Three short emails over three weeks, to the people the last campaign already warmed up. Each email carries one link, and the landing page does the explaining.
The last campaign did not produce a demo, but it did produce a sorted audience. Start there, then extend to fresh cold audience in the same format so the two reads are comparable.
Reached the landing page, or read it, or already known to Civis from a previous event. Security-scanner accounts are stripped out.
Opened or clicked across two or more separate messages. Repeat engagement over weeks is the signal email security software cannot fake.
Nonprofits from the public-filings and hiring-signal pipeline, in the same short format. Sized when the list is built.
Every layer is applied when the list is built. The last campaign learned this the expensive way: 467 people who could not receive mail sat on the lists through five sends, and only one of them would have been caught by send-time suppression.
Rendered as they would arrive. Two subject lines per touch, because the subject is now the only thing being tested. Everything else is identical between the arms.
Scroll the email sideways to read it at full width.
Scroll the email sideways to read it at full width.
Scroll the email sideways to read it at full width.
After the open, the plain and branded lanes were indistinguishable on clicks, the branded one won the Leadership persona on both metrics, and it produced fewer opt-outs. There is no evidence a light wrapper suppresses response, and a real cost to sending unbranded mail from a company this audience cannot name.
Who fronts the sends. The named human sender is the variable most likely to have earned the open rate in the last campaign, and it decides where replies land. Whoever it is, the reply address has to reach somebody who reads it.
The last campaign spent six weeks per group on four long emails, and the three after the first bought no incremental engagement.
Scroll the timeline sideways to read it.
A click. One link to a two minute overview, with no form in the way.
The same click, from a different angle and in new words. Never the same body twice.
A yes or a no, by reply. That is the whole ask, and it is the one we can count.
Day 22, one week after the last touch, opens have finished accruing and the result is read on clicks and replies. A yes goes straight to a person. The winning subject line carries into wave 2 unchanged, so waves 2 and 3 are not re-running the same test. One send time and one wave size every wave: the last campaign's worst-performing send was its only morning send and its largest, and the same first email, unchanged, swung from 29.3% open to 16.8% depending on the day it went out.
Every gap below is one the last campaign is still carrying, and none of them can be fixed after a send.
Open rate stays on the report and stops being a success metric. Apple is 62% of all email opens and its privacy feature affects 55 to 60% of them, so an open is a signal about the subject line and nothing else.
The last campaign proved we can reach these people and that they will not book a demo with a company they cannot name. Short List keeps the reach, drops the ask to something a stranger can complete alone, and counts the one signal we have never been able to count.
