Why some new product emails fail

I delete 8/10 emails I receive from ecom brands. Here’s what is wrong with them: 1) Grocery list emails. "New arrivals! 20% off! Check out our blog! Follow us on Instagram!" Pick a lane. These emails trying to do everything at once feel like a chaotic grocery list, and I’m not here to run errands. Instead, focus on one thing. Drive my attention to one clear action. Simpler emails = better results. --- 2) Over-Customization, Under-Value Oh, you put my name in the subject line? Mentioned my city? Told me you noticed these products in my cart? Cute. Unfortunately, I don’t care if it’s personalized if there’s no real value. It's just a fancy way of spamming me. Instead, skip the obvious personalization and give me something I didn't know I needed. --- 3) Most of them are just noise. They're all about the brand, not about me (the reader). “Our new wireless earbuds just launched - now with better noise cancellation!” Cool story, bro. But why should I care? If you want my attention, start with me. Hit me with a relatable situation or a problem I'm facing. Like, "Tired of your earbuds dying during your morning commute?" Suddenly I'm interested. --- 4) Talking to my wallet “SALE! EVERYTHING MUST GO!” “HURRY! LIMITED STOCK!” I get it. Brands need to sell. And yes, these types of emails work - initially. But if it's the 10-15th time using the same angle, it gets repetitive, boring, and delivers diminishing returns. Plus, I’ll buy when I need something, not just because you’re yelling at me with a caps lock. So understand what’s on my mind. Seasonal needs? Trends? Something I’ve been eyeing for weeks? Send me something timely, relevant, and helpful. Not desperate. --- 5) Predictable AF. “Hi [First Name], FLASH SALE! 20% OFF EVERYTHING!” That’s literally every other email in my inbox. Surprise me. Send something bold. Like an email with zero links- just a one-liner that’s so good, I can’t help but open the next one. Be the brand that breaks the mold. Because honestly? I’m not the only one deleting these emails. Your customers are, too. So, get out of this loop of self-centered, soulless emails. And dare to be different. #email #emailmarketing #ecommerce

Another failed cold outreach for the journal. Look, cold outreach isn't the problem. It's the thoughtless and clearly automated outreach that gets on my last nerve. I received this after our product launch a couple of weeks ago. Subject: Product Launch Message: Kyle — Congrats one the product launch. That’s exciting. Will you be hiring GTM sales to support the new product? So, LinkedIn fam, what's wrong here? >> No context. Which product? What about it caught your eye? Zero proof you looked. >> It’s about them, not me. The ask is “are you hiring so I can sell you something?” No value. >> Vague CTA. If I say “maybe,” what happens next? >> I work for a 1000-person company with a huge sales team. >> No credibility. Why you? Why now? C'mon, we can do better. Here's how I would fix it... same goal... same time... 100x better. Subject: Idea to get [NewProduct] in front of [ICP] without a sales hire (yet) Kyle—noticed your [specific launch detail: “AI summary shipped Oct 12”] and the push toward [key segment: “learning teams”]. I’ve helped [2–3 relevant logos or outcomes] run post-launch campaigns that drove [concrete result: “first 50 paying teams in 30 days”] without adding additional headcount. If it’s useful, I can share a 1-page “first 30 days GTM” checklist tailored to [NewProduct] (channels, messages, and a light SDR experiment you can pause anytime). Want the checklist? If yes, I’ll send it. No call required. This works because: >> Shows you did the homework (specific launch detail). >> Positions a relevant win (outcome over fluff). >> Leads with value (send an asset first). >> Low-friction CTA (binary “Want it?” beats “Let’s hop on a call”). >> Optional next step (invites, doesn’t corner). >> Swipe file: outreach that actually earns a reply So next time you are drafting cold outreach, do: ✅ Name the exact thing you saw. ✅ Offer something they can consume async. ✅ Make the next step binary and tiny. And don't: ❌ Don’t ask if they’re hiring as your opener. ❌ Don’t write like a bot: subject-in-body, typos, or vague asks.

Your prospects don’t care about you. Most sales emails fail because they’re too focused on the sender’s product, company, or pitch. You have to #EarnTheRight to ask your prospects to care about you, your product, and your company. You can’t start from email one expecting them to give a heck. ***I've gotten feedback (from SDRs) that I'm being too hard on them when I say that their prospects don't care about them. If I have to be the "bad guy" to get sellers to realize selling is not about them, I will be. The emails we write need to center on our buyers, not us.*** During my How to Write Emails That Get Replies workshop, one seller had this exact realization: “I never thought about whether I’d earned the right to ask for my prospect’s time.” 📌 We reframed their approach using the Features-Advantages-Benefits (FABs) framework: FEATURE: What is it? ADVANTAGE: How does it work? Benefit: Why does it matter to the prospect? 🫨 80% of emails don't make it past feature dropping. Top sellers often talk about advantages in their emails, but they generally stop at how those features save time & money. Only the BEST sales email copywriters take the time to explain why those advantages matter to the prospect. This is top 1% shizz. If your team takes these steps, they'll be writing top 1% emails in 2025. 👉 Here’s why this shift matters: - FABs keep the focus on the recipient. Prospects need to see what’s in it for them—not what you’re trying to sell. - Benefits build trust. By solving a real problem or addressing a clear need, you create a natural path for engagement. - It’s actionable. Writing emails this way forces reps to think about the recipient’s perspective, not just their product features. How to Write Emails that Get Replies is one of my favorite Keynote decks. I am passionate about B2B outbound sales email copy. If you'd like me to share that passion and present this topic at your SKO, email me at leslie@salesledgtm.com so we can schedule a call.

Your outbound strategy isn’t failing because of bad emails… It's failing because of bad engineering. I've seen this pattern across 14+ years in GTM: Companies blame their 1% reply rates on "market saturation" or "bad copy." But the real problem? Your product and engineering decisions are killing your credibility before prospects even read your emails. Here's what nobody talks about: Your prospect researches your product before replying. They hit your website. Check your demo. Message people in communities (on WhatsApp and Slack). Maybe even sign up for a trial. And what do they find? Slow load times. Broken features. Horror stories of bad experiences. A product that feels like it was built by engineers who never talked to customers. That's not a marketing problem. That's an engineering problem. I’ve learned this the hard way over the years. You can build the best campaigns and execute with precision. But if your product has reliability issues, the market will find out. The truth is, every engineering decision is a GTM decision. Your prospect doesn't care that you chose a faster development framework. They care that your API is down when they need it most. They don't care about your technical debt. They care that your product crashes during their demo. If your product is sh*t, no fancy and well thought of GTM will get you $. Here's how engineering kills outbound (and how to fix it): 1. Slow product = slow trust building If your product takes 30+ seconds to load, prospects assume you can't scale with their business. 2. Buggy demos = dead deals One broken feature in a demo erases months of email nurturing. 3. Poor user experience = credibility gap Prospects think: "If they can't build a simple signup flow, how can they solve my complex problem?" The fix isn't better emails. It's better engineering-GTM alignment. Start asking: "How does this engineering decision impact trust and credibility?" Because your best cold email can't overcome a broken product experience.

Most product teams have one launch checklist. They use it for everything. And that's why customers tune out.                                                                                           A good launch starts well before distribution. First, you align on the basics: → What does this feature actually do? What are its limitations? → What's the value proposition? → Who is the primary target persona? → What's the key visual or demo moment? That part most teams get right these days. Where they stumble is varying their "launch volume". Not every feature deserves the same external push. Treating a minor workflow improvement the same as a category-defining release is a waste. It trains your audience to stop paying attention. That's where launch tiering comes in: 🔴 Tier 1: Grand Launch Category-defining. Repositions the product or unlocks new revenue. → 1-2 times a year, maximum → Tactics like founder video, paid ads, PR, webinars, dedicated email blast, landing page 🟠 Tier 2: Spotlight Launch Valuable and broad. Most active users will care. → 1-2 times a quarter → Multiple LinkedIn posts, newsletter feature, demo video, changelog 🟡 Tier 3: Minor Drop Useful for a specific segment. Not everyone needs to know. → 1-2 times a month max → In-app notification, newsletter mention, knowledge base article ⚪ Tier 4: Soft Update A config change, bug fix, or subtle design tweak. → Internal note to support + changelog. Nothing more. One more thing that's underrated: before any external push, Product Marketers need to align with PMs to make sure the self-discovery layer is solid. In my experience, existing customers don't always read launch emails. They need to stumble onto the feature inside the product itself. Think contextual tooltips, visual callouts, in-flow prompts. Slack does this well. Drop a Google Drive link and it immediately surfaces the integration. No campaign needed.    If the product doesn't surface the feature, the launch email carries all the weight. That's too much to ask of one round of announcements.  Now, some mistakes I've made in the past: 1. One checklist for every tier. Even within a tier, hand-pick the tactics that fit. Not every Tier 1 needs a webinar. A Tier 2 might land better through a partner's post than your own channels . 2. Labelling everything "exciting." When every release is "game-changing", your audience learns to ignore all of them. Save the big words for when they earn it. 3. Treating Tier 1 like a bigger Tier 2. A Grand Launch doesn't just need more tactics. It needs genuinely different content. Something that stops people mid-scroll. Ex: Clay got influencers to shoot video skits for their Signals feature. 4. Never re-launching. Customers forget, and features improve. A relaunch 6 to 12 months later introduces the feature to everyone who has joined since. The tier system doesn't make launches easier.  It makes the decision clearer. What's the biggest launch mistake you've seen?

Here’s something I don’t hear talked about enough. Cold email doesn’t work for every product. Roughly 20% of the clients I've worked with don't get meaningful results from cold email alone. Not because the messaging was bad. Not because the list was off. But because their offer wasn’t ready for it. Some examples: – Selling CMS software? No one wants to rip out their CMS mid-contract. – CRM software? Same deal. Sticky product, high switching cost. – Brand-new category? People don’t even realize they have the problem yet. There are always exceptions, but the truth is, cold email works best when your product is easy to understand, and has a big enough differentiator that it’s worth the cost of switching. Cold email already starts at a disadvantage — people are skeptical. Even if you write the perfect message, that still might not be enough to outweigh the very real pain of switching from what they’re already using. You can still book meetings by catching prospects near renewal or by nurturing them over time — but that’s a long game, and not enough to scale outbound on its own. If you're not seeing traction, it might not be your messaging or your list. It might just be too early or the wrong channel. What do you think? #sales

We caught 40+ emails flooding one trial user's inbox in 30 days. But nobody owned The First 30. The client was a SaaS company. Smart team. Strong product. Real revenue. Our team at The Good | Digital Experience Optimization audited their First 30 days. We mapped every email a new trial user received in that window. The list ran to 40+ messages. Welcome emails. Onboarding emails. Feature highlight emails. Discount emails. Re-engagement emails. Webinar invites. Case study drops. Survey requests. Every email had been written with a goal. Every team had thought through their own workflow. But nobody had thought through the user's whole experience. I asked the leadership team a simple question. Who owns the trial-to-paid journey? Three answers. Marketing said it was Product. Product said it was Customer Success. Customer Success said it was Marketing. Everybody owned a piece. Nobody owned the experience. This is the structural failure I see at most SaaS companies. The First 30 days is the most valuable customer window you have. The moment that determines trial-to-paid, retention, expansion, and lifetime value. And it usually has no owner. When something has no owner, every team optimizes their own metric. Marketing's open rates go up. Product's feature adoption goes up. Customer Success's outreach completion rate goes up. Meanwhile your trial user is drowning in your inbox and unsubscribing. The fix is not another tool. It is a single accountable owner of The First 30 days. One person whose job is the whole experience, not the individual touchpoints. If you cannot name that person at your company, you do not have a First 30 problem. You have a First 30 vacuum.

Why most email advice fails in the inbox Most email advice sounds sensible until it hits a real inbox → Keep emails short → Personalise more → Send at the "optimal time" (wtf even is that) → One clear CTA above the fold None of this is wrong, but it’s built on a faulty assumption: that the inbox is a place people go to browse It isn’t The inbox is a task/utility environment 📢 This means people open it to check, clear, confirm, respond, or reduce cognitive load - not to explore your content or be persuaded Email is not 'fun' That changes everything In task mode, attention is narrow, tolerance for friction is low, and pattern recognition is high. People are scanning for relevance, not creativity. They are deciding what can be ignored safely, not what looks interesting This is where most “best practice” breaks down Take “keep emails short” Short emails work when the reader already trusts you and understands why you’re emailing. They fail when context is missing, length isn’t the real variable - cognitive effort is. People don’t avoid long emails; they avoid emails that feel like work or that are irrelevant Or “one clear CTA” That assumes the reader is ready to decide; they’re not. Many inbox moments are about orientation: reminding themselves who you are, whether you’re useful, and whether you’re worth paying attention to later. Sometimes the most valuable outcome of an email is recognition, not a click. Personalisation fails for similar reasons because using someone’s first name is not personalisation. Worse, incorrect or poorly timed personalisation creates friction because it signals false familiarity. In a task-based environment, trust is SO fragile Most email advice also ignores expectation People have been trained to expect certain things from their inbox: Work inboxes mean requests and sales Consumer inboxes mean promotions and urgency When an email looks like something they’ve already learned to ignore, the brain filters it before it’s opened This is why predictability kills engagement Consistency builds trust, but sameness trains people to stop paying attention Email doesn’t win by persuading harder; it only wins by being recognised as relevant quickly. And that’s why optimisation alone rarely fixes performance. If expectations are misaligned or relevance is missing, better subject lines and CTAs just help people ignore you faster The real question isn’t “how do we get more engagement?” It’s whether you’re creating the conditions that make engagement possible in the inbox I go much deeper into this, with practical examples and a step-by-step breakdown, in my latest blog (see below how to find) _______ I'm Beth, and I train, transform, consult, audit (and occasionally rant) about all things email. 💌 Newsletter → RE:markable (view my newsletter under my name) 📊 Free tool → Email Health Check (featured section on profile) 💻 Email & CRM Vault → Very helpful blog (featured section on profile)

Your email marketing is failing because you're sending the same tired offers. Ecommerce customers are done with: - Generic "10% off your next order" post-purchase emails - Predictable "Abandoned cart? Here's a coupon" reminders - Weekly "New arrivals!" blasts that look identical every time Instead, try these approaches that actually drive revenue: - Behavior-triggered flows that respond to browsing patterns "We noticed you looked at these 3 items twice - here's how they work together" - Value-first content that builds product knowledge "5 ways our customers are using this product that we never expected" - Segment-specific messaging that feels custom-built "As someone who loves our skincare line, here's what our founder just created" The average consumer gets 250+ emails per day. If yours looks like everyone else's, you're just contributing to the noise. The brands seeing 30%+ email revenue aren't sending better discounts. They're sending better experiences. And they are connecting with the human on the other side. Think about this as you hit send on your next email.

I’ve received ~14,000 sales emails over the last 18 years. 98% failed in the first line. Not because the product was bad. Not because I wasn’t a potential customer. Because the effort wasn’t there. As much as procurement leaders want to respond professionally, there simply isn’t time. So most emails get judged instantly. Here’s what gets you deleted just as fast: - Misspelling the name or company (this happens a lot) - Writing a long, multi-paragraph novel - Leading with yourself instead of the prospect - Copy-pasting a generic pitch (painfully obvious) The bar isn’t high. It’s low. PAINFULLY low. Which means standing out doesn’t require brilliance… it requires effort. Even just a bit of effort. Here’s what actually puts you in the top 2%: - Go beyond surface-level personalization→ Show you understand their business, not just their title - Leverage real connections → Mutual contacts matter more than clever wording - Do 15 minutes of homework → Industry, customers, current challenges - Be specific → What problem do you solve for them? - Make the next step easy → Clear, simple CTA. (Hint: it shouldn't always include asking for someone's time right away). I recently received an email that referenced the wrong company, wrong role, and still asked for 30 minutes. That’s not an issue with bad leads. That’s an effort problem. Most sales emails don’t fail because selling is hard. They fail because they’re lazy.