To be successful in driving engagement from business buyers, it’s not enough that marketing content simply be relevant to the individual reader. To be information of value, that same content needs to be useful, and at a very fundamental level it needs to tell the reader something he or she doesn’t already know.
Sounds obvious, right? And yet if I were to choose the one thing that dooms more B2B email creative to mediocrity and worse, it would be just that: telling people stuff they already know.
In 90 percent of all cases, this dreadful habit occurs in the service of what at our firm we call the “set-up paragraph” – that very first paragraph of email copy in which the writer attempts to make a case for why the recipient should care about everything else he/she is about to read.
