A few years ago, I met someone at a business networking event. Her husband owned a photography studio and needed help with their email marketing campaigns. After looking at the emails they were sending, I right away saw that there was room for improvement.

I agreed to craft 3 separate campaigns for them, promoting their services that people didn’t know they offered. I spent hours copywriting a series of emails for each of their services. I had created what I felt was the perfect set of automated email sequences. I was positive that I’d get them the results they wanted. I’m a professional email marketer, after all!!

Finally came the fateful day. I clicked SEND and waited for the clicks to come in.

But they didn’t.

Worse yet, the open rates from MY emails were several percentage points below what they’d historically been getting.

Needless to say, after that disastrous experience, they never spoke to me again.

Has that ever happened to you? Have you ever gone from confident hubris to crushing defeat?

So, what went wrong? In retrospect, LOTS!

In my (over)confidence, I wrote their emails in my voice; not theirs. I felt that my voice was better than theirs and that I’d get better results. But in my arrogance, I failed to realize that a strange voice doesn’t build trust. In fact, it does the opposite.

What I should have done: I should have read several of their emails until I understood their voice. Then, the promotional copy that I wrote would have been expressed in their words, in their style of communication. This event took place long before A.I. copywriting tools came into existence. If I were to do it today, I would absolutely add paragraphs of their email copy to my prompts. A.I. copywriting tools are really good at imitating style and voice in the content they produce.

I sent a general campaign to their mailing list highlighting the three under-utilized services they wanted to promote. The email body had links to visit the landing pages on their website that explained more about each of the services. Then, depending upon which link they clicked, they would be automatically added to a specific sequence of three emails that promoted that specific feature of interest.

What I should have done: Given the fact that the email was promoting three of their under-utilized services, I should have realized it’s axiomatic that the click rate on that email would be low.

There’s a reason why these services were under-utilized. Sometimes business owners get caught up in their own hubris. They tend to think that the reason why no one buys one of their products is just because no one knows about it. They don’t like to consider the possibility that no one buys a product because no one wants it.

I should have first created a Product Education email sequence, and added their entire email list to this sequence. Instead of just a single email, this Product Education sequence should have had at least 4 emails promoting their under-utilized services.

Finally, after the Product Education sequence was completed, only then should I have added the contacts to the feature-specific email sequence, depending upon which links they clicked.

The email service provider I was using at the time was different than the one they were using. I ran their entire campaign using my provider not theirs. Classic mistake, and I should have known better. I believe this mistake was the Number One cause for campaign's failure

What I should have done: I should have run the entire campaign using their email service provider, not mine. There were a lot of moving parts in this case. I was promoting new products. I was writing email copy in a different voice. By changing email service providers, I introduced an element of variability that was impossible to quantify and separate out from all the other variable elements.

I’m almost positive that the main reason why the open rates were abysmal is because the vast majority of the emails got routed to the recipients’ spam folders. I was using a completely new From address and they were being sent from a completely new set of IP addresses. And as I mentioned in one of my blog posts about email deliverability, if mailbox providers have never seen the combination of from address and IP address before, then they’re more likely to route the email to spam than to the inbox.

Here's what I learned from this mistake: