Back to the roots: Setting up Narratic's marketing

A day filled with excitement, progress, and nostalgia

Yesterday was a joyful reminder about why I ended up on the sales and marketing side of my former company Levity rather than making the shift towards software development I had planned back then.

Over the years, I was regularly reminded how effective email marketing is. While most people have built-in spam filters for whatever gets past their email account’s filters, many still do open and read emails and take action.

Since I didn’t do this for the first time, it only took me a day to get from zero leads to 350+ scheduled emails across five different segments for our company Narratic. We did speak to a bunch of people to this point and are now starting to set up systems to work in parallel to help increase the volume.

While setting up the system, I noticed a few key aspects to be conscious about when working with emails as a sales or marketing tool.

Constant and reliable stream of leads: Email has low, single-digit conversion rates. Needless to say that the campaign needs lots of leads. Where those are coming from doesn’t matter - as long as they are plenty. But don’t get yourself fooled: This is not a naive numbers game, meaning that if you had a way to magically mail the 50 people that end up acting, you wouldn’t need to write an email to 1,000 people - those very 50 would be sufficient.

There are lots of good tools out there to filter large prospect databases. We are using Apollo and it seems to be working well but you will likely get to similar results with any of the other modern systems.

Inbound is also a great way to generate high-likelihood leads. Since they are pre-warmed, they are slightly easier to please. If you have that opportunity, seize it.

Segmentation: We set up 5 different audiences to start with. This isn’t much but enough to draw a few conclusions from. The more granular you make it, the more targeted you can communicate and the higher your conversion will be. Most sales emails lead nowhere not because the copy sucks (~ talent) but because it’s not optimal for the given audience (~ effort). When bothering people with unsolicited messages, don’t be lazy.

Copy: Email allows to be a lot more precise in language but it is also where people tend to get lost in details and poor line of argumentation. With tools like ChatGPT, this shouldn’t be the case anymore: Just tell it what you want to get across, ask for a few different versions, and chose which option you like the best.

A/B testing: One of the reasons why Facebook and Google work so well as marketing channels is because they automatically optimize for critical variables around audience and messaging. While you are taking the task of finding leads yourself, the next piece on you is to figure out what resonates with the people you picked. By all means: Do it.

Regardless of how confident you are with your ability to write compelling copy, data has a better idea. Be sure to test “wild swings” and don’t switch out single words only. Test two opposing angles that you are equally comfortable with and let the system handle the rest.

Measurement: It should go without saying that anything you do at scale needs to be measured. Most email tools and CRMs come with such features and if they don’t they are not for you. You need to understand which audience responds to what message. You need to understand your conversion rates across all stages of your funnel. Don’t bother thinking about manual tracking when it comes to email sequences as you will waste your time and that of the people you are sending a message.

Patience: Once the system is up and running, you have a machine that works tirelessly day and night, giving you room to adjust and expand or work on other things. But be careful not to quickly ramp things up and expect to get thousands of leads through email in a few days. Especially when you are just getting started, think of sales sequences as background noise that gets you the occasional lead delivered to your inbox.