▤Templates in practice

At the start, three — one per stage. Nobody who is just beginning needs more.

Later, the number grows by audience: if you approach trade businesses differently from clinics, that is two sets of three templates each. That is the sensible way to grow.

Where it tips over: from about fifteen templates. Then nobody knows any more which one is current, and copies of copies appear.

The rule of thumb: one template per combination of audience and stage. If you seriously distinguish three audiences, nine templates are right. If you have twenty, you are not distinguishing — you have just never tidied up.

According to a fixed pattern that you define once and then stick to:

Audience – stage – occasion, for example:

• “Trades – first contact – general”
• “Trades – 1st follow-up”
• “Clinics – first contact – skills shortage”

What you should not do:

• Date in the name. “Template March” says nothing about what it is for.
• Version numbers. “First contact v3” means that v1 and v2 still exist — delete them.
• Names of people. After Krause has left, nobody knows what to make of “Template Krause”.

And alphabetically, the pattern sorts itself correctly: all templates for one audience stand together.

As few as possible — each one is a place where something can remain empty.

Almost always useful: - Salutation and surname. - Company, if you refer to it.

Use with care: - First name — often seems too familiar for a first contact in German business correspondence. - Town — only if you really use it (“in your region around Meissen”).

Never without a fallback: every placeholder needs an idea of what happens if the field is empty. “Dear ,” is the mistake that ruins an entire campaign.

Before every sending, check the recipient list for empty fields — the preview with a real contact shows it immediately.

Clearly — and anyone who writes the same thing three times gets unsubscribes the third time.

• First contact: why I am writing, what I offer, what the next step would be. Complete, but short.
• First follow-up: short. Reference in half a sentence, a new thought, the same question. Three to four sentences.
• Second follow-up: even shorter. And with a door that closes: “If now is not a good time, I will get back to you in six months.”

The last one is more effective than it sounds. An email that explicitly asks for nothing more gets a reply more often than one that keeps pushing.

What does not belong in any follow-up email: the complete first email underneath. That makes it twice as long and only shows that you have nothing new to say.

Four steps, ten minutes in total:

1. Preview with a real contact. Not with sample data — with someone from your recipient list. Then you can see whether the placeholders are filled.
2. A test mail to yourself, to an address you do not otherwise use.
3. Read it on your phone. There you see how much is visible without scrolling, and that is all that counts.
4. Look in the spam folder. If your own test mail ends up there, the others will too.

In addition, if you can ask someone: have it read by someone who does not know the text. The question is not “do you like it?” but “what would you do now?”.

If the answer is “nothing”, the closing question is missing.

Technically yes — in practice, with care.

What happens: anyone who has not yet received the email gets the new version. Anyone who already has it keeps the old one. So afterwards you have two groups with different text.

When that is fine:

• Correcting typos.
• Correcting a wrong detail — then immediately.

When not:

• Restructuring the text because it is not working. Then pause the campaign, make the changes and start again. Otherwise you cannot tell afterwards what worked.

And: note when you made the change. Otherwise, in four weeks you will wonder about two groups of replies that do not fit together.

With a review twice a year, twenty minutes:

• Which ones have not been used in the last six months? If you cannot name the reason, they can go.
• Are there copies? “First contact” and “First contact new” are a state of affairs, not a collection.
• Are the details still correct? Prices, contact persons, services, years.
• Does the tone still fit? Texts that are two years old often sound like the time they were written in.

What you should not delete: templates attached to completed campaigns — you need them to prove what you sent.

Rule of thumb: a collection you have to scroll through when selecting is too large.

Yes — the subject is the most effective thing you can change with little effort.

How to do it sensibly:

• Two versions, change nothing else.
• Enough recipients per version — under a hundred, the difference is chance.
• Compare replies, not opens. Those are deliberately not measured here.

What you can try out:

• Question versus statement. “Are you still looking for a project manager?” versus “Project manager for the plant extension”.
• With a local reference versus without.
• Short versus very short.

And note what you tested and how it turned out. A result that nobody remembers after four weeks was wasted.

The mandatory details and nothing that distracts.

Mandatory in business emails (as in a business letter):

• Full company name with legal form.
• Address.
• Register court and register number, if registered.
• Persons authorised to represent the company.

Useful additions:

• Your name and your position.
• Phone number — the most important line of all.
• Website.

Leave out:

• Large logos and images. They increase the likelihood of spam filtering and are often not loaded.
• Quotations, environmental appeals, legal disclaimers without effect.
• Several lines of links to social networks.

Check once in a test mail how the signature arrives at a recipient — especially on a phone.

No — it is set automatically for campaigns. You should still check it once in a test mail.

What matters:

• It must be recognisable. An unsubscribe link in light grey six-point type does not serve its purpose.
• It must work without signing in. Nobody creates an account to unsubscribe.
• It must take effect. No further advertising may follow after unsubscribing.

What you should also do: include a sentence in the template that mentions unsubscribing. That does not look weak but proper — and it lowers the number of people who click “Spam” instead.

A spam report harms all your future emails. An unsubscribe harms only that one relationship.

As separate templates, not as a bilingual email.

Why: an email in which the same text appears twice seems half-hearted in both languages, and is twice as long.

In practice:

• A separate set of templates per language, named with the language code: “Trades – first contact – DE” and “… – EN”.
• Cut the audience accordingly. You need a characteristic by which you can tell who gets which language — a category or a tag.
• Do not translate literally. What is polite in German comes across as long-winded in English.

And bear in mind the mandatory details: they apply in every language version.

As a model for the structure: by all means. As text: no.

Two reasons:

• Copyright. An advertising text is protected, even if there is no notice anywhere. This applies to texts from competitors just as much as to samples from the internet.
• It does not work. A text written for another business is generic for yours, and generic emails get deleted.

What you can take over without concern:

• The structure: reference, offer, benefit, question.
• The length.
• The insight that a small closing question works better than a big one.

And if you inherit a template from a colleague who has left: read it in full once. Surprisingly often, it contains details that are no longer correct.

Then exactly that is missing: a template assigned to this stage.

The most common causes:

• The template exists but is assigned to the wrong stage. A text can be a follow-up email in content and still be entered as a first contact.
• It has been deleted while a campaign still pointed to it.

What to do: create a template or assign the existing one to the right stage. Then try the campaign again.

And to prevent it: before you create a campaign with three stages, all three templates should be in place. A campaign that stalls halfway because stage two is missing is annoying — and the recipients are left waiting.