Why the average print sales email makes prospects LESS likely to buy

Here’s the latest episode of UK v USA.  In this episode I go off on a major rant and Deborah actually has to calm me down!

Listen to discover:

👉 Where most print sales emails go REALLY wrong

👉 What actually ENGAGES prospects and customers

👉 The basics that most print sellers IGNORE 

We’d love to hear your perspective – what do you think about the current state of emails from the printing industry? Drop a comment below.

Mentioned in This Episode:

Matthew Parker: https://www.linkedin.com/in/profitableprintrelationships/

Profitable Print Relationships: https://profitableprintrelationships.com

Deborah Corn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/deborahcorn/

Print Media Centr: https://printmediacentr.com

Subscribe to News From The Printerverse: https://printmediacentr.com/subscribe-2

PrintFM Radio: https://printfmradio.com/

Girls Who Print: https://girlswhoprint.org

Project Peacock: https://ProjectPeacock.TV

Transcript

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:02] DC: Print Buying UKvUSA is a series dedicated to helping printers create stronger, more meaningful, and more profitable relationships with print customers on both sides of the pond. I’m Deborah Corn, founder of Project Peacock and Principal at Print Media Centr.

[0:00:21] MP: And I’m Matthew Parker, the Champion of Print at profitableprintrelationships.com.

[0:00:26] DC: We may not always agree, but that’s when it gets interesting. So, turn up the volume, get out your notepad, and welcome to the program.

[EPISODE]

[0:00:41] DC: Every day, 361.6 billion emails are sent. The average employee receives 117 emails per day. Only 13% of emails sent worldwide are now estimated to be written by humans; 48% of email marketers identify inbox placement and avoiding spam folders as a top channel. Eighty-seven percent of B2B marketers still rely on email as a primary content distribution channel. And Yahoo recommends that senders have to keep spam complaints below .3%. And that means for just three spam complaints for every thousand emails. Otherwise, it will impact your inbox placement.

Welcome, everybody, to Podcasts From the Printerverse, more specifically, the UKvUSA podcast with my co-host, Matthew Parker, from Profitable Print Relationships. And as you can tell, hopefully, today we are speaking about email. Hello, Matthew Parker.

[0:02:01] MP: Hello, Deborah. How are you today?

[0:02:03] DC: I am inundated with emails, as I told you last week when we were discussing what we were going to speak about. And the thing is that I didn’t subscribe to most of them that I’m getting. I mean, I can’t say I don’t know where people are getting my email address from because it’s out there in the world, but they’re certainly not doing any research on what I do or anything like that. What is your email situation before we get into the three topics we’re going to discuss today?

[0:02:35] MP: I get rather more emails than I’d like. And I don’t know about you. Here’s a question for you. How many emails do you delete? Or what percentage of your emails do you delete without even opening them?

[0:02:47] DC: My god, honestly, it’s the first thing I do in the morning, and I just do a command-shift bulk delete in my inbox. I mean, I have a lot of email addresses. I would say on average, 25 to 30 every morning. That’s just when I wake up.

[0:03:05] MP: I reckon. I delete. I’m going to say getting on for about half my emails without opening it. I just see it. I just click it, and it’s gone. Which is a sad indictment of where we are. And there’s one or two I keep an eye out for. And every now and again, I actually go back to someone who sent me a genuine email asking them, “Did you send me this? Should I worry about it?” And again, sometimes people say, “No, please ignore that. I’ve been hacked.” If I really want to communicate with someone and I know them, email is becoming less and less the channel that I use because it is so messed up.

[0:03:46] DC: I’m hysterically laughing because last week, I reached out to two people on LinkedIn to see if they had really sent me an email. I was like, “Your email address was like XAI. And it made me nervous.” But everything about the email seemed real. I found the person on LinkedIn, and now we have a phone call. But it was crazy. I was being a detective on a real email.

And then someone else I responded to. It was a sales outreach that was inappropriate because I didn’t need those services, but there was no doubt that a person had written it. And there was nothing about it that didn’t make me want to respond and say, “Thank you for reaching out, but this doesn’t really have anything to do with me.” I felt that they were owed a response, believe it or not, because it was actually like a human interaction. And I said, “No, thank you.” You know?

But then I referred them to somebody else. I referred them to somebody else who might need some printing services, all because it wasn’t a selly email. It was just a regular thing. I don’t know. It was like an old-school reach-out. And I was like, “Thank you. Somebody is still just like being a normal person out there.”

[0:05:01] MP: You’re so nice on email, Deborah. They just get like wham out. I’m not interested in hearing. If you can’t be bothered to research and find out whether I’m right or not, then you can – I’m just trying to think of the right phrase without getting blacklisted by all your listeners here. But you can go away in disgrace, shall we say?

[0:05:17] DC: Yeah.

[0:05:18] MP: I’m going to do that. I wouldn’t say no, thank you, to be honest.

[0:05:22] DC: No, no, no, no. My first response was why do you think this has anything to do with me? And I wanted to see if then he was going to go back and figure out that it didn’t. And he did.

[0:05:34] MP: Yeah, fair to him.

[0:05:35] DC: So then I was like, “Okay, dude.” And he was really cool about it. It wasn’t like some big mea culpa thing. It was just like he mentioned the work I did do, and then he just said he wasn’t sure if I also had printing needs. It was a very kind interaction. Maybe because he was from Canada. I don’t know.

[0:05:52] MP: That’s probably it.

[0:05:54] DC: He was very nice.

[0:05:55] MP: But yeah, I even get annoyed. Someone might send me something acknowledging or something like that. I get really annoyed when I get that “Oh, thank you so much” email or something like that, because we’re just wasting our bandwidth, the planet’s resources, everything. Yeah, our mental bandwidth, just with noise of conversations which don’t have to be had. Or I’m seized into something along with five other people. None of us needs to know something about this conversation. But someone wants to cover their backside by everyone else. Sorry. Yeah, email sometimes is just a giant pain in the posterior.

[0:06:28] DC: Yeah. And I don’t know how it happens because it doesn’t happen with me and my setup. But there are some people that send back like thumbs up, like respond with a thumbs-up, and I can’t see that. So, I think it’s a response. I open it up, and it’s a freaking thumbs up. And I’m like, “Really?” I mean, okay.

All right. Everything we’re talking about, Matthew, means that the email made it through the spam filters, the servers, everything else that is now being set up to counteract as much of this craziness as they can. I know with my monthly email, News From The Printerverse, I had to redo my whole DKIM and –

[0:07:11] MP: Your DMARC. Yeah.

[0:07:12] DC: Yeah. DMARC, all these settings, I had to redo. I had to get extra verification on certain things because of – I think it’s Outlook and something else. They have these crazy security devices now, systems now stopping email before it even enters the realm of their servers and things like that.

So staying out of the spam folder is crucial because you can’t even get ignored until you at least make it into the inbox. I see it as an engagement problem more than a relevance problem, right? The best way to stay out of the spam folder is to stay out of the delete folder. Because if you’re on a mailing list, let’s say you actually signed up for a mailing list, you wanted information from people, and you don’t open those emails, then these systems start making decisions about is this relevant to you.

I know that things end up in my spam folder, that I have it marked as spam, but I don’t really interact with them. Somehow, my system is saying she doesn’t care about this. So we’re just going to move it there. Remember when Gmail did that? It was like your primary list.

[0:08:36] MP: Yeah. Put it into the promotion folder. Yeah.

[0:08:37] DC: Yeah. That’s going on too. There is a lot of pre-sorting that gets done before it can even get to you, whether you’ve marked it as spam or not. What are your spam situations over there?

[0:08:54] MP: Basically, if you don’t know what you’re doing, you probably do need to get someone to check your deliverability, check your DMARC records, everything like that. And to be honest, I don’t know a lot about it. I just use people who do. You probably only need a couple of hours of someone’s time to get it all set up for best deliverability. But you should be monitoring your deliverability scores. I know I’m at 92%. I know I’m happy with that. But if you don’t know that, then you’re spending money and time on a marketing effort, and you don’t even know if it’s working.

I know that when I’m sending out to thousands of people, I’m a bit below what I should be in terms of open rates at 25%. I know if I’m sending out to a small group of people, I’m above where I should be at about 50%. Bear in mind that even when your deliverability is good, even when you have got a high-ranking email, only half the people who receive it are still going to open it, let alone click on what’s in there. These are all things that you really need to think about as to whether email is going to work for you as a marketing channel.

My dentist, for instance, they send out emails to chase people up for their appointments. I want to hear from them. And actually, my last few appointments have only been because I rang them up and said, “Hey, I think I’m due a checkup now.” They went, “Yeah, we sent an email about it, but it doesn’t seem to land very often.” And this year they did a lot better, because this year they made it from me not getting it anywhere to landing in my spam folder. Still didn’t read it, but at least the deliverability is getting slightly better.

But this is what you’re contending with. This is a trusted in theory email address that is sending me stuff I want to read, and it’s not getting there. Don’t assume that just because you press send on 15,000 emails to that list you just bought from some dodgy list dealer you’ve never heard of before, that they’re all going to land and that people are going to willingly read them.

[0:10:43] DC: Right. But it’s not just a list. It could be your own customer list. If you’re sending emails to your customers and they are not opening them, then the systems out there are understanding that. And therefore, they are penalizing your email as not valuable. And it can get relegated to the spam folders through company filters, firewalls, whatever that barracuda thing is out there chomping at all the emails.

It’s really important that it’s not about just getting it into the inbox to stay out of the spam folder. You also need people to engage with those emails in some manner, more than just opening them up. They need to scroll it. They need to click on a few things for the programs to think. And Google, by the way, who pays attention to everything that goes to a Gmail address.

I mean, constantly, when I go into my Gmail, it says, “Hey, you haven’t opened these. Do you want to unsubscribe? Do you still want these? Is it still relevant?” I’ll go into my spam folder. I’ll just see things that it has put in there because it’s similar to other things that I don’t read or I have marked spam previously.

[BREAK]

[0:12:06] DC: Get ready to turn up the volume on print. PrintFM is a global internet radio station dedicated exclusively to print and graphic communications, accessible around the clock in every time zone. No more searching across channels and apps. PrintFM brings relevant topical programming from Print Media Centr, Girls Who Print, and an array of industry contributors who bring their own perspectives, guests, and conversations to the mix. PrintFM also broadcasts from industry events, with live shows being scheduled throughout the year. Visit printfm.com to explore our daily programming, event schedules, and opportunities to share your content or sponsor our shows. Expert discussions, real-world insight, and industry voices are just a click away. Listen long and prosper.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:13:05] DC: Okay, Matthew, let’s move to why customers unsubscribe. Okay. A company has gone through the due diligence of working with – by the way, my web developer is the one who goes into Cloudflare for me and adjusts my DKIM and all those settings so that my emails have the best chance of getting through all the security that’s out there now. But still, it gets upset if there’s too many links versus text, or too many images versus text. Now there’s this whole other formula to use in order to optimize your chances of it getting into the inbox. But once it’s in there, why do you think people unsubscribe, assuming that they’ve subscribed to begin with?

[0:13:58] MP: In the first place. Yes. Well, let’s just go back to remember. A lot of the time I don’t click unsubscribe because I don’t know who sent it, and I don’t want them to think it’s an active email address. It’s not just why do people unsubscribe, it’s why do people ignore your email in the first place. And I think we should broaden it to that. But when was the last time you actually read fully an email from a print seller? Because I’m struggling to think the last time I read one because the majority of them are utterly uninteresting, and I’m totally indifferent to them.

So, let’s start with a couple of things. First of all, so many are written by AI these days. And people know if it’s written with AI. We all know what it’s going to say. This is not communication. This is print. Powerful, intelligent, quietly long lasting, with plenty of em dashes. Okay, it’s easy enough for me to write in AI speed. We all recognize it.

If you just go, “Hey, AI, write me an email,” and then just send it out, you will fail. Because, actually, I’ve reached out to a couple of people in print companies that I know and like, and I said, “Stop writing your emails in AI because it’s winding me up. And if it’s winding me up, it’s going to be winding up a whole load of your customer base as well. You are going to lose people.” I’m not saying don’t use AI. AI comes up with great ideas. It comes up with good frameworks for emails. Go and write it yourself in your human voice, which will resonate with people far more than the AI will. And if necessary, just get AI to sense-check it afterwards, but do not allow AI to write it for you and outsource your copyrighting to them, whatever you do.

Secondly, have something interesting to say. We all know that every single print seller offers brilliant service, brilliant quality, print at good prices. We’re going to list all the services that you can do because it sounds good for SEO. And it is so boring. Okay? I don’t want to read another email from a print company going, “Just wondering if you’ve got any work, because here’s all the wonderful things we do, and we’re wonderful.” It doesn’t click with me. I know you can do that. My current supplier can do that. Why should I change? Because someone sent an email probably written in an AI, hoping that it will last.

How many times have you actually sent an email written like that and actually got any business out of it? Unless you’re sending millions of these emails, in which case, please stop because you’re just destroying the environment for it. Then you are not getting any work from it. You are wasting your time. You are winding people up. And actually, if I get an email like that and someone actually bothers to contact me afterwards, I will probably be less interested in working with them as a result of that.

Contact me with a personally thought-out written email that is actually relevant to me. Okay? And this happens so infrequently that I will sit up, and I will probably take notice. If you’ve done your research, you know the sort of business I am, you’ve bothered to remember my name, not dear print and procurement, not dear profitable print relationships. It’s not difficult to find out I’m called Matthew. Call me Matthew. Okay? Sorry, I’m on one now.

Call me by my name. Okay? Write something that’s said to me, not we’ve just visited your business, and we look like the ideal fit. Tell me what sort of business you’ve seen. Tell me the sort of problems that you are going to solve for me as my business. If you’re going out to the restaurant business, go. We know the restaurant industry is tough at the moment. We specialize in getting customers through the door. Not I can print you a cheap menu because there are approximately 7,853 other printers that will print you a cheap menu. But very few of them will go, “Hey, we’ll help you get customers through the door.” If you can increase my customer base and I’m a restaurant, I might actually take some notice. So, just write something that’s interesting to people.

I mean, for goodness sakes, the average email I get from the Nigerian prince who wants to invest in my business is more interesting than the average print email that I get, and I’m more likely to read it and resonate with it. Okay? This is how dull the average print email is. Generally, I can scarcely contain mine different at the marketing email that I am getting through.

So write something. Just send me a joke of the week. I’m more likely to engage with that honestly, or some interesting stuff that goes, “Hey, there’s a human out there that’s interesting.” Then, when you get in touch with me, and I found out they’ve actually sent me some vaguely interesting jokes, make sure they’re good. Don’t copy my jokes. Make sure they’re good. Actually, I might have a conversation with you. Deborah, what’s your advice? Because I’ve just about run out of energy after that rant.

[0:18:35] DC: First of all, are you okay? I mean, I thought your head was going to explode there. I think that’s the most animated I’ve ever heard you on a topic. Do you need to rest? Are you okay?

[0:18:47] MP: I just had a lot to get off my mind there. You can tell it’s been getting to me over the years.

[0:18:50] DC: Oh my goodness. I mean, we are on video. And, I mean, Matthew’s nose was literally up to his computer camera. He leaned all the way forward, and his veins are popping in his forehead. Okay, very interesting. I think we’ve switched roles for a minute here. I’m going to be the calming voice. I cannot believe this.

[0:19:10] MP: Really? Oh, wow. Okay, this is the new UK versus USA. Deborah Corn is calm and reasonable, and Matt has lost his great British calm all of a sudden.

[0:19:21] DC: Yes, this is true. So, everything you said is spot-on, as you would say. And this doesn’t have anything to do with you, but this is not new. I mean, this is just best practices that most people do not follow. I think that thinking of it in a different way might motivate people to do something about it. So if you think about it this way, people aren’t unsubscribing from email, they’re unsubscribing from disappointment. And if you’re sending things, to Matthew’s point, is just not relevant to that person, then it becomes a disappointment. And they start feeling a certain way about your company or you as a person if you are the one sending it.

Or about they’re not sending me anything relevant, and other people are sending me information about new technology they have, and people who how they just saved a job from there was a crisis, and they saved something. And this other person is just sending me 10% off your next order on business cards or something.

And again, assuming that people have subscribed or they bought something from you, and now you have their email address, and therefore it makes sense that you would market to them. But just because that customer bought something from you once or signed up for an email because they wanted the discount or the offer that was offered by signing up for the newsletter or the email list, you can’t assume that they wanted a lifelong relationship with you just because they’ve done that.

So yes, you have their email address, but now you have to earn your spot in their inbox. You have to earn the right to be opened, you know. Because otherwise, as we said before, that contributes to ending up with undeliverable mail that goes into their spam boxes. And the email platforms do say why things are undeliverable. Sometimes I’ll see like a known spammer, even though I’m not a known spammer. There are servers out there that think I’m a known spammer. There are other servers that just block my email, and I think it’s because of the links. I mean, there’s a million reasons why they do that. But you can try to address some of those things.

Before you send an email, what I would say is that why this email? Why now? And why should the person on the other end care about that? And that is at least a way to keep them opening for a little while versus marking you spam or ignoring you and then figuring it out from there. But every unsubscribe tells you something that your open rate doesn’t, which is that you are not being relevant to that person.

[0:22:27] MP: The other key thing that I think email marketers need to think about is actually taking prospects on a journey. Now, I don’t mean the type of journey where you send someone an email going, “Hey, we’ve got this wonderful printing service.” “Hey, Matthew, just circling to see whether you’ve had a chance to check out my details of my wonderful printing service yet.” “Hey, Matthew, is the details of my wonderful printing service reached the top of your inbox yet?” Hey, Matthew, I’m not actually going to stop sending you these automated emails just because you’re ignoring me.” “Hey, Matthew, I’m now going to spam you on the air every hour until you respond to me.” And I’ve had, possibly the exception of the last one, every single one of those come by on automated email flows. And you know what? They make me angry, as Deborah has found out during today’s podcast. It’s all come to a head today. Finally, my pent-up irritation and anger at all this spam email is getting, I’m letting it out today. This is great therapy.

[0:23:20] DC: I have to say, I’m enjoying this a lot.

[0:23:22] MP: Anyway, that’s one journey. Do not do that. But do check who’s opened your email, who’s clicked on a link, and send them more relevant follow-ups as a result of that. Someone clicked on a link to find out that about, say, multi-touch marketing. Send them some more relevant information about that. Not, “Hey, Matthew, we do multi-touch marketing. Can we speak?” But just send them some more information about that. Because if they see you as a trusted resource, maybe they’ll pick up the phone or send the email, and make contact with you when the time is right.

And when you send the email is almost never when the time is right. I’ve had customers who’ve heard from me for three years, four years, and then they’ve got in contact with me at the right time because I’m sending useful information and I stay top of mind for them. Send people on that journey. Check what they’re doing. And if they haven’t clicked on your marvelous link about your multi-touch marketing, maybe they’re not interested in it. Maybe you should try them with something else.

But do think carefully about what you want people to do as a result of receiving your email? Hint, it’s not going to be buy some print. Because who do you know who’s actually bought print as a result of receiving that first cold email? The only person who’s ever done that is the type of customer you don’t want because they’re just as likely to buy off the next cold email of somebody else.

But what that email is good at doing, if they read it, is to start building that relationship. So don’t go for the hard cell straight away. However, once you’ve seen that someone is actually regularly checking your emails, and it’s easy through your email dashboard to see who’s opening your emails, who’s clicking on links, who are your top most engaged prospects that actually maybe you should shock, horror, pick up the phone to, connect on LinkedIn, reach out to them on a different channel, see if you can make contact with them because they’re taking notice of you. They’re the sort of people that you can then follow up with. And if you haven’t got an email system that allows you to check that sort of information, then you are using the wrong email system.

[0:25:28] DC: Right. And before I get to the us presenting some ideas in order to break through the noise, as we say, it’s understandable that many people listening to this podcast are not the person who’s responsible for putting together those emails or contributing to the newsletters that their company is sending out. But if you’re a salesperson, I think you have a vested interest in understanding how they’re performing and potentially contributing to the conversation about how improvements can be made. You never want to say change. You always want to say improvements because everybody wants improvements. Nobody wants to make a change.

[BREAK]

[0:26:13] MP: Do you need some direction or new ideas for your business? Would sales goals setting and accountability improve your revenues? Or do you have a member of staff who could be performing better? I’m Matthew Parker, the Champion of Print at profitableprintrelationships.com, and I offer a personal mentoring service. Together, we work out exactly what you need. We create a personal mentoring program for you, and then we speak twice a month. You get set goals and action points to make sure you progress.

What makes me different is that I’m the buyer. I’ve been approached by over 1,400 different printing companies, so I know what works, and I know what doesn’t. If you’d like to find out more, go to profitableprintrelationships.com, click the training tab, and then go to mentoring. Or, alternatively, just hit me up on LinkedIn. I look forward to working with you.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:27:07] DC: So, Matthew, you’re in the spam folder. People are unsubscribing. It is time to break through the channel noise. And I would say that the problem is not volume. The problem is sameness, as you mentioned before. So everyone is using the same AI tools. Everybody is using the same subject line formulas, the same personalization tactics, the same promotional offers. And so instead of how do I get people to open my email, what if the strategy was, “Would people notice if my emails stopped arriving?” Is it like “must see TV” as they used to say?

I have a few ideas on how to reinvent email, which I’m just going to rattle off and then ask for your comments on them. The first one is to think like a magazine. Make your email a magazine with recurring features, predictions, bust industry myths, stats that are relevant to the verticals that those customers are in, behind-the-scenes stories, customer challenges, have a debate. Build anticipation for the next email. Think like Netflix. They don’t do emails to tell you when the next show is coming. They make videos. Create episodes of emails with ongoing storylines.

You mentioned this before, leading people to the next thing, but do it through the journey of – this is a weird example. But during COVID, on the PrinterChat podcast, we followed Jamie, the printer’s SwissQ press journey, because it was stuck in all of the shipping things. Every time we did a podcast, we had an update on where in the world is Jaime’s press, until he finally got it. So it was just an interesting thing.

I’ve seen really great time-lapse videos of presses being installed. I mean, what a great way to let people know that you have new technology, as long as it’s relevant to them, to share it in a video form that can go through email and say, “In the next email, we’re going to show you the first print that came out.” I know you’re going to say that no, it’s boring and nobody cares about that. I’m just giving an example. I’m just framing it. So, don’t jump on me for, “Deborah, nobody cares about a press –” whatever.

[0:29:49] MP: Just bear in mind, I’m ranty today. That’s all I’ll say.

[0:29:52] DC: Okay, you could be ranty, but don’t come ranty at me because then I’ll become ranty at you, and then we’re really going to have a fight in here. Think of your email like a community. What if your email was literally just asking a question, asking people to respond, and then in the next email putting people’s responses to the question in it. And so now people are engaging.

Obviously, you probably don’t want other people having other people’s names or email addresses, but that’s easy enough, “Deborah C. said.” Nobody needs to know it’s me and it’s from a certain company. Think like a print person. Think of it like what are all the reasons that we tell people to print, right? It’s worth saving. It’s worth sharing with other people. It’s worth forwarding. It’s a moment in time, something memorable.

Are your emails print-worthy in that sense? Not that you would print them out, but do they check off the same boxes of how we feel about why print breaks through the noise? How can you make your email follow some of those parameters and feel like something special? Matthew, the noise is too many emails in your inbox that are all the same, and that you want to stop competing to be read, and you want to start competing to be remembered.

[0:31:16] MP: Can I be ranty again, please?

[0:31:18] DC: Yeah. Just don’t come at me.

[0:31:21] MP: Just your idea.

[0:31:22] DC: All right, fine. Go ahead. I can take it.

[0:31:24] MP: Two things. First of all, we should remember that people don’t have a huge bandwidth for reading emails. Much as I love your magazine idea, I think it’s probably too much for people to spend time with. But the key thing I want to get over is if you’re sending an email, it’s not about you. It’s about them. Okay?

All the print shops I know go, “Oh, look at our new press. Oh, look at our wonderful print. Oh, look at us. Look at us. Look at us.” People don’t care about you. They care about them. Make it about the people who are receiving the emails. This is where so many people go wrong, in my opinion.

I love the idea of the stories. People like stories. Create. I love the idea of where’s Jamie’s press this week. And it’s okay. You almost be honest. Here’s the time. Our boundary is flooded. And what we did about it. And then next episode, here’s the time our dispatch department caught fire or something like that. Maybe not do a disaster every week because people might go, “Actually, this printer is cursed. We’re not placing our work with them.” But here’s what happened. Or here’s what happened to one of our customers and how we helped them. But tune into more customer disasters every week. That’s the sort of thing that people like because it’s a bit different.

And actually, it’s not about you. It’s about the customer. And it’s something that’s more interesting than the shite that just gets put out by so many printing companies because we make it all about us and we don’t care. If you’re a salesperson, then you do need to know about what the marketing people are doing. Because one of those companies, I went back, and I said to my contact, “Look, you’re printing from AI.” I said, “I know. I know. I’ve talked to the marketing team about it. It’s what they’re doing. And they don’t want to listen. They are making your job more difficult if you are putting out stuff like this.” Can I just put forward a radical proposal now?

[0:33:17] DC: Go ahead. I can guess what it’s going to be. Stop emailing people.

[0:33:21] MP: No, but nearly. Okay? When was the last time you got a piece of mail from a printing company?

[0:33:27] DC: I do get mail from printing companies.

[0:33:29] MP: Okay.

[0:33:30] DC: Postcards. Postcards.

[0:33:31] MP: Yeah. Cool. Okay. You’re in the minority. Here’s a radical suggestion. Go through your email list. Find out if anyone’s still reading your emails. But if they are, and they’re opening them, and you can get your top 50 email readers from the last two months, send them a piece of mail. Because what are we as companies? We’re not email marketing companies. We’re printers.

If we can’t market using print, isn’t it a bit sad that we can’t celebrate and market through what we do? Let’s just show a bit of confidence in what we do. Send those top 50 people a piece of mail. Doesn’t have to be a print saying, “Look at us. We’re a printing company. How good are we?” We will get that. Send them a lovingly-created, high-value box with some nice bits of print in it. Maybe a chocolate bar, because chocolate is always a way to my heart. You’ll get the order then. Maybe a chocolate bar. Maybe a nice gift. Not, please, a branded pen or pencil. Not a mug or that sort of that everyone does, but just something interesting.

People might like a cookie. A piece of fruit if you want to be healthy. But let’s just do something that’s a bit more interesting than the average one. Make it bulky mail because people will either think it’s a bomb and test it. Or they might actually open it because they’re curious. And send that out with shock, horror, a handwritten note that shows you care, that makes it personal.

Your email list can show you who might be interested, who’s reading. Take it further. Don’t send them another email because that’s what everyone does. Go out and be personal to them instead. That’s my radical suggestion. Show them that actually, you then cut through the noise with print. And I would be amazed if you didn’t get a really high percentage of conversations as a result of that.

Follow it up with a phone call. Follow it up with a message on social media. If you can get their number, send them a WhatsApp and just go, “Hey, we sent you a little present with the post. What did you think?” If you have to send go up through email, then fair enough, but send it as a personal email. But use your email list as a way to work out who your warm prospects are. And do something interesting with them rather than expecting them just to press buy from your website.

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[0:35:49] DC: Gentlemen, leadership isn’t just about making decisions. It’s about setting the tone. Joining Girls Who Print as a male ally sends a clear message. You’re committed to advocacy, mentorship, professional growth, and creating a space where everyone can thrive. Membership gives you access to a powerful global network, exclusive events, conversations, and resources that support meaningful progress. Whether you’re an owner, manager, colleague, or peer, your presence makes a difference and helps shape the future you’d want for your colleagues, your clients, and your daughters. Learn more about ally membership at girlswhoprint.org. Link in the show notes. Empower long and prosper.

[EPISODE CONTINUED]

[0:36:40] DC: I’m going to go back to the magazine idea for a minute because I don’t think you’re on the same page with me, and you should be. Yes, people don’t have time to put together things like that. Granted. But what is the frequency? It could be quarterly. That doesn’t mean you’re not sending emails in between, but the emails in between can be follow-ups to the stories from last month’s email, the next thing that happened in the process of whatever the interview was about in the previous email, the final result after all of the pre-press was done on that file that nobody saw as many mistakes ever. Whatever it might be. We always go to disasters, but I think that’s because we’re print customers and we value how printers handle disasters way more than we value the service they provide. I mean, it goes together. But it is really important that people, especially professional print customers, understand if there’s a crisis, they’ve got you. Especially if you work in advertising or with big budgets.

[0:37:46] MP: To be fair, actually, most people receiving an email love to see other people suffering as well. That’s far more interested in hearing about the new printing press.

[0:37:55] DC: Okay. I agree with that completely. I think there is a way that you can break through the noise with something different and then use the time in between to keep people engaged. Whether it’s use all of my ideas. Use one email just to send a question about something. Not a question, by the way, that is a backhanded focus group for you and what people will be spending on print next year, but something that is more relatable to people so they engage. And that is what the goal is. Because engagement is what will keep your open rates higher, get your open rates higher, get your deliverability higher, and keep you out of the spam folder.

Matthew, final words. Go ahead, rant away. If you have anything left, by the way.

[0:38:54] MP: Okay, final words. Email is overrated. This is just my challenge out there. Doesn’t mean it can’t be used. But if you think you’re going to get lots of sales just by sending out subpar, boring emails, it’s a lazy way to sell. I’m not saying don’t do it because we all do it. Deborah uses email. I use email. We get results from it.

[0:39:16] DC: Not to sell. I don’t sell anything.

[0:39:18] MP: I do sell an email, and I get results from it.

[0:39:20] DC: Yeah, I do not. My newsletter is literally articles and podcasts. I’m just sharing my content. I’m not selling.
[0:39:28] MP: I rarely send a sales email, but there’s always an option to buy at the end, but I do it in a slightly different way. So, I’m not saying don’t use email. I am saying that email is overrated. And if you think that just by sending out a weekly marketing email without much thought that’s written by AI, that says how wonderful you are, then you are a lazy seller, and you will struggle to sell much print. Unless you’ve got some great other channels where you are putting in some personal effort into building up those one-to-one relationships, in which case I would suggest that you concentrate on those channels and give up on email.

Having said that, do it right. And maybe, just maybe, you can get email to work. Because if you’re the 0.001% of people who send an interesting email that I want to see that I’m going to keep an eye out for, then you are cutting through the noise. I’m far more likely to use you.

[0:40:18] DC: Excellent. So, my final words are –

[0:40:22] MP: Calm down, Matthew.

[0:40:24] DC: No, no, no. I like this, Matthew. Stop competing to be read. Start competing to be remembered. The goal isn’t to be opened. It’s to be anticipated. And the best unsubscribe strategy is to create something people would miss if it disappeared.

Matthew Parker, thank you very much for your time and an interesting and heated conversation from the UK side of the podcast for a change. And thanks to everybody out there for listening. We appreciate you. Hopefully, you’ve gotten some information that will be helpful and help you improve your email marketing and your sales. Until next time, email long and prosper.

Thanks for listening to Podcasts From the Printerverse. Please subscribe, click some stars, and leave us a review. Connect with us through printmediacentr.com, we’d love to hear your feedback on our shows and topics that are of interest for future broadcasts. Until next time, thanks for joining us. Print long and prosper.

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