May 11, 2017 by Ashwini Murthy

Email marketing campaigns are notorious for their monotony. Take an email template that has been working well for you, add 2 follow-up email templates, personalise it to address the recipient by their first name and mention their company’s name somewhere and BAM! You just made yourself the most basic email marketing campaign which every sales/marketing person is guilty of using at some point of time in their careers. If you’re still using that method, then this article is for you.

“Set it and forget it” is the commonly followed tactic. Not having to check on a process till it shows results sounds fun, doesn’t it? But it doesn’t impress much unless you’re slow-cooking beef stew.  Only exception: if you’re slow-cooking beef stew, then trust me, it’s impressive.

The Bot Problem

Automated email campaigns are simple. There are a lot of softwares which let you schedule and send emails in bulk. Every other SDR is using the same or similar softwares for their campaigns. How are you any different? How do you intend to cut through the crowd of bots pretending to be humans and make yourself heard?

Sending a chain of emails and follow-ups to it in a set order without any form of human interception from the sender’s side is a selfish thing to do. It means you are blindly bombarding a few hundred people in the hopes that at least a handful will reply. The positivity of the response is secondary. The sender knows that there’s a high chance the email will be marked as spam. Sending a personalised email to every recipient isn’t the solution. So, how do you make it sound more.. Human?

  1. Time Zones!

Emailing in the wrong time isn’t just discourteous, it’s also very foolish. Emails sent after work hours will go unchecked and get lost in a pile of emails the next morning. Either that or it will piss them off. Always keep in mind the time zone in which your recipient lives.

  2. Chit-chat your way out of a ‘No’

A negative response is still good in the sense that the prospect has acknowledged your presence. Instead of dealing it with persistence, accept the no and engage in chit chat. Here’s how we do it:




3. Being overly smart will definitely bite you in the rear

Many SDRs are resorting to creative email templates to garner attention. Great thinking, indeed. But, it is easy to overstep creativity and let some cockiness seep into your email. With such an email, there’s no way you can repair the impression you’ve made on your client. Here’s an example of one such email we received:


This had about 5 follow-ups, and they all went unanswered. For those who don’t know: Ghajini is a king who invaded India 17 times to plunder all of the country’s wealth and conquer it. Needless to say, this falls under things not to mention in an already aggressive email.

4. Step-up the degree of personalisation

Personalising to the extent of first name and company is overdone. Next step would be to broadly personalise it based on the geography, company or whichever broad parameter you can think of. If you’re doing it on a company level, congratulating on recent funding or mergers/acquisitions is a good idea. That’s becoming common these days. Another way would be to include the local slang in your emails. Here’s what we did:


We wrote to a prospect in Singapore in Singlish which is English in Singaporean slang.


It is all about empathy. Nobody likes to be bombarded with emails by a bot. Disguise wisely.

Ashwini Murthy

Content marketer @ PipeCandy

A writer by day. Illustrator by night. Currently trying to conquer the B2B marketing world one baby step at a time. Loves everything outside her comfort zone.