Email Marketing Services | Email Copywriting Case Study
About the Project
A luxury wine and spirits company was looking for an email copywriter to craft the copy for a cold email prospecting lead sequence.
As the email copywriter on the project, I worked with the client's appointed team to drive clicks, opens and conversions as cold leads progressed through the email marketing lead sequence. The challenge was to build trust with a “cold” audience that knew little about the brand and to deliver email copy striking the right balance between salesy and not salesy enough.
Email Marketing Strategy – The Personal Touch
As the email marketing funnel was specifically created to convert cold leads, it was essential to build trust and rapport with the audience and hold their attention and interest.
The emails would be sent in plain text (rather than the usual HTML) and we saw this as an opportunity to showcase the personality of the Client Service Team representative sending the emails – a knowledgeable wine expert that genuinely wants to help people improve their wine knowledge and find the wines they like.
Unlike a generic brand email newsletter, this approach gave the email a much more personal touch.
Email Copywriting: The Right Opening
We opened the sequence by telling the engaging backstory of how our representative had gone from wine zero – being intimidated when receiving the wine list – to wine hero – being knowledgeable about wine and becoming the humble wine expert he was today.
Relatable, engaging and human, we knew this story would resonate and get the relationship with the reader on the right foot; one of our audience’s major pain points was “not having enough wine knowledge” and the desire to become a more savvy wine drinker.
Moving Along the Email Funnel
As the reader progressed along the funnel, we continued to use storytelling and parables to craft engaging and relatable content. The email topics were designed to touch on the pain points of potential customers and we continually offered them value by presenting solutions to their most common wine-related struggles.
Much of the email content was educational – to build trust and authority for the client and to reflect their genuine desire to help – we also added wine 'spot offers' along the sequence. As the company sources small quantities of wine straight from the vineyard, we capitalised on the limited availability and time-sensitivity of these offers, using the sense of urgency to drive sales.
Endless Email Optimisation
For each email, I drew on copywriting principles like storytelling and psychological triggers such as a sense of community and the curiosity gap to boost clicks. We used open and closed loops to keep the reader engaged and eagerly anticipating the next email.
Working with the client team, we continually optimised, edited and perfected the sequence as well as the subject lines, body copy and calls to action. We split tested variations to steadily Increase engagement.
Email Copywriting Results
The funnel maintained well-above-industry-average clicks and opens across the funnel – no easy feat for cold leads. We steadily saw purchases increase as our audience progressed through the email funnel and trust was built.
We achieved our goal of getting across the persona of the client representative as a helpful expert – a true reflection of the company’s expert wine team.