AUDIENCE - Who am I actually writing this for?

Offering 25 free mobile numbers worked well when we were emailing enterprise buyers for Wiza. We ran that offer to companies with fewer than 50 employees and found they wanted email data instead.

We hadn't changed the product.

We'd changed who was looking at it, and they wanted to use it differently. I could spend all day rewriting an email about mobile numbers and still be selling the smaller companies something they didn't care about.

That's something I want to understand before writing. When I talk to a founder, I want to know who buys and what that person is trying to get done. If we get through the explanation and all I have is a feature list, I still don't know what to put in the email.

Say we're selling commission software.

Finance and sales could buy the same tool for very different reasons.

The finance person is reconciling payouts before payroll. I'd show them how they can see which deals changed a commission before approving it. The VP of Sales keeps getting questions from reps about what they'll earn. I'd show them how a rep can check the calculation without asking their manager.

Both are more useful things to say than “we automate commission management.” The buyer can picture where it fits into their day.

Outcome-focused messaging booked 1,078 meetings in the 12.2 million-email analysis, or 17.1 per 100,000 sends.

That's where I'd start. Only then can I explain the feature that makes the outcome possible.

We ran into the same issue with Directive's proof. Mentioning Gong worked well with SaaS buyers. When we took that copy into other B2B markets, I went through the responses and found people who didn't know who Gong was.

To us, Gong was an obvious name to use. We'd spent so much time around SaaS that we were assuming everyone else knew it too.

If I'm emailing a manufacturer, a result from another manufacturer probably needs less explaining. If I don't have one, I can show them the work or the product. Putting an impressive logo in the email doesn't help much if the person reading it has never heard of the company.