Untangling an email marketing mess

How better strategy and stronger copy improved dozens of underperforming campaigns

CONTEXT

After freelancing for ProTrainings for two years, copywriter Nick Mistretta took over the company’s email marketing for nearly a year. The company offered numerous products to different audiences, with dozens of email campaigns involving multiple internal stakeholders.

Mistretta became responsible for the strategy, copy, organization, and ongoing optimization of an increasingly complex email marketing operation.

PROBLEM

ProTrainings had dozens of email campaigns running across multiple products and audiences. Many were underperforming, while others were outdated, no longer relevant, or simply not being used.

Making matters worse, the campaigns were spread across three different email platforms while the company was in the process of migrating everything to Drip. Years of adding new campaigns, sequences, and stakeholders had created an increasingly complicated system without a clear strategy tying everything together.

The challenge: Untangle the existing mess, determine what was still relevant, and rebuild the email marketing program from the ground up with a new strategy for each product and audience.

SOLUTION

Mistretta started by learning the existing email platforms, meeting with stakeholders, and researching each product and audience to understand what they were selling, who they were selling it to, and what each campaign actually needed to accomplish.

Step 1: Develop a new strategy for each product and audience, including the journey from initial ad or lead form through the different email sequences that followed.

Step 2: Rewrite the campaigns from the ground up, including the top-of-funnel ads and forms that brought people into them.

Step 3: Create rules for segmentation, send times, and frequency, as well as when and how subscribers should move from one sequence to another.

Step 4: Identify missing opportunities and build new campaigns, including ProTrainings’ first abandoned cart sequence.

Step 5: Audit the campaigns every month, analyze performance data, and continually optimize the copy and strategy based on what was working.

OUTCOME

By the time Mistretta left ProTrainings, every campaign he rebuilt was outperforming the version it replaced, with some showing substantial improvements in engagement and conversion.

The new abandoned cart campaign began generating revenue immediately, turning an overlooked gap in the customer journey into an entirely new source of sales.

More importantly, ProTrainings was left with something it hadn’t had before: a coordinated email marketing system built around clear strategies, defined audiences, and performance data rather than a collection of disconnected campaigns.

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