Most obsess over the copy because it’s visible.
You can read, critique, and compare it with ease.
Writing is a multiplier, not a driver.
Good copy matters, but it works by amplifying what’s already there:
- A strong offer
- A clear audience
- A well-structured campaign
- Smart email ideas
These things pre-exist the copy.
The real skill that matters is harder to see. Invisible, almost. And, thus, is easier to overlook.
It encompasses those 4 bullet points above and more.
You’re about to learn what that much more important skill is, its components, and what this means for you…
Whether you’re a founder or copywriter.
And that skill is…
| Table of Contents |
| Strategy: Why It Beats Writing The Components of Email Strategy The Copy Flows From the Strategy What This Means For You The Skill Behind the Skill What To Do Next |
Strategy: Why It Beats Writing
Put a world-class copywriter on a weak offer pointed at the wrong audience, and the emails will underperform.
Put a decent writer on a strong offer with a clear strategy behind it, and the results will surprise you.
The writing is the last thing that gets figured out.
Everything before it — the offer, the audience, the campaign structure, the angle — is strategy.
Strategy determines whether the email has any real chance of working before a single word is written.
The email marketers who consistently drive results aren’t necessarily the best writers in the room…
But they do the strategic thinking first, and let the copy follow.
The Components of Email Strategy
Strategy isn’t one thing.
It’s a collection of decisions that, made well, give every email you send a clear purpose and a real chance of working.
There are four core components worth understanding:
Offer
Before you write a single line of copy, you need to understand what you’re selling and why someone would want it.
Sounds obvious…
But many underperforming emails do so because the writer doesn’t fully understand the offer.
They don’t know:
- What objections exist
- The real value proposition is
- The various features and benefits
- How those features and benefits show up in the customer’s life
- What makes this product compelling to this specific audience at this specific moment
- Any other details (like shipping or guarantees)
Copy can’t fix a misunderstood offer.
It can only reflect your understanding of it back to the reader.
The deeper that understanding, the sharper the email.
Audience
An amazing offer with strong copy won’t sell if you put it in front of the wrong people.
For example, I get YouTube pre-video ads for travel. I am not interested in traveling at this exact moment, and am not a frequent traveler.
Even the best copy won’t make me act.
Now, knowing your audience means more than knowing their demographics. You should know:
- Where they are in the customer journey
- What they’ve already bought
- How engaged they are
- What they’re likely to need next
A first-time buyer needs something different than a repeat customer, for instance.
Or, a highly engaged subscriber responds differently than someone who hasn’t opened in three months.
That all starts with customer research. And customer research is ongoing.
You can deepen research by collecting reviews, leveraging surveys (either on the front end or post-purchase), and simply asking for things in certain emails (such as “why didn’t you buy?”).
Segmentation is how you act on this knowledge.
It helps you split your audience into buckets and send the right message to the right people.
Lastly…
YOU NEED ENOUGH PEOPLE IN YOUR AUDIENCE.
If you don’t have enough people on your list, and you’re not growing it, you won’t make many sales. Duh.
Example:
I worked with a massive subscription brand that was obsessed with targeting its huge list of canceled customers.
No matter what creative concepts we developed, our winback campaigns never made more than a few sales…
Even when we handed them a big offer (like the first 2-3 months free when they come back).
This audience is inherently uninterested, either because they don’t like the brand or lack the money (and yes, an incentive may fail here due to the recurring billing aspect).
Small List Example:
I once worked with a brand — purely on rev share — that had a tiny list (a couple thousand) and offered nonconsumable products.
The list wasn’t growing much, either.
My emails made a few sales, but there just weren’t many people to sell to.
It would’ve been easier for a consumable product, but we had to lean heavily on “gifting” and “backup pair” angles.
Campaign Architecture
You have a hungry audience and a solid offer that solves their problem.
Campaign architecture operates at two levels.
The first is your regular broadcast cadence — the regular emails you send 1-7 times/week.
This is as straightforward as deciding how often you mail, what kinds of emails you send, and which products you push on which days.
For example, a brand mailing three times a week might push:
- Product A on Mondays
- Product B on Wednesdays
- Product C on Fridays
And within that (or alternatively), they may opt for sending certain kinds of emails on certain days.
For instance, I worked with a brand that sent a Storymonial every Saturday.
This structure matters more than it seems.
I knew that every Saturday, I was to write this kind of email.
It kept me from making arbitrary decisions every time I sat down to write, and it gave my angle selection (next) a framework to work within.
The second level is the structured campaign/promotion.
Think Black Friday sales, end-of-quarter promotions, product launches, and similar sales events.
Here, architecture means deciding:
- How many emails the sequence needs (overall and per day)
- What overarching theme to employ
- Where to introduce the offer
- When to build urgency
- How the emails build on each other to move the reader toward a decision
A well-architected campaign can make mediocre emails work well enough.
But we don’t want mediocre, so onto the last piece…
Email Angle Selection
An “email angle” is the specific lens through which you approach a topic or an offer in a given email. Choosing the right one is a creative and strategic decision.
There are tons of angle types, with a few common ones being:
- Customer stories
- Belief-shifting
- Science behind the product
- Problem/solution
For example, a belief-shift angle in the pet health niche might be “Why your dog’s bad breath isn’t just cosmetic… and what it could actually be telling you about their gut health.”
The angles you choose depend on the audience, buyer journey stage, and the overall campaign’s goals.
See? Basically the topic of the email. You’d build the copy around this topic.
Good angle selection is what keeps an email list from feeling repetitive.
Instead, things feel fresh and relevant… while continuing to sell your offers.
The Copy Flows From the Strategy
Once the strategic work is done:
- You know the offer inside and out.
- You know who you’re writing to and where they are in the journey.
- You know where this email fits in the larger campaign or cadence.
- You know the angle you’re taking.
At that point, the copy almost writes itself.
Writing well isn’t “easy” and is indeed a skill.
But every decision that shapes the email has already been made. The parameters are defined.
Execution remains.
Say you’re writing for a men’s leather goods brand:
- The offer is a wallet
- The audience is existing customers who recently purchased anything else in the store
- You need to write a post-purchase flow designed to onboard them into the brand and drive a second purchase
- The angle for the email you need to write is identity — speaking to the kind of man who refuses to carry a cheap, falling-apart wallet.
You know the who, the what, the why, and the lens.
The copy is a natural output of these. And it’s even easier if you lean on proven email frameworks to “plug and play” the details.
So, in short:
The copywriter who did more strategic thinking will write better emails, more easily, than the one who skimped on it.
What This Means For You
For Founders
Resist the urge to evaluate potential copywriter/email marketer hires purely on writing samples.
Writing samples tell you whether someone can construct a good sentence, but NOT whether that person understands your offer, thinks in systems, or knows how to architect a campaign that actually moves customers through a journey
A few questions to ask instead:
- How they’d approach your list
- How they do research
- What they’d want to know about your offer or audience before writing a single email
- How they think about segmentation
The answers to those questions will tell you far more than any writing sample. The best email marketers are strategic partners first and writers second. Hire accordingly.
For Copywriters
Writers are commoditized. There are thousands of them, and clients know it.
So if you want to stop competing on price and start commanding higher rates, strategy is the answer.
A copywriter who understands offer and customer economics, thinks in campaigns rather than individual emails, and can walk a client through the strategic decisions behind their email program…
That person is much harder to replace and much easier to justify paying well.
Writing is still important. But it is merely a part of the process. Strategy is what makes you indispensable (and what often creates the copy by accident).
Time to evolve.
The Skill Behind the Skill
Good writing, when you think about it, is not just clever arrangements of words on a page.
The act of “writing” entails the direction and intent behind the words. In other words, the strategy.
Offer, audience, campaign architecture, and email angles. Each selected deliberately, so that when you sit down to write, the words flow out without as much resistance.
Learn the strategy first. The copy will follow.
What To Do Next
- Share this article with someone who might find it helpful (or entertaining).
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- Reach out to me at info(at)bradleyschnitzer.com if you have a sizable email list and make less than 20% of your revenue through email.