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How to Write Better Emails at Work

Eight tips you can start using today.

Where your work meets your life. See more from Ascend here .

Is writing a bad email going to ruin your career? No. But learning the unspoken rules for writing professional emails can improve how competent you appear in the eyes of your colleagues. In this HBR collaboration with YouTube creator Jeff Su , you’ll learn how to better organize your email communications and avoid typical rookie mistakes.

0:00  — Why bother with email etiquette? 1:19 — Include a call to action in subject line 2:13 — One email thread per topic 2:48  — Manage recipients 3:27  — Start with the main point 4:30  — Summarize in your reply 5:10 — Hyperlink whenever possible 5:38  — Change default setting to “Reply” (not “Reply all”) 6:06 — Change undo send options 

Transcript 

JEFF SU: OK, real talk. Making email etiquette mistakes in the workplace — it’s not going to capsize your career. But learning the unspoken rules of writing professional emails will affect how competent you are perceived to be in the eyes of your colleagues.

And since there are no standardized training courses for this, in this video, I’m going to first share the very real benefits of getting good at emailing in the workplace, then dive into my top eight tips for professional email etiquette, many of which I learned the hard way during my first full-time job as a management consultant. So let’s get started.

Hi, everyone. My name is Jeff, and I’m truly honored to be able to partner with Harvard Business Review for this video about a nerdy passion of mine: Email etiquette in the workplace. Think back to the last time you received a poorly written email. You might have had to reread it a few times to get the main point, and the action items might have been scattered all over the place.

Worst-case scenario, it led to an unnecessarily long back and forth email thread that could have been avoided had the initial email been properly planned out. Therein lies the beauty of well-crafted emails. Not only does it help you, the sender, come across as more capable by showcasing strong communication skills, but it also saves the reader so much of their time by only surfacing information relevant to them.

So without further ado, my first step is to have a call to action, when appropriate, in the email subject line. Most of us are familiar with a generic “action required” in subject lines, right? My recommendation is just to take it a step further and include exactly what you need the recipient to do and the estimated time it takes for them to do it.

For example, instead of writing “Action required, feedback for project X,” write “Five minutes — survey feedback for project X,” instead. This very small trick gives you a lot more context. It’s a survey for project X. I can get it done very quickly in between the two meetings I have. Or if it’s not appropriate to include the estimated time, be specific about the call to action. For example, instead of “spending estimates for Q4,” write “Elon to approve spending estimates for Q4.” So Elon knows what’s expected of him even before he opens the email.

Step number two: Stick with one email thread for the same topic. I’m going to be honest, I got called out for this by a colleague of mine, but I’m glad she told me. Basically, I used to send out separate emails for the same project whenever I had a new idea or follow-up question. But if you think about it from the recipient’s point of view, they’re missing the context from the original email thread and multiple new emails on the same topic just clog up their inboxes unnecessarily. So the general rule of thumb here is to stick to the original email chain for any given topic so everyone can refer to the same information.

Email etiquette tip number three: Explain why you added in or took out recipients in email threads. There are many situations you have to add someone in to the email thread to get their input, or take someone out to spare their inbox. A professional and easy way to do this is to add a sentence at the very top of the email clearly showing who you added in or took out. I like to add parentheses and italicize the font to separate it from the actual email body. This way, the readers know who the new recipients are immediately.

Tip number four actually addresses a very big pet peeve of mine, which is when senders include a lot information up front, but what they’re really trying to get at or ask for is at the very end of the email. To avoid that, always include your main point first, followed by the context. Just compare these two emails:

“Hi Jane, my name is Jeff and I’m in the product marketing team. We’re preparing a forecast deck for the big boss and he’s looking for the revenue projection numbers for the secret electric car that’s launching soon. Can I trouble you to pull that data for me?”

“Hi Jane, may l please trouble you for the electric car revenue projection numbers? Context: the product marketing team is currently preparing a forecast deck for the big boss and we’re hoping to use the projections to fight for more budget. It would be amazing to get numbers for 2025 to 2030 in a Google Sheets format.”

By pushing the context back, we’re giving the other person the option to read the not so important part of the email. Oftentimes, when we’re emailing someone more senior than us, we feel obligated to explain why we’re emailing right at the beginning so it doesn’t seem like we’re bothering them. This is actually counterproductive because if the person is very senior, they probably just want to know what you’re emailing them about so they can deal with it then move on with their own schedules.

Tip number five: If you receive an email with a lot of disorganized content, summarize the sender’s main points for them in your reply. So if you receive an email from someone who clearly has not watched this video and they sent you a long, wordy, convoluted message you have to reread a few times, you want to do two things.

Number one, send them this video. Number two, take a few minutes to identify and bucket common themes from their email, and summarize their message in a few sentences before responding to whatever they’re emailing you about. Not only does this help you confirm your understanding is correct, the other party will appreciate the extra effort you took to help them organize their thoughts.

Email etiquette tip number six: Hyperlink whatever possible. This is another pet peeve of mine. If you’re sharing a link with someone over email, you really should take the extra few seconds to hit Command K on Mac or Control K on Windows and hyperlink the external website or video. Not only does this looks so much cleaner to the recipient than just pasting the big clunky link, but it also decreases the chances of you making a mistake by adding an extra letter or deleting one in the original URL.

Tip number seven: Change your default setting to “reply” instead of “reply all.” This is honestly the risk-averse side of me talking. The way I think about it, let’s say your reply to an email in a rush and you do make a mistake, the damage is contained to that one recipient because your default setting is to reply to one person instead of reply all. This is a standard setting on most popular email clients, and you can usually find this in the general settings section.

Email etiquette tip number eight: Change the “undo send” option to 30 seconds. So you might not know this, but Murphy’s law when it comes to emailing in the workplace is that you will always catch your mistakes 10 seconds after the email is already sent. All jokes aside, I’m sure we’ve all been there. We send an email, we go into the sent email folder to read it from the other person’s perspective, and we realize something is wrong.

Again, this is a standard setting you can play around with in all of the email apps. Instead of the default five seconds undo send, for example, update to 30 seconds for good measure.

• JS Jeff Su is a full-time Product Marketer who makes videos on practical career and productivity tips.

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How to write a case study — examples, templates, and tools

It’s a marketer’s job to communicate the effectiveness of a product or service to potential and current customers to convince them to buy and keep business moving. One of the best methods for doing this is to share success stories that are relatable to prospects and customers based on their pain points, experiences, and overall needs.

That’s where case studies come in. Case studies are an essential part of a content marketing plan. These in-depth stories of customer experiences are some of the most effective at demonstrating the value of a product or service. Yet many marketers don’t use them, whether because of their regimented formats or the process of customer involvement and approval.

A case study is a powerful tool for showcasing your hard work and the success your customer achieved. But writing a great case study can be difficult if you’ve never done it before or if it’s been a while. This guide will show you how to write an effective case study and provide real-world examples and templates that will keep readers engaged and support your business.

In this article, you’ll learn:

What is a case study?

How to write a case study, case study templates, case study examples, case study tools.

A case study is the detailed story of a customer’s experience with a product or service that demonstrates their success and often includes measurable outcomes. Case studies are used in a range of fields and for various reasons, from business to academic research. They’re especially impactful in marketing as brands work to convince and convert consumers with relatable, real-world stories of actual customer experiences.

The best case studies tell the story of a customer’s success, including the steps they took, the results they achieved, and the support they received from a brand along the way. To write a great case study, you need to:

• Celebrate the customer and make them — not a product or service — the star of the story.
• Craft the story with specific audiences or target segments in mind so that the story of one customer will be viewed as relatable and actionable for another customer.
• Write copy that is easy to read and engaging so that readers will gain the insights and messages intended.
• Follow a standardized format that includes all of the essentials a potential customer would find interesting and useful.
• Support all of the claims for success made in the story with data in the forms of hard numbers and customer statements.

Case studies are a type of review but more in depth, aiming to show — rather than just tell — the positive experiences that customers have with a brand. Notably, 89% of consumers read reviews before deciding to buy, and 79% view case study content as part of their purchasing process. When it comes to B2B sales, 52% of buyers rank case studies as an important part of their evaluation process.

Telling a brand story through the experience of a tried-and-true customer matters. The story is relatable to potential new customers as they imagine themselves in the shoes of the company or individual featured in the case study. Showcasing previous customers can help new ones see themselves engaging with your brand in the ways that are most meaningful to them.

Besides sharing the perspective of another customer, case studies stand out from other content marketing forms because they are based on evidence. Whether pulling from client testimonials or data-driven results, case studies tend to have more impact on new business because the story contains information that is both objective (data) and subjective (customer experience) — and the brand doesn’t sound too self-promotional.

Case studies are unique in that there’s a fairly standardized format for telling a customer’s story. But that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for creativity. It’s all about making sure that teams are clear on the goals for the case study — along with strategies for supporting content and channels — and understanding how the story fits within the framework of the company’s overall marketing goals.

Here are the basic steps to writing a good case study.

1. Identify your goal

Start by defining exactly who your case study will be designed to help. Case studies are about specific instances where a company works with a customer to achieve a goal. Identify which customers are likely to have these goals, as well as other needs the story should cover to appeal to them.

The answer is often found in one of the buyer personas that have been constructed as part of your larger marketing strategy. This can include anything from new leads generated by the marketing team to long-term customers that are being pressed for cross-sell opportunities. In all of these cases, demonstrating value through a relatable customer success story can be part of the solution to conversion.

2. Choose your client or subject

Who you highlight matters. Case studies tie brands together that might otherwise not cross paths. A writer will want to ensure that the highlighted customer aligns with their own company’s brand identity and offerings. Look for a customer with positive name recognition who has had great success with a product or service and is willing to be an advocate.

The client should also match up with the identified target audience. Whichever company or individual is selected should be a reflection of other potential customers who can see themselves in similar circumstances, having the same problems and possible solutions.

Some of the most compelling case studies feature customers who:

• Switch from one product or service to another while naming competitors that missed the mark.
• Experience measurable results that are relatable to others in a specific industry.
• Represent well-known brands and recognizable names that are likely to compel action.
• Advocate for a product or service as a champion and are well-versed in its advantages.

Whoever or whatever customer is selected, marketers must ensure they have the permission of the company involved before getting started. Some brands have strict review and approval procedures for any official marketing or promotional materials that include their name. Acquiring those approvals in advance will prevent any miscommunication or wasted effort if there is an issue with their legal or compliance teams.

3. Conduct research and compile data

Substantiating the claims made in a case study — either by the marketing team or customers themselves — adds validity to the story. To do this, include data and feedback from the client that defines what success looks like. This can be anything from demonstrating return on investment (ROI) to a specific metric the customer was striving to improve. Case studies should prove how an outcome was achieved and show tangible results that indicate to the customer that your solution is the right one.

This step could also include customer interviews. Make sure that the people being interviewed are key stakeholders in the purchase decision or deployment and use of the product or service that is being highlighted. Content writers should work off a set list of questions prepared in advance. It can be helpful to share these with the interviewees beforehand so they have time to consider and craft their responses. One of the best interview tactics to keep in mind is to ask questions where yes and no are not natural answers. This way, your subject will provide more open-ended responses that produce more meaningful content.

Whether pulling from client testimonials or data-driven results, case studies tend to have more impact on new business because the story contains information that is both objective (data) and subjective (customer experience) — and the brand doesn’t sound too self-promotional.

4. Choose the right format

There are a number of different ways to format a case study. Depending on what you hope to achieve, one style will be better than another. However, there are some common elements to include, such as:

• An engaging headline
• A subject and customer introduction
• The unique challenge or challenges the customer faced
• The solution the customer used to solve the problem
• The results achieved
• Data and statistics to back up claims of success
• A strong call to action (CTA) to engage with the vendor

It’s also important to note that while case studies are traditionally written as stories, they don’t have to be in a written format. Some companies choose to get more creative with their case studies and produce multimedia content, depending on their audience and objectives. Case study formats can include traditional print stories, interactive web or social content, data-heavy infographics, professionally shot videos, podcasts, and more.

5. Write your case study

We’ll go into more detail later about how exactly to write a case study, including templates and examples. Generally speaking, though, there are a few things to keep in mind when writing your case study.

• Be clear and concise. Readers want to get to the point of the story quickly and easily, and they’ll be looking to see themselves reflected in the story right from the start.
• Provide a big picture. Always make sure to explain who the client is, their goals, and how they achieved success in a short introduction to engage the reader.
• Construct a clear narrative. Stick to the story from the perspective of the customer and what they needed to solve instead of just listing product features or benefits.
• Leverage graphics. Incorporating infographics, charts, and sidebars can be a more engaging and eye-catching way to share key statistics and data in readable ways.
• Offer the right amount of detail. Most case studies are one or two pages with clear sections that a reader can skim to find the information most important to them.
• Include data to support claims. Show real results — both facts and figures and customer quotes — to demonstrate credibility and prove the solution works.

6. Promote your story

Marketers have a number of options for distribution of a freshly minted case study. Many brands choose to publish case studies on their website and post them on social media. This can help support SEO and organic content strategies while also boosting company credibility and trust as visitors see that other businesses have used the product or service.

Marketers are always looking for quality content they can use for lead generation. Consider offering a case study as gated content behind a form on a landing page or as an offer in an email message. One great way to do this is to summarize the content and tease the full story available for download after the user takes an action.

Sales teams can also leverage case studies, so be sure they are aware that the assets exist once they’re published. Especially when it comes to larger B2B sales, companies often ask for examples of similar customer challenges that have been solved.

Case studies are a vital tool for any marketing team as they enable you to demonstrate the value of your company’s products and services to others.

Now that you’ve learned a bit about case studies and what they should include, you may be wondering how to start creating great customer story content. Here are a couple of templates you can use to structure your case study.

Template 1 — Challenge-solution-result format

• Start with an engaging title. This should be fewer than 70 characters long for SEO best practices. One of the best ways to approach the title is to include the customer’s name and a hint at the challenge they overcame in the end.
• Create an introduction. Lead with an explanation as to who the customer is, the need they had, and the opportunity they found with a specific product or solution. Writers can also suggest the success the customer experienced with the solution they chose.
• Present the challenge. This should be several paragraphs long and explain the problem the customer faced and the issues they were trying to solve. Details should tie into the company’s products and services naturally. This section needs to be the most relatable to the reader so they can picture themselves in a similar situation.
• Share the solution. Explain which product or service offered was the ideal fit for the customer and why. Feel free to delve into their experience setting up, purchasing, and onboarding the solution.
• Explain the results. Demonstrate the impact of the solution they chose by backing up their positive experience with data. Fill in with customer quotes and tangible, measurable results that show the effect of their choice.
• Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that invites readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to nurture them further in the marketing pipeline. What you ask of the reader should tie directly into the goals that were established for the case study in the first place.

Template 2 — Data-driven format

• Start with an engaging title. Be sure to include a statistic or data point in the first 70 characters. Again, it’s best to include the customer’s name as part of the title.
• Create an overview. Share the customer’s background and a short version of the challenge they faced. Present the reason a particular product or service was chosen, and feel free to include quotes from the customer about their selection process.
• Present data point 1. Isolate the first metric that the customer used to define success and explain how the product or solution helped to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Present data point 2. Isolate the second metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Present data point 3. Isolate the final metric that the customer used to define success and explain what the product or solution did to achieve this goal. Provide data points and quotes to substantiate the claim that success was achieved.
• Summarize the results. Reiterate the fact that the customer was able to achieve success thanks to a specific product or service. Include quotes and statements that reflect customer satisfaction and suggest they plan to continue using the solution.
• Ask for action. Include a CTA at the end of the case study that asks readers to reach out for more information, try a demo, or learn more — to further nurture them in the marketing pipeline. Again, remember that this is where marketers can look to convert their content into action with the customer.

While templates are helpful, seeing a case study in action can also be a great way to learn. Here are some examples of how Adobe customers have experienced success.

Juniper Networks

One example is the Adobe and Juniper Networks case study , which puts the reader in the customer’s shoes. The beginning of the story quickly orients the reader so that they know exactly who the article is about and what they were trying to achieve. Solutions are outlined in a way that shows Adobe Experience Manager is the best choice and a natural fit for the customer. Along the way, quotes from the client are incorporated to help add validity to the statements. The results in the case study are conveyed with clear evidence of scale and volume using tangible data.

The story of Lenovo’s journey with Adobe is one that spans years of planning, implementation, and rollout. The Lenovo case study does a great job of consolidating all of this into a relatable journey that other enterprise organizations can see themselves taking, despite the project size. This case study also features descriptive headers and compelling visual elements that engage the reader and strengthen the content.

Tata Consulting

When it comes to using data to show customer results, this case study does an excellent job of conveying details and numbers in an easy-to-digest manner. Bullet points at the start break up the content while also helping the reader understand exactly what the case study will be about. Tata Consulting used Adobe to deliver elevated, engaging content experiences for a large telecommunications client of its own — an objective that’s relatable for a lot of companies.

Case studies are a vital tool for any marketing team as they enable you to demonstrate the value of your company’s products and services to others. They help marketers do their job and add credibility to a brand trying to promote its solutions by using the experiences and stories of real customers.

When you’re ready to get started with a case study:

• Think about a few goals you’d like to accomplish with your content.
• Make a list of successful clients that would be strong candidates for a case study.
• Reach out to the client to get their approval and conduct an interview.
• Gather the data to present an engaging and effective customer story.

Adobe can help

There are several Adobe products that can help you craft compelling case studies. Adobe Experience Platform helps you collect data and deliver great customer experiences across every channel. Once you’ve created your case studies, Experience Platform will help you deliver the right information to the right customer at the right time for maximum impact.

To learn more, watch the Adobe Experience Platform story .

Keep in mind that the best case studies are backed by data. That’s where Adobe Real-Time Customer Data Platform and Adobe Analytics come into play. With Real-Time CDP, you can gather the data you need to build a great case study and target specific customers to deliver the content to the right audience at the perfect moment.

Watch the Real-Time CDP overview video to learn more.

Finally, Adobe Analytics turns real-time data into real-time insights. It helps your business collect and synthesize data from multiple platforms to make more informed decisions and create the best case study possible.

Request a demo to learn more about Adobe Analytics.

https://business.adobe.com/blog/perspectives/b2b-ecommerce-10-case-studies-inspire-you

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/business-case

https://business.adobe.com/blog/basics/what-is-real-time-analytics

How to Write a Great Business Case

Hbs pro tips: build relationships, plan the discussion, think layers, and avoid curveballs, explore more.

• Case Teaching

C ase studies are powerful teaching tools. “When you have a good case, and students who are well prepared to learn and to teach each other, you get some magical moments that students will never forget,” says James L. Heskett, UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, emeritus, at Harvard Business School (HBS). “They will remember the lessons they learn in that class discussion and apply them 20 years later.”

Yet, for many educators who want to pen their own case, the act of writing a great business case seldom comes easily or naturally. For starters, it’s time consuming. Case writers can spend substantial time visiting companies, securing a willing site, conducting interviews, observing operations, collecting data, reviewing notes, writing the case, revising the narrative, ensuring that teaching points come through, and then getting executives to approve the finished product.

The question, then, becomes: Where do you begin? How do you approach case writing? How do you decide which company to use as the subject of the case? And what distinguishes a well-written case from a mediocre one?

We asked three expert HBS case writers—who collectively have written and supported hundreds of cases—to share their insights on how to write a great business case study that will inspire passionate classroom discussion and transmit key educational concepts.

Insights from James L. Heskett

UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Keep your eyes open for a great business issue.

“I’m always on the prowl for new case material. Whenever I’m reading or consulting, I look for interesting people doing interesting things and facing interesting challenges. For instance, I was reading a magazine and came across a story about how Shouldice Hospital treated patients undergoing surgery to fix inguinal hernias—how patients would get up from the operating table and walk away on the arm of the surgeon.

6 QUALITIES OF GREAT CASE WRITERS

Comfort with ambiguity, since cases may have more than one “right” answer

Command of the topic or subject at hand

Ability to relate to the case protagonists

Enthusiasm for the case teaching method

Capacity for finding the drama in a business situation and making it feel personal to students

Build relationships with executives.

“When writing a case, it’s helpful to start as high in the organization as possible. It helps assure mid-level managers that they can share the information you need with an outsider. It also helps when it comes to getting the case cleared for use. Serving on corporate boards can help in building relationships with senior executives, but there are other ways to make those connections. For instance, you can approach speakers at business conferences if you think their presentations could form the basis for a good business case. If you want to write about a company where you don’t have any personal connections, you can always check with your colleagues to see if any of them have a personal relationship with the CEO or sit on a board where they could introduce you to the right person who would be able to facilitate the case. My colleagues and I make a lot of these introductions for each other.”

“If you make the case into a crossword puzzle that takes five hours to solve, it’s not really fair to the students and will most likely cause them to lose focus.” James L. Heskett

Skip the curveballs and focus on key issues.

“Cases don’t have to be obvious. As a pedagogical objective, you might want students to look beyond a superficial issue to say this is the underlying topic that we need to address, and these are the questions we need to pose. Still, I think it’s unhelpful if cases contain real curveballs where ‘unlocking’ the case depends on finding some small piece of information hidden in an exhibit. Give students a break! They may have to read and digest three cases per day, so they probably won’t be able to devote more than a couple of hours to each one. If you make the case into a crossword puzzle that takes five hours to solve, it’s not really fair to the students and will most likely cause them to lose focus.”

Build a discussion plan while writing the case.

“In case method teaching, the teacher is not in complete control. Students teach each other and learn from each other. On any given day, there will likely be somebody in the room who knows more about the company featured in the case than the professor does. So a professor can’t walk into the classroom and expect to impose a lesson plan that goes in a strict linear way from A to B to C to D. The case ought to be written to allow students to jump from A to D and then come back later to B if that’s how the discussion plays out. At the same time, the case should be structured so that the instructor can collect student comments on a board, organizing them as a coherent set of related ideas, and then deliver a 5-to-10-minute summary that communicates whatever essential concepts the case has covered. This summation can be a very powerful teaching and learning experience.”

Focus on quality over quantity.

“Cases don’t have to be too long. Some good cases are only two or three pages. Students may give more scrutiny to these brief cases than they would a 20-page case.”

Advice from Benson P. Shapiro

Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, Emeritus, Harvard Business School

Take out the chaff in advance.

“You don’t want students to spend too much time separating the wheat from the chaff. If a case has 12 pages of text and 10 pages of exhibits, even the smartest MBA students will likely lose interest. Writers who try to capture a situation from every angle and in every detail end up with sprawling narratives that usually do not make a good case. When writing cases, you need to set good, strong boundaries. Avoid superfluous, flowery, or poetic material that may contain interesting anecdotes or factoids, but that could distract readers from the case’s core topics. Include only those important and useful details that can help students make decisions and understand key issues that the case explores.”

Work in layers and metaphors—subtly.

“The best cases work on multiple levels. A case should focus on a specific situation—for example, whether or not to introduce a certain product. But it should also serve as a metaphor for broader issues in the background: How do we think about introducing new products? Are we introducing enough products? Are new product introductions a source of competitive advantage in our industry? How should we organize and manage new product development? You want the case to encourage students to think broadly about the various cultural, financial, and strategic impacts that managerial decisions have on a company.”

“Writers who try to capture a situation from every angle and in every detail end up with sprawling narratives that usually do not make a good case.” Benson P. Shapiro

Encourage emotional engagement.

“Case writing is an interesting literary form—it needs to be very engaging, but also educational. Great cases revolve around points of contention on which intelligent people can hold different points of view: What should you do? Why? How do you get it done? Ideally, students should have to choose between two very attractive alternatives or two terrible alternatives. The best cases involve questions that get students emotionally engaged so that they really care about choices and outcomes. When you see students physically leaning forward and following what their peers are saying, you know that they have a visceral feel for the importance of the subject. When you hear them debating after class— You were out in left field! You missed what was really important here! —that’s how you can tell you succeeded in developing a great case.”

Lessons from Carin-Isabel Knoop

Executive Director of the Case Research & Writing Group, Harvard Business School

Don’t forget the classroom component.

“Cases are deliberately incomplete documents. What a case writer leaves out of a case is often just as important as what he or she puts into it. Cases are designed to be completed through classroom instruction and discussion. While drafting the case, try to develop the classroom process in parallel. Work on the assignment questions and classroom content. Keep in mind that the case should be able to adapt to your classroom and course needs.”

Hone your elevator pitch.

“Before getting started, always have clear, succinct learning objectives in mind. Don’t start developing the case until you are able to summarize these objectives in less than five minutes.”

Case writing is a relationship, not a transaction.

When choosing a case site, be clear with executives that you are developing a teaching tool and that you will require their time and candor—and eventually their data. Put them at ease, and manage the authorization process, right from the start. Indicate that quotes will be cleared before publication and there will be time for individual review. During the creation process, ask their advice. This creates a process of engagement and helps bring home that this is a pedagogical tool, not gotcha journalism. At HBS, we oftentimes invite someone from the company to attend class. Finally, once the case is done, stay in touch with your case protagonists. They will move to other organizations and spread the good word about their experience with case writing.

Invite disagreement in case discussions.

“The case study method is based on participant-centered learning. The students all start from the same base of 11 (or however many) pages in the case, but they bring different knowledge and experiences into the classroom. So they can take the same facts and disagree about what course of action to pursue. We want students to behave like decision makers, and it can be painful to make decisions. Some critics deride the case teaching method as being unrealistic, but someone who just lectures about marketing doesn’t help students realize how difficult it is to choose between two plausible options to meet the same marketing objectives. For students, a big part of the education process is learning from discussions with classmates who think differently and advocate for different solutions. Witnessing a robust case discussion reminds us of the potential for collective learning to emerge from contrasting views.”

“Faculty don’t just write cases for teaching purposes, they write them to learn.” Carin-Isabel Knoop

The Case Writing Process Is a Worthy Effort

Researching, writing, and publishing cases is well worth the time and effort. “The case research and writing process is important for faculty development,” Knoop adds. “While developing field cases, faculty go to site visits and meet with decision makers. The case writing process helps connect scholars to practitioners and practitioners to the academic world. Faculty case writers get to explore and test how their academic theories work in practice. So faculty don’t just write cases for teaching purposes, they write them to learn. The case method is an integral part of faculty development.”

There’s another big bonus to becoming a case writer, especially for younger educators. “Young business instructors face a credibility gap with their students,” says Heskett. “It’s not uncommon to have MBA students in a class who have more experience than the instructor on a particular subject. Once you go into the field and write a case, you will know more about that subject than anyone else in the class. A primary way for professors to establish their credibility on a topic is to have written the case the class is discussing that day.”

James L. Heskett is UPS Foundation Professor of Business Logistics, emeritus, at Harvard Business School. He completed his Ph.D. at the Graduate School of Business, Stanford University, and has been a faculty member at The Ohio State University as well as president of Logistics Systems, Inc. Since 2000, he has authored a blog on Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge website .

Benson P. Shapiro is the Malcolm P. McNair Professor of Marketing, emeritus, at Harvard Business School where he taught full time from 1970 to 1997. Since 1997, Shapiro has concentrated his professional time on consulting, giving speeches, serving on boards, and writing. He continues to teach at Harvard and has taught in many executive programs and has chaired the Sustainable Marketing Leadership for Mid-Sized Firms Program.

Carin-Isabel Knoop is the executive director of the Case Research & Writing Group at Harvard Business School. She is also coauthor of Compassionate Management of Mental Health in the Modern Workplace .

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Why use case studies in your marketing strategy?

Client case study request email templates, the formal case study request email, the casual case study request email, case study request email following a positive customer experience, case study request email following a customer’s feedback, case study request email after reaching a milestone, end-of-year case study request email, follow-up email after a customer has agreed to be featured in a case study, business case study interview questions to ask your customers, case study interview questions about their environment before purchasing your product, case study interview questions about their decision-making process, case study interview questions about their experience using your product, case study interview questions about their results with your product, frequently asked questions.

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Case study request email templates

Case studies are a critical part of most B2B marketing strategies. They give you a chance to show your potential customers real-life examples of how your product was able to satisfy other customer’s needs, solve their problems, and ultimately help them achieve their business goals. Case studies go a long way in earning your prospects’ trust and validating that your product or service actually works. The following article outlines why case studies are an essential content marketing tool and provides helpful case study request email templates along with the basic case study interview questions to help you acquire case studies and success stories from your customers. With these resources and using case study templates , you can craft the perfect case study examples to get the most out of the customers’ experience.

• 13% of marketers name case studies as one of the primary forms of media used within their content strategy – this makes them the fifth most popular type of content, outshined only by visual content, blogs, and ebooks. ( HubSpot’s State of Marketing Report )
• Client case studies are the most popular self-promotional tactics used by marketing agency executives: 62.6% of respondents voted in favor of them being effective in generating leads. ( eMarketer study )
• Case studies/ success stories rank as the third most influential content marketing type in the purchase process for both small businesses and large enterprises. ( B2B Technology Content Survey Report by Eccolo Media).
• 73% of consumers say case studies play an important role in their decision-making process. ( Content Preferences Survey Report )

[Company name] is currently building a library of case studies to include on our website. We’re looking for successful companies using [Product name] to solve interesting challenges, and your team immediately came to mind. Are you open to [Customer company name] being featured?

Your story will help inform our prospects about how they can benefit from using our product. I’d be happy to provide more details if you are potentially interested.

Either way, thank you for considering my request and thank you for being a loyal [COMPANY] customer.

Regards, [YOUR SIGNATURE]

Subject line: Can I feature you as a case study?

The subject line pretty much says everything, but I’d like to ask again. Can I feature you as a case study? I think our project had a lot of highlights, and I’m eager to get the word out about our great work together.

Specifically, I plan to dig into these main aspects:

[Aspect 1] [Aspect 2] [Aspect 3]

If being featured is OK with you, can we have a quick call on [date/ time] to discuss it in more detail? Or if that doesn’t work, I’m free on [date].

I look forward to chatting with you!

Cheers, [YOUR SIGNATURE]

I’m really glad to hear you had [positive experience with your company], and I was wondering whether you’d be interested in being featured as one of our customer success stories. I manage our case study initiatives and have the opportunity to showcase all the great stories from customers like you.

It should be a lightweight process – I will ask you roughly 10 – 15 questions via email or phone about your experience and results. This case study will include a blurb about your company and a link to your homepage (which hopefully will make your SEO team happy!)

Here’s an example of how it usually looks like: link to a case study example

If this is something you would be interested in, please let me know by responding to this email, or giving me a call at [number] to discuss it in more detail.

Best, [YOUR SIGNATURE]

Thank you for the fantastic feedback – I’m thrilled to hear [Product name] is working well for you and that [Customer company name] is getting the results you’ve been looking for.

My team is actually in the process of building out our library of case studies, and I’d love to include your story. Happy to provide more details if you’re potentially interested.

In any case, thank you again, and I look forward to getting more updates on your progress.

I wanted to reach out to thank you for being a loyal [Company] customer for over [number] years now. I noticed you achieved your goal of [milestone] last month, and I wanted to congratulate you on your success!

I’d love to share your story using [Product name] with the world – I think it’s a great example of how our product + a dedicated team and a good strategy can achieve awesome results.

Are you open to being featured in a case study? If so, I’ll send along more details.

Happy Holidays!

As this year winds down, I wanted to say thank you for being a loyal [Company] customer and for your partnership using [Product/ Service] this year. You’ve achieved fantastic results in the time we’ve been working together, so I wanted to reach out to see if you’d be interested in being featured in a case study on our website.

Here’s how it would look like: link to a case study example

Either way, thank you once again for the chance to work with you, and I hope you have a warm and happy holiday season with your family and friends.

I’m looking forward to chatting soon in the new year!

We’re thrilled to hear you’re interested in sharing your success story with [Product name]. My name is [Name], and I’ll be working directly with you on this case study.

I’ve attached an important document to this email that outlines the whole process, which includes [details of your case study process]. Typically, a case study will take about a week t complete from start-to-finish depending on availability and turnaround time of any revisions, and your involvement will require about 1 hour of your time.

Again, I’m excited to start the process with your team and learn more about your success with [Product name]!

In the meantime, please don’t hesitate to contact me with any questions. Happy to be a resource.

To write a compelling case study/ success story filled with in-depth insights and data on how your product or service adds value – you need to be asking thoughtful questions – while also respecting the fact that your customers may not be able to spare much time to answer them. Here are some of the most common case study interview questions that you can use when conducting your own customer case study interviews.

• What were you using before our product?
• What were the three major points of frustration you faced?
• What other challenges were you experiencing prior to using our product?
• What was the big “Aha!” moment when you decided you needed to try something new?
• How did you first hear about our product? 
• Which other products did you look at before deciding on using ours?
• What were you looking for in a solution?
• What made our solution stand out over others that you researched? 
• What were the top reasons you selected our product?
• What feature of our product was most appealing?
• How easy or hard was it to get started with our product?
• How long have you been using our product?
• How has our product helped you overcome the challenges you had before?
• What is your favorite feature or part of our product? Why?
• Can you tell me about the most positive experience you’ve had using our product?
• What results have you seen with our solution so far?
• Can you share any metrics/ KPIs that show the success you have enjoyed with our product? 
• What have you been most impressed with?
• By using our product can you measure any reduced costs/ improvements in productivity/ increases in revenue?
• What is the single biggest reason you would recommend our product?

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Take advantage of our free, 14-day, all-inclusive trial. Gamify your support and utilize live chat to assist potential customers with choosing the right products.

How do you promote a case study?

You can promote a study through email or by giving it more visibility on your website, sharing it through your social media channels, and linking to it from your blogs.

What is the purpose of case study emails?

Case studies are a very effective way to build credibility for your business. They can help you explain your product or service benefits and demonstrate that you have real customers using your product/service.

What should you definitely include in a case study?

When writing a case study email, it’s important to mention how the solution would help with the problems described. You can also provide links to the product/service, and do not forget to include the names of the team members who worked on the project.

B2B Referral Email Templates

This article discusses the benefits of referral marketing for B2B businesses and provides 10 B2B customer referral email templates. Referral marketing has high conversion rates and can lead to faster sales, higher customer lifetime value, and increased retention and loyalty. The article includes statistics to support the value of referrals and suggests asking for referrals from loyal customers or those who have expressed satisfaction with the product/service. The article also provides a variety of email templates for different referral situations. Finally, the article lists when it is appropriate to ask for referrals and defines referral marketing as a method of generating leads through word of mouth.

Case study email templates

Case studies are effective tools for showcasing your brand and its achievements to prospective clients in the middle stage of the sales funnel. They should be informative and factual, containing quantitative figures and quotes from previous clients. It's important to focus on problem-solving instead of self-promotion and overselling. Case studies are similar to news stories, and should be presented from an independent reporter's perspective.

B2C referral email templates

Referral marketing is a valuable tool for business growth, with studies showing that people rely on recommendations from friends and family when making purchasing decisions. B2C and B2B referral programs differ, but both can benefit from word-of-mouth marketing. Referral marketing generates high conversion rates and can lead to increased revenue. The article provides various B2C referral email templates, including program announcements, updates, invitations to become a brand ambassador, and more. Rewards and incentives for referrals range from discounts to cash back, donations to charity, and even the chance to win prizes.

Help desk request form templates

Omnichannel customer service involves being available to customers on different communication channels and providing the same level of support on each channel. This approach offers many advantages such as gaining insights about customers, products or services, and improving agent productivity, resulting in considerable savings on customer service costs. LiveAgent offers customizable help desk request form templates to improve customer service.

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Email Marketing Case Studies: 21 Case Study Examples

How would you like to read the best email marketing case studies ever published?

More importantly, how would you like to copy the best practices for email marketing campaigns that are based on real-world examples and not just theory.

If that sounds, good then you’ll get a lot of value out of this post.

Below, you’ll find a list of the top 21 email marketing case studies along with the results and key findings from each example. By studying these email marketing case study examples and applying the lessons learned in your own email campaigns, you can hopefully achieve similar results as an email marketer.

When you’re done reading these email marketing success case studies, make sure to check out these other related posts: an SEO case study  collection to help you improve organic search engine optimization, a  PPC case study  list for paid search examples, this content marketing case study page for increasing brand awareness, this digital marketing case study list for general marketing ideas, a social media marketing case study page, and this  affiliate marketing case study  page for expert data on that type of business.

Table of Contents

Email Marketing Case Studies

Getting 1,300 monthly donations – watsi email marketing case study.

In this case study, you’ll learn how Watsi crafted an email marketing campaign encouraging new and existing users to sign up for its Universal Fund. Using seven test-driven tools helped this organization knock huge campaigns out of the park. Learn how Watsi used email to make people feel more special, take customization to the next level, earn 1,300 monthly donations, and more.

Collecting 100,000 Emails In One Week – Tim Ferris Show Email Marketing Case Study

This email marketing case study has it all: tips, templates, and code to create a successful email campaign. Discover how Harry’s, a men’s grooming brand, launched its brand and how it collected nearly 100,000 email addresses in one week. You’ll learn everything they did so you can try to replicate the results.

The Science Behind Obama’s Campaign Emails – Bloomberg Email Marketing Case Study

Obama’s election success proved the true power of digital marketing, including powerful email campaigns. Most of the $690 million dollars Obama raised online came from fundraising emails. In this article, you’ll learn about the rigorous experimentation by a large team of analysts and the strategies that made the campaign so successful.

The Amazon Email Experience – Vero Email Marketing Case Study

In this case study on email marketing by Vero, you’ll get a complete analysis of Amazon’s email experience for the user. It takes you from the initial subscriber welcome message, to email receipts, shipping updates, thank you content, invites, Black Friday deals, the review email, and more. There are loads of data and useful tips you can gain and use for your own email campaigns in this post.

Increasing Open Rates from 20% to 29% – Mailigen Email Marketing Case Study

This is one of the best email marketing case studies that any business can learn from no matter the size of your list. Inside, you’ll find out how Mailigen used one simple tactic to increase open rates from 20% to 29% that works with any email software.

Boost Open Rates By 3X & CTR By 2X – Digital Marketer Email Marketing Case Study

How would you like to instantly boost your open rates by 3X and your click-through rates (CTR) by 2X with the next email you send to your list? Digital Marketer shows you 11 strategies you can use right now based on its own research and data to achieve similar results.

Increasing Reach, Impact & Subscriber Satisfaction – Content Marketing Institute Email Marketing Case Study

This article by Content Marketing Institute contains a breakdown of several case study examples for email marketing. Inside, you’ll learn about using list segmentation as well as advice on measuring and optimizing your email delivery performance. Popular brands discussed include SalesForce, Xerox, Noodles Company, and more.

Birchbox Boost Conversions By 25% – Braze Email Marketing Case Study

This is one of the top email marketing case studies that prove why you shouldn’t send out a one-size-fits-all message to your mailing list. It’s a short case study on email marketing, but you’ll learn quickly how Braze helped Birchbox use custom attributes culled from data gathered on customer behavior to switch from generic email content to a more personalized strategy that delivered better results: a 25% boost in conversion rates and 16% increase in open rates.

109% Revenue Lift for Dell with GIFs – MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Case Study

This is one of the best email marketing case studies available that shows the true power of using GIFs in your daily, weekly, or monthly newsletter campaigns. Discover how Dell lifted revenue by 109% with GIF-centered email effort.

$40,000 In Sales Without Annoying Subscribers – Yaro Starak Email Marketing Case Study

Here’s a complete breakdown of how Yaro Starak generated $40,00 in sales without annoying his subscribers during new product launches. It contains lots of tips, tricks, and expert advice on how (and when) to send consecutive emails, usiing videos in the campaign, creating a sense of urgency to buy now, and more.

$800,000 for Charity Water By Increasing Email Frequency – Money Journal Email Marketing Case Study

There are numerous email marketing strategies you can use to increase revenue for your business. However, not all email campaigns have to be heavily focused on giving customer discounts or free stuff to generate more money. This is especially true for non-profit organizations. Check out this case study to learn how Charity Water increased revenue by $800,000 by taking an unconventional approach to their follow-up emails that takes their audience on a journey.

Nanoleaf Recovers 30% of Abandonded Carts – Rejoiner Email Marketing Case Study

Are you an ecommerce brand, online retailer, course seller, or other type of website that uses a cart for the checkout process? If so, then this case study by Rejoiner will give you actionable tips to try based on data from Nanoleaf, which recovered 30% of sales with abandoned cart follow-up emails.

70+ Calls for a B2B Company with Cold Emailing – Growforce Email Marketing Case Study

Cold email marketing can be one of the best converting channels when done right. And this article will help you improve your cold emailing results. Read it to find out some of the top cold email best practices, get an example email sequence, and learn a powerful extra step you can use for marketing automation that works.

From Starting Blocks to Total Clarity – Email Marketing Heroes Case Study

Email Marketing Heroes is a podcast that offers free email marketing tips and a membership program to help business owners improve their email campaigns. In this blog post (and podcast), you’ll learn how one member got instant positive results by emailing her list more regularly, setting up automated email campaigns, and including links in a specific part of each message.

Hammock Increased Open Rate 48% with Shorter Emails – MarketingSherpa Email Marketing Case Study

Hammock is a B2B company that turned its traditional, content-heavy email newsletter into what they refer to as an “un-newsletter.” Discover how “The Idea Email” increased email open rates by 48% by focusing on one central topic and containing 350 words or less.

A/B Testing for Success – VWO Email Marketing Case Study

Most digital marketers don’t think about A/B testing their email marketing campaigns. However, year after year, email marketing delivers the highest return on investment (ROI) across all acquisition channels. In this article, you’ll learn how to incorporate A/B testing best practices, methodologies, and mental models to increase open rates, click-through rates (CTR), conversions, and more.

Building a Welcome Series from Scratch – HelpScout Email Marketing Case Study

This is not your typical case study on email marketing; however, it’s an important article to read if you need help setting up a good welcome series for your business. HelpScout takes you from the first email to the last you send to new subscribers while also describing the goal of each email message in the campaign.

600 Email Subscribers With 2 Blog Posts – Jacob McMillen Email Marketing Case Study

Want to know how to combine the power of SEO, blogging, and email marketing to get new subscribers on your list? Jacob McMillen teaches you all that and more in this case study. Learn how he used ConvertKit on a new blog along with SumoMe Pro popups, and a special SEO content writing technique to get 600 email subscribers from just two blog posts. Includes step-by-step instructions for you to copy this exact strategy for your website and email campaigns.

8 Steps to Building a Tripwire Email Funnel – Data Driven Marketing Email Case Study

If you’re serious about email marketing, then you need to have a good tripwire in place to make more sales from your new subscribers. Inside this guide, you’ll find a complete strategy for building an effective tripwire funnel that converts more subscribers into customers as well as using a follow up email sequence to capture the non-buyers.

10 Tripwire Examples – Autogrow Email Marketing Case Study

After reading the last previous guide on setting up an email tripwire funnel, you may want to look at this page to get proven examples of case studies that worked for this type of email marketing.

56% Rise In Open Rates with Emojis In Subject Lines – Campaign Monitor Email Marketing Case Study

A famous email campaign case study released by Experian revealed that 56% of unique open rates increased for brands that used emojis in their subject lines. In this article, Campaign Monitor offers valuable tips for using emojis like a pro email marketer.

What Is an Email Marketing Case Study?

An email marketing case study explains the process a business went through with a client to help them achieve specific results with an email campaign. Email marketing case studies provide a detailed examination of particular strategies within a real-world context to prove how effective it was for the client.

Are Case Studies Good for Email Marketing?

Case studies are good for email marketing because you can learn how to create email campaigns in a more effective way. Instead of just studying the theory of email marketing, you can learn from real email strategy campaigns to find out what methods deliver a higher return on investment.

Email Marketing Case Study Examples Summary

I hope you enjoyed this list of the best email marketing case studies that are based on real-world results and not just theory.

As you discovered, the email marketing case study examples above demonstrated many different ways to implement an effective email campaign. By studying the key findings from these examples, and applying the methods learned to your own business and email newsletters, you can hopefully achieve the same positive outcome with your email marketing efforts.

New email success case studies are being published every month and I’ll continue to update this list as they become available. So keep checking back to read the current sources of information on email marketing.

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9 Great Email Marketing Case Studies (and Counting)

Transparency is hot right now, but not in email marketing.

You can see how many Twitter followers a brand has. Lots of businesses blog about their audience growth. And some newsletters share their subscriber count as social proof .

But no one talks about open and click rates, ROI or impact on the bottom line. It’s taboo in the email world.

That makes it really hard to find email marketing case studies. If you want inspiration for your own campaigns, there aren’t many options. You can:

• Read blogs like this one 🙂
• Dive into ReallyGoodEmails.com
• Sign up for newsletters and products to receive their emails

Other than that, all you can do is test your assumptions relentlessly.

We’d like to make it a little easier to read stories about great email campaigns so we collected some of our favorites. Here is the criteria for the case studies we included:

• They are real case studies, not a best practices pieces.
• They include quotes or data from the campaign creators.

That sounds simple until you start exploring the web for stories that meet those two rules. We’d like to add to this list so if you know of a great email story, let us know in the comments.

Together, these posts are long enough to be a book. So we turned them into one.

Download an .epub file

What Startups Can Learn from Watsi’s Wildly Successful Email Campaign

Read it | Share it | Save it

This story is too nuanced to accurately summarize but here’s a primer.

Watsi is the first non-profit to be part of Y Combinator. They crowdsource healthcare funding for people all over the world. To drive recurring revenue, they broke out their monthly donation feature into its own product and launched it separately.

They used email to source early feedback, used social proof to create buzz and built a personalized newsletter to keep users informed about their donations.

Here’s a snippet from this post:

Part of showing people what they’re getting is investing in communications where you aren’t asking for anything. Instead, you’re thanking people for their business or their participation. You’re acknowledging your end of the deal where you’re committed to delighting and surprising them. This is something that for-profit startups tend to neglect – the importance of not just sending a receipt for a purchase, but honing that interaction to make customers feel something more.

Email marketing is isn’t a channel – it’s one layer of a customer-centric company. This case study reveals how complex (and truly valuable) it is to use email to grow a business.

Building a Newsletter Welcome Series from Scratch

Help Scout’s signature flair is purpose .

As they considered how to welcome to new subscribers – and there are more than 51,000 – they knew that aligning business goals with a great experience was key. They pulled it off by ensuring each email sought to achieve a single, measurable goal.

Each of the five emails in the sequence is explained in detail, including the intended purpose and suggestions based on their own learnings.

How The Skimm’s passionate readership helped its newsletter grow to 1.5 million subscribers

Building a profitable business with email is very different than using email to build a profitable business.

Watsi, for example, uses email to support their product. In The Skimm’s case, the email is the product. When newsletters become a business, it’s worth paying careful attention to their strategy. (We detailed an example of this in our Death to the Stock Photo case study .)

The Skimm’s email newsletter reaches 1.5 million daily. That growth has been fueled by an intense understanding of their target reader and an community that is eager to help. There are more than 6,000 “ Skimm’bassadors ” actively spreading the word about this business.

There’s a lot to learn here but if you take just one lesson, let it be this:

The Skimm focuses on women ages 22-34 in big cities throughout the country. They are busy, they’re on the go. It’s a professional audience. And we looked at what they do first thing in the morning. Your alarm goes off, you grab your phone, and you read emails from friends and family first. It really made sense to us to introduce a product that fit in with that routine. And email is very much in the routines of the demo that we’re going after.

There’s no need to reinvent the wheel. Meet your target audience where they’re already active.

How to Gather 100,000 Emails in One Week

I hope you’re noticing a trend in these case studies: Pulling off a wildly successful email campaign isn’t easy.

Even when the goals are simple, the logistics tend to get messy. The smartest companies dig in anyway.

In Harry’s case, they used a landing page to gather 100,000 emails in the week leading up their launch. As a shaving company, they are competing against institutions like Gillette. The only way to outsell them is to out-maneuver them.

Harry’s drove traffic to a landing page, asked for a signup, then used a referral mechanism to incentivize people to share the product. Those who referred friends earned free products. They gave away a ton of free razors that week but it cost way less than broadcasting the upcoming launch on traditional advertising channels.

This post gets into the nitty gritty of driving the traffic, managing the flood of interest and actually delivering the free products.

The Art and Science of Turning Free Trials Into Happy Customers

If you’re a small startup, you’ll be able to relate to this story.

Alex Smith runs marketing at ContactMonkey . As a growing company with a small team, it became too difficult to onboard new customers one at a time. So Alex created a series of events in the application that trigger emails or pause existing campaigns.

The result was not only happier customers, but faster growth. Once the triggers were in place, ContactMonkey was able to guarantee that each customer received the right messaging at the right time.

This post shares the exact emails and triggers ContactMonkey uses to onboarding their users, along with some ideas for blurring the lines between CRM and email marketing.

The Science Behind Those Obama Campaign E-Mails

I think this line will pique your interest about Obama’s last campaign: “Most of the $690 million Obama raised online came from fundraising e-mails.”

The Obama campaign famously used a casual, conversational in tone in the email subject lines. The most famous subject line was simply “Hey.” Another – “I will be outspent” – raised $2.6 million on its own.

Source: Slideshare

This didn’t happen by accident. The folks behind the campaigns tested incessantly, sometimes playing with a dozen or more variations on a single email. Here’s one of the most interesting findings revealed by digital analytics directo Amelia Showalter:

…these triumphs were fleeting. There was no such thing as the perfect e-mail; every breakthrough had a shelf life. “Eventually the novelty wore off, and we had to go back and retest,” says Showalter.

They bottled lightening over and over through rigorous testing and exceptional copywriting. The viral effect was manufactured, not serendipitous.

What We Learned From A Week Of Prototyping A Newsletter In Public

When Buzzfeed began developing a daily email newsletter, the editors turned to Facebook for feedback. They shared their prototypes ( here’s an example ) with their own friends. They made each iteration of the newsletter public to ensure they could patch any holes before launch.

Interestingly, editor Millie Tran said the most useful part of this exercise was the intense focus on the product/market fit:

The most valuable thing about this exercise was that it allowed us to avoid getting too emotionally attached to any one idea early on and to keep tweaking and adjusting the product to be better.

As we’ve written before, email is an extension of your product and should be treated with the appropriate care.

Buzzfeed also wrote a follow-up to this post about using email to test early versions of their mobile app.

Learning vs. Selling

This is a personal story based on my experience here at Vero. Last year, we created 14-step campaign to welcome new subscribers to the blog. The open rates were decent and we heard some positive feedback from customers about the campaign.

Then we nuked it.

Because it a) wasn’t helping us convert readers into customers and b) it wasn’t helping us learn about our readers. We replaced the entire campaign with a single email.

Tons of people replied and we’ve been able to shape our content and emails to match our readers’ challenges and needs. The lesson is here to create opportunities to learn before you try to sell your product.

The Most Successful E-mail I Ever Wrote

A single email can change a business.

Derek Sivers, founder of CD Baby, realized this after he created this masterpiece of a shipping confirmation email :

Source: Smashing Magazine

The email went viral. At the time, no one put any effort into their transactional emails . The personal touch resonated with a lot of people.

That one silly e-mail, sent out with every order, has been so loved that if you search Google for “private CD Baby jet” you’ll get over 20,000 results. Each one is somebody who got the e-mail and loved it enough to post on their website and tell all their friends. That one goofy e-mail created thousands of new customers.

Simon Schmid calls this finesse the “personality layer.” Here are a number of other examples.

A few more case studies from the Vero archives:

• TripAdvisor’s Unfair Email Marketing Advantage
• How Amazon Dominates E-Commerce with Email
• How Death to the Stock Photo Built a Profitable Business with Email
• Why Product Hunt’s Emails Are So Addictive
• Evernote’s Simple But Useful Onboarding Emails

And here’s a few suggestions from readers:

• How The New York Times gets a 70 percent open rate on its newsletters

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How to Write a Business Case (Template Included)

Table of Contents

What is a business case, how to write a business case, business case template, watch our business case training video, key elements of a business case, how projectmanager helps with your business case.

A business case is a project management document that explains how the benefits of a project overweigh its costs and why it should be executed. Business cases are prepared during the project initiation phase and their purpose is to include all the project’s objectives, costs and benefits to convince stakeholders of its value.

A business case is an important project document to prove to your client, customer or stakeholder that the project you’re pitching is a sound investment. Below, we illustrate the steps to writing one that will sway them.

The need for a business case is that it collects the financial appraisal, proposal, strategy and marketing plan in one document and offers a full look at how the project will benefit the organization. Once your business case is approved by the project stakeholders, you can begin the project planning phase.

Projects fail without having a solid business case to rest on, as this document is necessary to start the project and it’s the base for the project charter and project plan. But if a project business case is not anchored to reality, and doesn’t address a need that aligns with the larger business objectives of the organization, then it is irrelevant.

Get your free

Use this free Business Case Template for Word to manage your projects better.

The research you’ll need to create a strong business case is the why, what, how and who of your project. This must be clearly communicated. The elements of your business case will address the why but in greater detail. Think of the business case as a document that is created during the project initiation phase but will be used as a reference throughout the project life cycle.

Whether you’re starting a new project or mid-way through one, take time to write up a business case to justify the project expenditure by identifying the business benefits your project will deliver and that your stakeholders are most interested in reaping from the work. The following four steps will show you how to write a business case.

Step 1: Identify the Business Problem

Projects aren’t created for projects’ sake. They have a goal. Usually, they’re initiated to solve a specific business problem or create a business opportunity.

You should “Lead with the need.” Your first job is to figure out what that problem or opportunity is, describe it, find out where it comes from and then address the time frame needed to deal with it.

This can be a simple statement but is best articulated with some research into the economic climate and the competitive landscape to justify the timing of the project.

Step 2: Identify the Alternative Solutions

How do you know whether the project you’re undertaking is the best possible solution to the problem defined above? Naturally, choosing the right solution is hard, and the path to success is not paved with unfounded assumptions.

One way to narrow down the focus to make the right solution clear is to follow these six steps (after the relevant research, of course):

• Note the alternative solutions.
• For each solution, quantify its benefits.
• Also, forecast the costs involved in each solution.
• Then figure out its feasibility .
• Discern the risks and issues associated with each solution.
• Finally, document all this in your business case.

Step 3: Recommend a Preferred Solution

You’ll next need to rank the solutions, but before doing that it’s best to set up criteria, maybe have a scoring mechanism to help you prioritize the solutions to best choose the right one.

Some methodologies you can apply include:

• Depending on the solution’s cost and benefit, give it a score of 1-10.
• Base your score on what’s important to you.
• Add more complexity to your ranking to cover all bases.

Regardless of your approach, once you’ve added up your numbers, the best solution to your problem will become evident. Again, you’ll want to have this process also documented in your business case.

Step 4: Describe the Implementation Approach

So, you’ve identified your business problem or opportunity and how to reach it, now you have to convince your stakeholders that you’re right and have the best way to implement a process to achieve your goals. That’s why documentation is so important; it offers a practical path to solve the core problem you identified.

Now, it’s not just an exercise to appease senior leadership. Who knows what you might uncover in the research you put into exploring the underlying problem and determining alternative solutions? You might save the organization millions with an alternate solution than the one initially proposed. When you put in the work on a strong business case, you’re able to get your sponsors or organizational leadership on board with you and have a clear vision as to how to ensure the delivery of the business benefits they expect.

Our business case template for Word is the perfect tool to start writing a business case. It has 9 key business case areas you can customize as needed. Download the template for free and follow the steps below to create a great business case for all your projects.

One of the key steps to starting a business case is to have a business case checklist. The following is a detailed outline to follow when developing your business case. You can choose which of these elements are the most relevant to your project stakeholders and add them to our business case template. Then once your business case is approved, start managing your projects with a robust project management software such as ProjectManager.

1. Executive Summary

The executive summary is a short version of each section of your business case. It’s used to give stakeholders a quick overview of your project.

2. Project Definition

This section is meant to provide general information about your projects, such as the business objectives that will be achieved and the project plan outline.

3. Vision, Goals and Objectives

First, you have to figure out what you’re trying to do and what is the problem you want to solve. You’ll need to define your project vision, goals and objectives. This will help you shape your project scope and identify project deliverables.

4. Project Scope

The project scope determines all the tasks and deliverables that will be executed in your project to reach your business objectives.

5. Background Information

Here you can provide a context for your project, explaining the problem that it’s meant to solve, and how it aligns with your organization’s vision and strategic plan.

6. Success Criteria and Stakeholder Requirements

Depending on what kind of project you’re working on, the quality requirements will differ, but they are critical to the project’s success. Collect all of them, figure out what determines if you’ve successfully met them and report on the results.

7. Project Plan

It’s time to create the project plan. Figure out the tasks you’ll have to take to get the project done. You can use a work breakdown structure template  to make sure you are through. Once you have all the tasks collected, estimate how long it will take to complete each one.

Project management software makes creating a project plan significantly easier. ProjectManager can upload your work breakdown structure template and all your tasks are populated in our tool. You can organize them according to your production cycle with our kanban board view, or use our Gantt chart view to create a project schedule.

8. Project Budget

Your budget is an estimate of everything in your project plan and what it will cost to complete the project over the scheduled time allotted.

9. Project Schedule

Make a timeline for the project by estimating how long it will take to get each task completed. For a more impactful project schedule, use a tool to make a Gantt chart , and print it out. This will provide that extra flourish of data visualization and skill that Excel sheets lack.

10. Project Governance

Project governance refers to all the project management rules and procedures that apply to your project. For example, it defines the roles and responsibilities of the project team members and the framework for decision-making.

11. Communication Plan

Have milestones for check-ins and status updates, as well as determine how stakeholders will stay aware of the progress over the project life cycle.

12. Progress Reports

Have a plan in place to monitor and track your progress during the project to compare planned to actual progress. There are task tracking tools that can help you monitor progress and performance.

Again, using a project management tool improves your ability to see what’s happening in your project. ProjectManager has tracking tools like dashboards and status reports that give you a high-level view and more detail, respectively. Unlike light-weight apps that make you set up a dashboard, ours is embedded in the tool. Better still, our cloud-based software gives you real-time data for more insightful decision-making. Also, get reports on more than just status updates, but timesheets, workload, portfolio status and much more, all with just one click. Then filter the reports and share them with stakeholders to keep them updated.

13. Financial Appraisal

This is a very important section of your business case because this is where you explain how the financial benefits outweigh the costs. Compare the financial costs and benefits of your project. You can do this by doing a sensitivity analysis and a cost-benefit analysis.

14. Market Assessment

Research your market, competitors and industry, to find opportunities and threats

15. Competitor Analysis

Identify direct and indirect competitors and do an assessment of their products, strengths, competitive advantages and their business strategy.

16. SWOT Analysis

A SWOT analysis helps you identify your organization’s strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats. The strengths and weaknesses are internal, while the opportunities and threats are external.

17. Marketing Strategy

Describe your product, distribution channels, pricing, target customers among other aspects of your marketing plan or strategy.

18. Risk Assessment

There are many risk categories that can impact your project. The first step to mitigating them is to identify and assess the risks associated with your project activities.

ProjectManager , an award-winning project management software, can collect and assemble all the various data you’ll be collecting, and then easily share it both with your team and project sponsors.

Once you have a spreadsheet with all your tasks listed, you can import it into our software. Then it’s instantly populated into a Gantt chart . Simply set the duration for each of the tasks, add any dependencies, and your project is now spread across a timeline. You can set milestones, but there is so much more you can do.

You have a project plan now, and from the online Gantt chart, you can assign team members to tasks. Then they can comment directly on the tasks they’re working on, adding as many documents and images as needed, fostering a collaborative environment. You can track their progress and change task durations as needed by dragging and dropping the start and end dates.

But that’s only a taste of what ProjectManager offers. We have kanban boards that visualize your workflow and a real-time dashboard that tracks six project metrics for the most accurate view of your project possible.

Try ProjectManager and see for yourself with this 30-day free trial .

If you want more business case advice, take a moment to watch Jennifer Bridges, PMP, in this short training video. She explains the steps you have to take in order to write a good business case.

Here’s a screenshot for your reference.

Transcription:

Today we’re talking about how to write a business case. Well, over the past few years, we’ve seen the market, or maybe organizations, companies or even projects, move away from doing business cases. But, these days, companies, organizations, and those same projects are scrutinizing the investments and they’re really seeking a rate of return.

So now, think of the business case as your opportunity to package your project, your idea, your opportunity, and show what it means and what the benefits are and how other people can benefit.

We want to take a look today to see what’s in the business case and how to write one. I want to be clear that when you look for information on a business case, it’s not a briefcase.

Someone called the other day and they were confused because they were looking for something, and they kept pulling up briefcases. That’s not what we’re talking about today. What we’re talking about are business cases, and they include information about your strategies, about your goals. It is your business proposal. It has your business outline, your business strategy, and even your marketing plan.

Why Do You Need a Business Case?

And so, why is that so important today? Again, companies are seeking not only their project managers but their team members to have a better understanding of business and more of an idea business acumen. So this business case provides the justification for the proposed business change or plan. It outlines the allocation of capital that you may be seeking and the resources required to implement it. Then, it can be an action plan. It may just serve as a unified vision. And then it also provides the decision-makers with different options.

So let’s look more at the steps required to put these business cases together. There are four main steps. One, you want to research your market. Really look at what’s out there, where are the needs, where are the gaps that you can serve? Look at your competition. How are they approaching this, and how can you maybe provide some other alternatives?

You want to compare and finalize different approaches that you can use to go to market. Then you compile that data and you present strategies, your goals and other options to be considered.

And then you literally document it.

So what does the document look like? Well, there are templates out there today. The components vary, but these are the common ones. And then these are what I consider essential. So there’s the executive summary. This is just a summary of your company, what your management team may look like, a summary of your product and service and your market.

The business description gives a little bit more history about your company and the mission statement and really what your company is about and how this product or service fits in.

Then, you outline the details of the product or service that you’re looking to either expand or roll out or implement. You may even include in their patents may be that you have pending or other trademarks.

Then, you want to identify and lay out your marketing strategy. Like, how are you gonna take this to your customers? Are you going to have a brick-and-mortar store? Are you gonna do this online? And, what are your plans to take it to market?

You also want to include detailed information about your competitor analysis. How are they doing things? And, how are you planning on, I guess, beating your competition?

You also want to look at and identify your SWOT. And the SWOT is your strength. What are the strengths that you have in going to market? And where are the weaknesses? Maybe some of your gaps. And further, where are your opportunities and maybe threats that you need to plan for? Then the overview of the operation includes operational information like your production, even human resources, information about the day-to-day operations of your company.

And then, your financial plan includes your profit statement, your profit and loss, any of your financials, any collateral that you may have, and any kind of investments that you may be seeking.

So these are the components of your business case. This is why it’s so important. And if you need a tool that can help you manage and track this process, then sign up for our software now at ProjectManager .

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How to Write a Business Case (With Example & Template)

AN business plan is a straightforward document. In it, you’ll include market conduct, your overall goals on the business , and your strategies for achieving this goals. 

Yet what is a business fallstudien and why do you need one if a business layout drafts everything else?

A business case takes a nearer look by a specials fix and how you canister solve it. Think of a business situation as who reason she create a project you’re going to manage in the early place. 

The article features a step-by-step manual on how to writing a successful economy case, including a catalog for defining problems, researching solutions, and presenting to stakeholders. As a bonus, we’ll show you how to employ Wrike to administration your product business cases includes a request management pattern press install them with a project scheduling template .

About is a business case?

A business event is ampere project you’ll assemble for identifying, addressing, plus solver a specific business problem. 

And key to a business case is the changes it creates in your business. Developing a company case starts with defining a problem that demands ampere permanent solution. Without that lasting change, a work case belongs only an observation about what’s going wrong. ADENINE complete business case phone method a company can alter own strategy to fix that problem. DOD IT BUSINESS CASE EXAMINATION TEMPLATE 22 OCTOBER 2014 ... Investment row out the structure in Appendix B. In the write-up, articulate the appropriations ...

Front-to-back, a business case is a complete story. It has one einleitung, a middle, and an end. It typically looks like this:

• Beginning: Someone identifies a issue within the business and present the business box to the key decision-makers.
• Middle: With the scheme go-ahead, the companies launches one internal employees on address the business case both deliver results.
• End: The team delivers adenine display upon this changes made and their long-term effects.

Maybe it’s not as compulsory a story as Jail or Hamlet. Still, per business case has the same ground ingredients. 

By short, a business case is the show of a problem that requests solving.

Examples of business-related cases

The problem for many companies is that they can turn ampere blind eye to difficulties that are right in cover of their faces. This is even the case when the corporation must one compelling product to sell. Which Is Business Case Analyzing (BCA)?

Consider the example of Febreze . In of mid-1990s, a researcher at Proctor & Gamble was working with hydroxypropyl beta-cyclodextrin. His wife found that his clothes no longer smelled like cigarettes, which was an frequent letter.

P&G had something of a miracle product on your hands. But, their approach has wrong. People initially sold Febreze as adenine method into eliminate embarrassing smells. Forecast, the product flopped.  Use these steps to indite ampere case study prospects will effectively read, with marketing case study examples and one free template!

But P&G stuck at it. They had a potentially business fall on you hands: a highly marketable product proved difficult to market. What was going wrong? Working on the business case from begin up end provided the answered. How to Write a Business Rechtssache | Smartsheet

After some focus group test, P&G finding out that few customers recognized and nasty scent they were former to. Choose, they learned to use a different business case with Febreze: it was a cleaning furniture now, a way to make the the smell nice when the soil have vacuumed and the counters are wiped clean. They gave it its own pleasant smell and fashioned it into a scrubbing product. Or since i worked so well, so did the campaign. 

That’s an example of a business case overall. But let’s get specific: developing a corporate case is easier when you have an template to look at. Let’s build an example using a made-up company, ABC Widgets, the a theoretical business kasten. Let’s call our business case example “Operation Super Widgets”: Learn wie to write a business case in 4 easy steps, with helpful examples & business case create included. Click to students & discover how-to.

Business Case: ABC Widgets

Absatz 1: summary.

Briefly describe the problem and the openings.  

ABC Widgets’ latest widget, the Super Widget, is suffering von supply issues, requiring higher shipping costs to procure the necessary resources, plus eating into benefit. We need to switch to a new supplier to restore to viability of the Super Useful.

Section 2: Project Size

This section should include an next:

• Financial report of the situation. Super Widgets are now 20% more expensive to produce from in the year prior, resulting in -1% profits with each Super Widget sold.
• Business goals. To get revenues previous increase, are need into restore profit margins in Cost Per Unit Sold for every Over Widget back on 2020 levels. Benefits/limitations. Restoring Cost Per Unit Selling wishes restore 5% of sagging gross. However, we are limited toward three choices for new Super Widget supplier.
• Scope and impact. We will need to involve supply chain executive furthermore Very Enable project management teams, which may temporarily reduce the amount away widgets we’re skilled to produce, potentially resulting in $25,000 stylish lost revenue.
• Plan . Project Management Teams A and B becoming take the next two weeks go get quotes from suppliers and select one as integrating an immediacy blueprint to bring in new Super Widget parts for manufacturing within four days.
• System. Team Member Sarah will take the guide on Operation Super Widget Profit. Both teams will report to Sarah.

This is a bare-bones example of what adenine work case kann look enjoy, but it does hit on the main points: what’s the report, how can it fix it, what’s the plan till fix it, and what will happen wenn you succeed?

How do you write and develop a general fallstudien?

When writing your own business case, aforementioned above example is a good guide to follow-up as you get started with the basics. 

But, once you’re more everyday with aforementioned nuts and bolts, it’s see worth being prepared since einige potential roadblocks you could face along the way. 

Challenges from writing a good business case

Mystery don’t learn companies create a business case? It might come down to a shortage of good communication. Many human don’t even know how to write ampere business case, let alone present one.

“The idea allowed be great, but if it’s not communicated well, it won’t get any traction,” said Homosexual Evie , communication and author whoever wrote And HBR Guide to Convince Presentations.

The key challenge, notes Dude, is takes abstract business concepts (like lagging numbers) and turning their into in immediately recognizable problem. After all, if a corporate already had perfect awareness that to was making a mistake, it likely would find a how to stopping the blunder in its tracks. 

A corporate cas belongs challenging because it usually wherewithal you’ll have to persuade someone that change is needed. And change can be complicated. In a prosperity business, it’s especially problematic because it’s ease to point to the bottom line and say that whatever the company is doing is have active. Business cases highlight the business value of projects. Find free checklists and how templates.

How do you present a business case?

Who tips and real above provide yours some pleasant remedies for creating a business matter without the typical problems. But you’ll still want on present a business cas with the straightforward tips and numbers you’d associate with any new project.  6 Steps of a Case Analysis (With Example)

Essentially, it all comes down to how well your business case can persuade the decision-makers. That’s why to shouldn’t just form a case off of raw numbers. The bottom line might can a cogent argument, but it’s not always what “clicks.”  DOD COMPUTER Business Case Analysis Template

If you’re presenting a general case, you’re a salesperson. And not every sale is an matter of pinpoint logic. It’s also about emotion—the story of why something’s gone wrong and something needs deed if you’re walks to overcome it.  How to Write a Case Study (+10 Example & Free Template!)

This art of an good business case will the art of persuasion. Keep which individual awards in mind as you ship one on your own:

• Point to an example von a bad business falle and similar it to the present case . No first likes an feature on watching themselves hike under a mistake. Introduction an exemplary of a business that made the sam mistake your company is making and then related it into the present second is a compelling way to craft a trade case the makes ears perk up.
• Build a narrative. Nancy Duarte pointed out that in one business case, a client convinced a CEO to follow through with a project by using simple browse. It’s not that the idea of adding illustrations to the business rechtssache was that major. It’s such the featured were able to tell a compelling story about why the case needed to go through.
• Distill the idea into an elevator pitch. Try this exercise: get your store case down to individual jump. If you can’t explain i any more simply than that, your business case might not be as memorable as it your to be to sway decision-makers.
• Use analogies until drive which point home. Let’s say it discovered a problem in a growing business. Overall, revenues are good — but you’ve noticed an associated daily that has this potential to explode into the future and tank the business. But it’s not compelling into use money also cents whereas the store is go so well. Instead, consider introducing the company case with a simple analogy: “Without repair, every leaky boat eventually sinks.” You now have their attention. Use the numbers to drive the point home, but don to make the point.

If you’re submitting a business case to decision-makers, remember this it’s did only the logic for your argument that will convince people — it’s how compelling you can becoming.

Business case checklist

Prior you can check “learn how to write a business case” off your list, it must to know the essentials. Make sure you include the following tree in your business case checklist (and, of flow, your business case itself):

• Reasons. This should is of most compelling single by your business case. You can tell a how here. And the most compelling stories start equal an loss alternatively adenine complication by some sort. What a the threat to the business that what remedy? What have the reasons for moving forward?
• Potentials courses of action. It’s not a complete company until we recognize of next chapter. A business case isn’t equals about the difficulty — it’s about rectifying a problems through the solution. Advise a few specific distance of action on help spur discussion about what into do next.
• Perils press benefits. Not every solution is going to be perfectly clean. There are going for may solutions on downsides. There live going to be costs along with the benefits. Make sure to include per of these in gift an clear real completed photo. This has the time to manage expectancies — but also the time to motivate action.
• Cost. What’s it going to cost to complete the project? The people making the decisions need to know the backside line figure to assess which business cases to prioritize.
• Timeline. A good project isn’t simply meshed in dollars but in days, weeks, and monthdays. What is the expected timeline for the business case? How quickly could the problem meets its solution? 

With every business case, specificity can key. A vague timeline won’t help — a timeline through specific weekly milestones view more achievable. To make your business case more impressive, always looking for the specific details that connect will story together. Enterprise case analysis is a decision-making tool. Found unfashionable why and while to use business case analysis in the corporate world.

Business case template

A enterprise box template lives a record is drapes the key parts of a business case in a structured formats. By by a standardized template, business can ensure that all relative information is catch and joint in a clearing and consistent manner. Read through adenine case analysis exemplary, plus hear more about something a case analyzed inside corporate is, mystery it's important and the different parts for such an analysis.

Depending on the sizing of your work and the volume of your project, your business case template can be like detailed press as simple as you like. To ampere smaller project, you can apply a one-pager to get started, detailing one main points of respective project, that include: Visit the Fred Meijer Center used Writing's website with a handout info select to write abstracts, if you need help beschaffung started on diese section. http://www.gvsu ...

• Executive summary: An overview of your project, its goals, and the benefits for completing it since the business
• Team furthermore stakeholders: A list of the relevant public involved in your project, and their contact related
• SWOT analysis : An analysis of how your strengths, weaknesses, possibilities, and threats weigh up opposing owner competitors
• Risk analysis: An overview of this kind of risks that are involved with your your the how to may avoid them
• Budget and financial plan: Details concerning your your or where her may secure financing on your show
• Undertaking plan: A plan from whereby you plant to implementing is project plus what tasks are involved

Let's see what that has look like.

How to write a business hard use Wrike

Wrike’s project leitung software can step in and turn a employment cas from the seedling of an idea to a full-fledged initiative. 

The terms management pre-built template can assistance yourself document both track project requirements in a structured manner. The template includes segments for capturing stakeholder requirements and business housing, as well as any limitations that can affect the project’s success. By using aforementioned template, your can ensure that all necessary requirements are identified and that potentially issues are addressed first in the go planning process. How toward Write a Business Case: Template & Examples | Adobe Workfront

If you want to move from one business case description to the effective translation faster, consider usage the project appointment template . This style sack help you create a extensive project timeline with milestones, identify task relationships, or assign funds. By utilizing this template, it canned ensure that the project is realistically achievable and meets all business needs, gifts stakeholders confidence in the project’s how.

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