The customer spotlight email, built from one real order

A portrait, not a quote

A testimonial answers a doubt. A spotlight answers something else: do people like me buy this. Nobody says that one out loud, and it stops more sales than any feature objection you'll ever handle.

So the subject of the email is your customer, not your product. Their situation, what they tried before, what worried them, what they do now. The product turns up where it actually turned up in their life, usually somewhere in the middle.

Choose for recognisability, not for enthusiasm

Your most enthusiastic customer is usually the least useful one. Their situation is unusual. Their enthusiasm can't be repeated either. Pick somebody ordinary, whose circumstances a big chunk of your list would recognise straight away.

• Their situation is common in your customer base, not an edge case you found interesting
• They tried something else first, which gives the story a middle
• They can describe a specific moment instead of a general feeling
• They're willing to be photographed, or to send their own photographs, which doubles the campaign's reach

Two spotlights a quarter, each drawn from a different segment of your customer base, will cover more of your list than twelve drawn from whoever replied first.

Twenty minutes on a call beats a form every time

A written questionnaire gets you short, careful answers. A phone call gets you the sentence you'll build the whole email around, usually about eleven minutes in, when they stop performing and start describing.

That send is the compact version: three customers with their own photographs of the finished job. A full spotlight takes one of those three and runs it long. Worth doing when the story has a real beginning and an end. Not just a verdict.

Their words in the middle, yours at the edges

Publish their first name and something that places them. A county, a trade, the age of the dog. Anonymous stories read as invented, and the detail that makes somebody real costs you nothing once you've asked for it.

Match the spotlight to the segment it describes

The whole value here is recognition, so blasting every spotlight to the whole list throws most of it away. Match the customer's situation to the segment that shares it, and send it there first.

So: a spotlight per customer type per quarter, each one sent to its own segment, with the whole list seeing maybe one of them. More work than a single broadcast, and it performs several times better. That's the trade every account we run makes.

Look at who replied to your last review request

The people who wrote more than a sentence in your last review request are your shortlist, already self selected. Most brands never read past the star rating. That's where these campaigns go to die.

Pick two, ring them, and ask what they were doing before they found you. If the answer takes more than a minute, you've got a campaign, and probably a page worth building around it as well.