Chocolate. One simple word which – at the right time – can grab your attention, encourage engagement and potentially catalyse a relationship with potential prospects. Proven by the fact that we’ve now captured your attention and intrigue. A man who can explain the method behind the madness is Andrew Nicholson, Co-Founder and CEO of marketing automation platform Kulea. 

With intimate knowledge of email marketing and the minefield your message needs to navigate in order to earn your recipient’s click, Andrew shares with Katie his top tips for engaging with prospects without sounding like you’re pitching. 

We also hear about how to improve the quality of your touchpoints, and his ‘iPhone test’ that keeps communications short, snappy and (most importantly) successful!

This episode covers

• Improving your business development communications
• Adapting to people’s unconventional home-working hours
• Coping with uncertainty
• Staying out of the spam folder
• How to stand out from other prospect and promo emails

Word on the Street is lucky enough to be sponsored by the wonderful team at Just After Midnight who are experts in uptime. Whatever the issue, whatever the time of day, they are supporting your websites and applications 24/7, while your team sleeps. Learn more: https://www.justaftermidnight247.com/

Links & references

Katie Street: https://www.linkedin.com/in/katiestreet/

Andrew Nicholson: https://www.linkedin.com/in/digitalmarketingdiva/

Kulea: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kulea-marketing-automation/

Kulea: https://kulea.ma/

Get in touch: [email protected]

Episode highlights

“Fortunately, at around the same time as we started really focusing on the recruitment industry, we were also starting to cultivate the business development service and solution offer that we work with today. So by the skin of our teeth, we managed to dodge that particular bullet [COVID-19].” – 5:20 – Andrew Nicholson

“Everyone says they prefer beautifully designed HTML emails, but actually they respond better to plain text. I think you get a 30% higher engagement rate for plain text, which is ridiculous! ” – 8:24 – Andrew Nicholson

“We have an internal test, which is the iPhone test, so it’s something that you would put together on an iPhone and send out that gets the response rates. Don’t overcomplicate things, don’t overthink things.” – 10:47 – Andrew Nicholson

“Every single touchpoint you have with that prospect or with that client, you should be in some way making their lives better. Making them smile, giving them something they can use, something that’s valuable to them, making them look good in front of their boss. It doesn’t matter what it is, but every single touch point, you’ve got to ask yourself ‘How does this make their life better? ‘” – 13:56 – Andrew Nicholson

“I think the only certainty is uncertainty right now, and we have to try and build that into our plans.” – 20:25 – Andrew Nicholson

“Most of the campaigns that we run, we do get opportunities for our clients straightaway. But a lot of them are a longer burn, and we’re building relationships, and we’re building engagement.” – 26:22 – Katie Street

“I am a big fan – and this is very much evidence based – of short, three or four-word subject lines, slightly vague subject headers. The best open rate we’ve ever gotten – a 60% open rate and huge engagement click through – was just the subject line ‘Chocolate’.” – 32:20 – Andrew Nicholson

“Humour is massively important, it’s so often underrated. If you can make someone smile in an email, you’re halfway through to building that relationship already. If your email is something they enjoy, and look forward to receiving – fantastic.” – 35:53 – Andrew Nicholson