04Section 4 of 8
BODY & TONE - How to write and test
When we first begin writing for Fyxer, they gave us this super long founder-story style email. It went against all of the best practices that cold emailers preach about, so we of course tested it alongside a few of our versions that followed these best practices.
Their version beat ours.
They understood their product and their customers better than we did. The email sounded like them. We eventually combined what worked in their copy with our shorter version, and that became the better winner.
They'd written about five to ten variants, so this wasn't a case of everything the founders touched working. One stood out. We had to send the emails to find it.
That's why I like asking a founder how they'd write to one person if they had ten minutes to research them. I want to know what they'd say before we make it sound like our idea of a cold email.
Imagine the founder of our hypothetical commission tool explains it like this:
The rep wants to know what they'll make on a deal, so they ask their manager. Then the manager has to ask finance, and someone's opening a spreadsheet. We let the rep see the deal and the calculation themselves.
I'd use that explanation to write something like:
If your reps have to ask what they'll make on a deal, we built a way for them to check it themselves. They can see the deal and how their commission was calculated.
I can shorten the explanation without losing the reason someone would use the product. Calling it a revenue-performance platform would make the reader work harder to figure that out.
Everstage gave us another useful comparison on tone. Friendly copy booked nine meetings from 235,000 emails. Consultative copy booked seven from 420,000.
EVERSTAGE CAMPAIGNS
Friendly copy booked more meetings per send.
Meetings booked per 100,000 emails
Friendly / casual
9 meetings / 235,000 emails
3.83
Consultative
7 meetings / 420,000 emails
1.67
There were only 16 meetings in this comparison, and send volumes were rounded. We cannot tell how much of the difference came from tone alone.
The friendly group booked nine meetings from 235,000 sends, or about 3.83 per 100,000. The consultative group booked seven from 420,000 sends, or about 1.67 per 100,000.
View original chartI'd use that to choose the next variants, but it's still only 16 meetings. Across the broader analysis, casual beat neutral by just 1.03x.
Every email that converted in the Everstage breakdown was under 100 words. That's a good length to start with. I want enough room to explain what we're offering, but I can usually lose the sentence about being excited to connect.