August 16, 2022 Copy

What is email spintax and how does it benefit your cold email campaigns (a fintech perspective)

When you’re sending hundreds of cold emails a month, you try to stay at the cusp of email innovation. But what if you’re sending thousands… millions of cold emails a month? Well, that’s when you bite your nails and use spintax. 

In this article, we are going to go deep into the world of mass email senders—spammers, as most would call them. And look at an innovation that’s gathering steam in their world: spintax. 

This became prevalent in March 2022, after Google changed its anti-spam rules and started to choke slam more of their emails into spam folders.

PS: Pay attention to sentiment from these mass cold email communities. Their average email sending volume is high enough for them to notice the tiniest of changes, which might feel non-existent to you.

What is email spintax and why do you use it?

Spintax is the combination of spin and syntax. And here’s how it works.

You’re selling fancy APIs to big banks ( I’ve asked around, it’s a profitable business). Your call to action is, “open for a call?” and you’ve been using this successfully since 1845. 

But email service providers like Gmail have learnt your spammy ways…so you decide to use spintax. This is what it would look like:

[spintax: open for a call|got time to talk|have a moment to chat|bad idea to chat about this|]?

Your cold emailing tool will pick from the given phrases randomly. Do this all over your email script and you have hundreds of copy variations-–enough to confuse the spam filter bots’ feelings and let you sail into the inbox sunset.

However, since fintech people don’t *cough* send spam, what can we learn from the spintax movement that will improve our cold email campaigns?

Update your copy

From what I could dig up, there’s a possibility that spam filters can remember your copy and make decisions based on patterns associated with that copy e.g. percentage of emails containing your words that have been flagged as spam before. 

Are the email scripts used by your team in the repertoires of every Tom, Dick and their apron-knitting grandpas? If so, update them and avoid those cold email scripts making rounds on social media. Google keeps its cards close though, this is all I could find on how they evaluate your emails.

Screenshot from Neil Kumaran’s article, Google’s Group Product Manager, Gmail Security & Trust 

Have healthy copy variations

While varying your email copy to this degree might seem extreme. 

Screenshot from one of the cold email groups I’m in.

If you’re sending thousands of cold emails a month, identify the areas you can change without affecting the overall message. 

Vary the call to actions. For example, “open to learning more?” has grown popular. What can you change here without altering the intentions the email script writer had for the line? Give it a try in the comments.

Conclusion

Will sales teams start walking around muttering to themselves, looking for spintax synonyms in dusty thesauruses? And if this goes mainstream, how hard will it be to identify winning email copy and milk it dry? Who knows… maybe it’ll all land in spam. Let’s wait and see.