Costly signalling theory and outbound marketing

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The meaning and significance we attach to something is felt in direct proportion to the expense with which it is communicated - Rory Sutherland

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Ninety-nine percent of outbound marketing gets ignored. Not because of poor copy, bad lists, weak deliverability, weak offers and lack of personalization. Or an inherent hate for cold emails. None of that helps of course but fundamentally it’s something else.

It is because it’s cheap and lacks meaning. Furthermore, for many busy professionals it's a source of anxiety.

Who wouldn’t want more revenue, more leads, and all the other wonderful promises in a typical cold email? In our subconscious minds, these promises come across as empty. Delivered through a medium that feels cheap and insincere from a sender who lacks credibility.

So it gets ignored and labeled as garbage (and rightfully so). 

This doesn't mean that email as a marketing channel is doomed. It still works very well and will work as long as humans continue to use it as one of the main communication channels.

This short article will give you a few examples of how you can apply the costly signalling theory to outreach emails. So it doesn't feel cheap.

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What is costly signalling?

Costly signalling is theory in evolutionary biology - it simply means signals that are hard to fake thus must be meaningful and reliable. About broadcasting beneficial traits about oneself to others. For example, showing off to attract a mate. Almost all animals, including humans, do it at some level. Some more theatrical than others (google peacock mating displays). 

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Successful outbound marketing examples leveraging costly signalling

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Airtable billboards

Airtable used billboards to target enterprise customers. These billboards were ridiculed on Twitter for being too vague, but what critics didn’t understand was that the purpose of the billboard was to signal to enterprise prospects that Airtable was a serious partner. The billboards were strategically placed near the offices of potential enterprise customers. While they didn’t see an immediate spike in traffic or leads, they did hear prospects mention the billboards on calls—and they assumed Airtable had hundreds of employees, when in reality, they only had 30 at the time. It worked.

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Creativity as a costly signal 

Ramp.fm sells custom T-shirts, a commodity in a highly competitive space. They launched a highly creative cold email campaign, targeting 50,000 companies by sending personalized emails that included a photo of their CEO wearing a T-shirt featuring the recipient’s company logo. This campaign generated tens of thousands of dollars in revenue, drove significant traffic, and prompted many recipients to share the campaign on social media, amplifying its effect. What made it work was that it was different (at the time), clearly took a lot of creative effort and the CEO took a risk by inserting himself in the email. All things were "costly".

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Who is the sender

A successful cold email campaign I got a chance to work on contained just a few lines of text. Also no images, no links, text-only (hint: it’s great for deliverability) but worked amazing well. Why? It was not the content but the sender. This person had thousands of followers on LinkedIn and a strong personal brand that took nearly a decade to built — the recipients knew it. Those few lines were also highly personalized for each recipient. While the output seemed super simple, it actually was quite a bit effort to put in all together (and a decade for the person to build their brand).

Similarly, I’ve seen a generic cold email, sent by an outsourced BDR team in India, achieve above-average contact-to-meeting rates. Just because it was from a well-know internet brand (which shall remain un-named). The brand communicates that meaning and costliness. It has features that haven been extremely difficult and expensive to come by.  

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It’s not about personalisation or offers but ultimately meaning and relevance. This doesn't mean that these exact ideas will work for you too but a little bit of effort can take you a long way. 

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