Email Marketing: An inside look

The Capital F in Farmer

To preface this article is a simple explanation to the question: Why capitalize the F in Farmer? Simply, this is one of the main voice guidelines at Barn2Door. At Barn2Door, we capitalize the “F” to underscore our appreciation for the people who are dedicated to supporting our food system. Each time a capital F is put in front of the word “Farmer”, we hope to remind Farmers that we appreciate their contribution to society, reminding them that they are heroes. 99% of the time, I ignore both the “social” and “promotions” tabs of my email inbox. This is mostly due to 1. lack of time 2. lack of interest and 3. the sheer amount of emails that I receive. With that being said, it doesn’t surprise me that companies allocate significant resources to write, design, and send emails to both potential customers and current customers. Emailing, along with ads, is often the first touch point with consumers. It is increasingly paramount that when customers interact with companies, emails are able to guide customers through content, and put forth a unified voice/tone. Below, I will focus on these two aspects and how they’ve taught me much more about writing and strategy in lieu of how to achieve high open + click rates.

How to Usher Customers Towards Content

For my first project at Barn2Door, I was tasked with writing and designing cold email streams directed to livestock Farmers in the EatWild coalition (a listing of humane and organic livestock farms). Being that Barn2Door serves as a SaaS e-commerce platform for Farmers to sell food online, I not only had a predetermined audience, but ample information and insights into their values and behaviors.

Above is a quote my supervisor shared with me when assigning me the project of writing the EatWild email campaign. The significance of the quote lies in one simple understanding: people are only interested in what helps them. He urged me to keep this in mind with regards to anything I would be writing.

Being that Barn2Door already had written useful content (ebooks, blogs, and videos) in conjunction with experts in the field, my main focus would be to present and package the content for Farmers via email in order to build trust and rapport with customers. To the left, is the first email in the stream. To write and design my email, I first had to create a framework which looked like this:

1. Introduce background information on potential pain points in order to showcase why Farmers should read our email + content.

2. Emotionally appeal to what matters to Farmers: their hard work, products, and customers. Farmers are extremely proud folk.

3. Deliver clear, concise instructions on what the content is, what it looks like, and how they can access it.

4. Continue the Farmer’s journey by giving them other ways to interact with the Company through landing pages + future emails.

   Step 1: One of the most prevalent struggles livestock Farmers deal with is securing orders before harvest. Right off the bat, referencing the correlation between online ordering capabilities and lost orders drives curiosity regarding a possible solution. This invites Farmers to find answers within the rest of the email.

   Step 2: The next paragraph aims at establishing emotional connection to the reader. By heavily appealing to the three pride points of hard work, product, and customers, Farmers are able to associate the things they care about with what Barn2Door is offering. A win - win!

   Step 3: When introducing content, brevity, clarity, and visuals are key. Hopefully, at this point, Farmers have found a problem and see our content as a potential solution. Content introduction is all about utilizing clear language such as “Click here to download” with hyperlinks. Including imagery such as the ebook cover aims at creating consistent imagery between email and landing pages.

   Step 4: Finally, answering the “What’s next?” question is paramount. The latter section of the email aims at giving the Farmer a clear course of action through prompting a demo request to learn about Barn2Door. This gives a sneak peak of upcoming email content in relation to the current topic.

The first step to writing and editing customer facing emails is first understanding your audience and their needs, and second what your company and content bring to the table. I found through writing and designing emails, that these two considerations are at the center of any decision a company makes. Just as a Farmer solely focuses on tying everything back to his/her hard work, product, and customers, companies should take the same considerations when writing any material.

Voice/Tone — Unsung Heroes

Both voice and tone are thrown around often in copywriting + brand guidelines. But where does it fit in the process of writing? In this section, I’d like to describe, in my own words, the definition of voice and tone and how it guides my writing.

Voice/Tone: A brand’s distinctive personality and temperament across channels.

A brand is a living, breathing entity. It’s something that interacts with people, emails customers, and even directs short films. It’s essential that any brand has guidelines and an established voice across all platforms to ensure consistency. Just as we have personalities and moral guidelines, brands should too. Along with guidelines, flexibility also comes into play. We don’t act the exact same to everyone we talk to, right? Initial outreach may be more informational and straightforward, whilst email newsletters to existing customers may be more casual and playful. When I first joined Barn2Door, the Company emanated a casual, humorous, and amicable aura, all whilst being professional. Now, Our Company culture is a direct reflection of what we write and how we write it. And it shows.

One example that comes to mind is a part of an email I wrote to underscore the merits of email collection forms at Farmers markets:

Contrary to the informational and content-based email stream shown earlier, this email excerpt was a part of a newsletter series to Farmers already on the Barn2Door platform and those who have churned through. Already being acclimated and trusted by these Farmers, we were able to approach writing with more of a conversational and humorous attitude. Humor looks like the use of quotations, the addition of “outside of some courage”, and informal (in a good way) parenthetical remarks. In the end of the day, people want a brand and more importantly a person to have a conversation with. An email stream, rather than simply a one sided conversation, is an invitation to learn new information and interact with the company on different platforms.