lot of people treat social, which is also problematic of just like, I just email just to send it by email. 

 12:48: And so talking them through, you know, email has a purpose. 

 12:52: There are times when email is absolutely the best channel and times when we back off from it, really teaching them how to use their strategy to target specifically, not every email needs to go to every client or potential clients, walking them through all of that. 

 13:07: Now they’ve had a lot of success. 

 13:08: We actually haven’t worked with them in a couple of months because they’re doing well right now, and we check back in every so often just to make sure. 

 13:15: But yeah, they have had a lot of success in, being able to sort of target things more clearly. 

 13:20: Certainly one of the things that we see across the board is audiences want to feel like you know who they are and what they need and why they should care about you. 

 13:28: And so certainly focusing a little more on all of the targeting and leading them in the right direction in terms of putting the right stories in front of the right parts of their. 

 13:36: The audience has made a really big difference. 

 13:39: That’s such a fun story. 

 13:40: It was a lot of fun. 

 13:41: It’s funny. 

 13:42: Most of my typical questions, I feel like don’t fit here because it’s such a unique experience and a unique story that if you were going to do this again, you know, well, that’s one of the classics. 

 13:51: If you’re going to do this again, what changes would make? 

 13:53: Like when is this ever gonna happen again? 

 13:55: It’s probably not gonna happen again. 

 13:56: I will say though, it’s funny because I thought about that a little bit, you know, would I do it again? 

 14:00: Would I do it differently? 

 14:02: And I think even if I found myself in exactly the same situation again, which is Probably not going to happen. 

 14:08: I don’t think I would take the same approach now because audiences are so different now. 

 14:12: This wasn’t that long ago, but audiences need more from brands now. 

 14:17: They want to know you’re aligned to them socially. 

 14:20: They wanna understand where you stand in the world as a business and what you’re doing to make the world a better place as younger audiences come in and stakeholders are getting air shifting younger, they’re expecting more from businesses. 

 14:32: And so if I had this to do again, if I found myself in the same. 

 14:36: Incredibly unique experience. 

 14:38: I think I would take more risks. 

 14:40: I think that we could have had more fun with the design. 

 14:43: I think we could have been punchier with a copy. 

 14:45: I think that there are ways that we could do it now that would create something that felt a little more modern. 

 14:50: And again, in the moment we had great success, they went from almost 0% open rate to like 34% in a couple of weeks, 26% click through rate, 62% form fill rate. 

 15:03: So crazy good results. 

 15:05: But I don’t. 

 15:06: No, I think that I would take more risks and be a little bolder if I had this to do again today. 

 15:12: Yeah, it’s funny how time is so short. 

 15:15: It change so quickly. 

 15:16: You can’t use the same strategy again. 

 15:18: You really have to just keep iterating and changing. 

 15:20: It’s what makes the work exciting. 

 15:22: It’s true. 

 15:23: It’s what makes it fun. 

 15:24: It’s really true. 

 15:25: What was the reaction when you told them like, I mean, nobody wants to hear like, hey, your strategy is kind of bad. 

 15:31: So, but thankfully, you know, we came in with the understanding that we were probably going to shake things up, that the things they were doing in the moment weren’t working the way they wanted them to. 

 15:40: And so we were very Lucky that they were ready. 

 15:43: They were ready to hear that there were things we could try to do differently. 

 15:47: And because we could come in and say, hey, we’re gonna try this. 

 15:50: We’re gonna see how this works. 

 15:51: We’re basing this on our expertise, but we can’t be sure. 

 15:54: We don’t know for sure. 

 15:56: So we’ll try it out. 

 15:57: The initial plan was we’ll give it a couple of months and see how things go. 

 16:00: And we were super lucky that we were seeing results in a couple of weeks. 

 16:04: So that, of course, also lessened the blow a little bit to say like, we know we gave you bad news, but look, it’s working. 

 16:12: It’s true. 

 16:12: It’s much better news than just being one of those bad agencies that doesn’t do the work that they’re hired for. 

 16:18: What a fun story. 

 16:19: Thank you for sharing. 

 16:20: Yeah, of course. 

 16:21: OK, so what are your favorite brands to get email inspiration from? 

 16:25: Oh man, OK, that’s a big question, long list. 

 16:29: There are so many good ones. 

 16:31: Honestly, I think right now one of the ones that I love and it’s super funny because I subscribe to their emails, but frankly, they probably don’t love me because I don’t buy from them very often. 

 16:40: I have a lot of res, but one of my favorites right now is Patagonia. 

 16:45: I’m based in the Netherlands, so that’s one of the bigger reasons why I don’t buy from them as often. 

 16:49: when I was in the States, but I love the way that they really lean into. 

 16:54: First of all, their emails are super interactive. 

 16:56: There’s always some functionality that’s a lot of fun. 

 16:58: There’s something you can play with or you can click through to something that is not just a page where you buy a jacket or whatever. 

 17:05: But I love the story they tell because I love the way that they lean into, you know, Yeah, this is a jacket, but it’s not just about keeping you warm. 

 17:13: It’s about picking on an adventure. 

 17:15: You’re gonna do bold, amazing things because this jacket is so well prepared to like scale of an iceberg or something. 

 17:23: So they really lean into some of the extreme examples of the way you might use their product and it makes it feel like, oh, This is a product for exciting people. 

 17:32: We all want to be exciting people. 

 17:34: I don’t want to scale a glacier, but I do want to be exciting. 

 17:37: And then also from a larger brand perspective, because I can’t help thinking through that part of it. 

 17:41: I love the way that they really lean into their values. 

 17:44: They’re very like staunchly aligned at every turn to who they are as a company and what they want to stand for in the world. 

 17:52: And it certainly creates some controversy for them. 

 17:55: But as any good marketer knows, controversy is not always a bad thing. 

 17:59: And I really enjoy that. 

 18:01: I enjoy that they really just lean hard into this is what we stand for, and if you don’t like it, there are other options. 

 18:07: See, but they don’t hate you for being on the list because then you talk on the podcast about how awesome they are. 

 18:12: That’s true. 

 18:13: So maybe I’ve balanced the scales again. 

 18:16: Who knows how many sales they’re gonna get now? 

 18:18: Yeah, Patagonia, if you’re listening, I would like a tiny discount. 

 18:24: And free shipping to the Netherlands. 

 18:25: That would be great. 

 18:26: Yeah. 

 18:26: In fact, skip the discount, free shipping. 

 18:28: That’s all I need. 

 18:29: Yes, that’s so great. 

 18:31: I love hearing the why, why people like certain brands, so that staying true to their brands, it makes for such good content. 

 18:39: It’s so easy when you have landmarks that you know you’re following, then you create the content that fits inside. 

 18:46: And I think it also, it feels. 

 18:48: Really authentic all the time because they’re always, even if it’s literally, please go buy this, which is, you know, very transactional, every single part of the messaging, the imagery they use, the colors they use, the way they set up their emails, how they’re targeting their audiences, that one’s a little bit of a guess, but I would assume it all aligns back. 

 19:07: It all ties back to who we are as a company and how we want to be in the world. 

 19:10: And so when you get an email from them. 

 19:13: It feels like it matters a little more. 

 19:15: It feels well targeted, like I don’t get emails from them about every single product that they ever have sold. 

 19:24: I get emails that are more aligned to the things I’ve interacted with in the past, and that’s such a simple thing from an email marketing perspective, but they do it so well. 

 19:33: because they tie that targeting back into that super core brand identity in a way that just makes it feel like you’re getting an email from somebody that you know. 

 19:43: That’s pretty impressive from a big brand. 

 19:45: Yeah, agreed. 

 19:46: OK, thank you so much for your time and expertise and your really unique story. 

 19:50: Really appreciate you coming on. 

 19:51: Thank you. 

 19:52: Yeah, sure. 

 19:53: Thanks for joining me for email story time. 

 19:56: If you enjoyed today’s story, give this podcast a review, so email marketers like you can have more fun with email. 

 20:02: See you next week when we dig into this story’s takeaways.