Stop guessing. Start listening
Oh boy! Today is going to be a fun, yet incredibly insightful day, folks.
If you’ve been around here for a while, the name Matt Thomas may ring a bell…
Matt, besides being a good friend and community member, is also a previous Email Advice From A Friend contributor (back in our 2nd-ever Volume of this edition in 2023).
Matt is a master wordsmith who has spent over 15 years as a technical writer, creator, and has been honing his superpowers as an AI whisperer.
Considering the love Matt got for his contribution, we thought it sacrilegious NOT to bring him back to see us out as our final guest before 2025 wraps up.
This is going to be one for the ages!
Time to take a dip in the infinite baths of understanding the truth about your audience, so let’s get to it.
Stop starting on the wrong side of the inbox
It’s a common mistake too many marketers make:
Their emails are about what matters to them — not what matters to their customers.
They write about their priorities, based on their assumptions, using their language.
Meaning their message rarely aligns with what their customers actually care about.
The solution is simple, and it’s something every email and B2B marketer is already sitting on.
Stop making email harder than it needs to be
Your customers have given you everything you need to send better emails.
And it’s in the words they already use.
Authentic customer language gives you what dashboards, KPIs, and spreadsheets can’t.
It’s unfiltered because customers talk about what’s really getting in their way, in their own words.
It’s revealing because it’s based on actual problems, objections, and frustrations.
It’s specific because it comes from real customers, not vague categories or idealised personas.
It’s the difference between writing at your customers and writing for them.
Writing for them turns guesswork into clarity.
And clarity = emails that resonate with readers.
Customer language sharpens every part of your email strategy
Used properly, this untapped feedback becomes your competitive advantage.
It gives you clarity on what to say, who you’re saying it to, and why it matters to them — before you ever start writing.
Which means you’re not crafting messaging, targeting subscribers, or building campaigns based on assumptions.
Here’s how that looks in practice:
Subject lines: If customers say “I’m overwhelmed,” don’t write “optimise your workflow.” Use “Feeling overwhelmed?”
Segmentation: If replies show repeated billing confusion, create a billing-specific nurture instead of a generic onboarding.
Personalisation: If customers call a feature “the dashboard,” stop calling it an “analytics workspace.”
Nurture content: If 40% of support tickets are about “getting started,” your first three emails should address that.
Using authentic customer language is a cheat code for emails that feel relevant – not random – to your readers.
Why more marketers don’t use it: It’s messy
The challenge for most marketing teams is that raw customer feedback feels impossible to work through:
The data is scattered across different tools and channels.
It doesn’t fit into neat rows or columns.
Nobody owns it, so it goes ignored.
Manually extracting insights buried in mountains of text is slow and tedious.
It’s no wonder B2B companies end up with 1,000 support tickets sitting untouched —digging through them feels like punishment.
Teams don’t have the time or manpower to process all that unstructured data, capture what’s relevant, or spot hidden trends.
That’s why the insights that should be shaping your email strategy never surface.
Capturing authentic customer language can feel intimidating
But it doesn’t have to be.
You just need a simple system to start collecting and applying your customers’ words.
Five minutes a day is enough to build something useful if you make it a habit.
Here’s the simplest way to get started:
1. Start a new document, titled Customer Language & Insights.
2. Create these 7 buckets:
Notable Customer Quotes
Pain Points
Decision Drivers
Top Benefits
Objections/Concerns
Scale Details
Summary Block
3. Start capturing customer feedback from the places it already lives, like:
Email replies
(“I don’t understand what this update means for me”)User reviews
(“Setup was easy once I found the right path”)Surveys
(“I want more clarity on which features our team needs”)Support logs
(“I don’t know where to update my preferences”)Cancellation notes
(“We couldn’t justify the cost without better reporting”)
4. Copy/paste that raw data into the 7 buckets:
Notable Customer Quotes
(“I finally have a clear picture of what’s happening”)Pain Points
(“I waste way too much time trying to find the right information”)Decision Drivers
(“We needed a tool our whole team could use without training”)Top Benefits
(“The reporting features helped us move faster on every project”)Objections/Concerns
(“I don’t know if this will integrate with the tools we already use”)Scale Details
(“Used across a team of 12 managing daily operations”)Summary Block
(“Used by a 10-person Ops team at a SaaS startup. Customers realised the value once they were up and running, but onboarding took much longer than expected.”)
These four steps give you a simple manual workflow to start capturing and using authentic customer language and insights you’d otherwise miss.
The process isn’t hard, but the challenge is keeping up with it.
Because this kind of work is the first thing that gets pushed aside when teams are busy.
That’s why it rarely happens, even when everyone agrees it should.
To save you time, I’ve built a simple template that handles the setup for you…
Grab it here: The Insights Engine Template
The problem with the manual approach?
It doesn’t scale!
For most marketers — especially in B2B — the biggest bottleneck isn’t the workflow.
It’s the sheer volume of data to sift through.
Because raw, language-based feedback doesn’t live in one place.
It’s spread across:
Product reviews
Survey responses
User feedback forms
Renewal + churn notes
Support tickets + chat logs
Win/loss interview transcripts
Worst of all, none of it is structured, organised, or searchable. Which means all you can do is grind through it:
Line by line. Page after page. Day after day.
That’s when the manual approach falls apart — all that raw feedback piles up faster than you can process it.
And that’s exactly why I built the Insights Engine
The first system designed to instantly extract insights from your customers’ words — at scale.
The Insights Engine ingests your unstructured B2B customer data and organises it into the 7 categories above.
NO manual data tagging, labelling, or categorising required—the engine handles it all.
Every review, reply, survey, ticket, interview, and note.
Here’s what makes the Insights Engine different from any other voice-of-customer tool:
Verbatim fidelity
It captures your customers’ exact words — untouched and unpolished — so your emails stay grounded in their language.
Source-level traceability
Every insight or quote is traceable to its exact source, so you can show exactly where each message or angle came from.
Interactive intelligence
The engine surfaces patterns and trends across your customers’ words, allowing you to target decision drivers, benefits, and pain points by segment and industry.
Iteration at lightning speed
Helps you go from customer insight to drafts to variants instantly, so you can A/B test subject lines, refresh stale sequences, or build full email marketing campaigns — in minutes instead of days.
But just as important as what the Insights Engine does is what it doesn’t come with:
AI hallucinations or fabricated quotes
Code or integrations
SaaS subscriptions or vendor lock-ins
The Insights Engine eliminates every barrier between you and your most valuable untapped asset: your customers’ exact words.
Which means you start every email from your customers’ POV — not yours.
Your data has the answers.
Now you can ask it questions.
You can learn more about the Insights Engine and try the demo here.
You can find answers to common questions here.
Matt
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How’s that for a guest feature?
If you have any feedback or knowledge to share, click here! Oh, and please share this email with your friends and colleagues if you think they’ll find value over here.
Your feedback only makes us better.
Your friend in email,
Des
