Rewriting for Results: How Trust-Focused Emails Outperformed Urgency
Expired Offers, Untapped Potential
Above Lending offers debt consolidation loans to clients of Beyond Finance — but many users don’t act on their initial offers. This project focused on a high-value but often overlooked segment: users whose loan offers had expired, but who were still eligible to reapply.
We launched a multi-wave retargeting campaign to re-engage them, segmented by how long ago their offer had expired, from 1 month to over a year. Previous emails leaned heavily on generic value props like “no prepayment penalties,” but performance had plateaued.
We saw an opportunity to rethink the entire strategy starting with the messaging.
Rebuilding Retargeting From the Ground Up
I was responsible for reimagining the retargeting experience — from initial concept to final execution. My work included:
Developing four new email themes
Writing the full copy deck
Building and QA’ing the emails in SendGrid
Testing What Actually Drives Action
We began with the control: a standard, compliance-safe email highlighting “No Prepayment Penalties.” To break away from this flat performance, I used AI to explore new angles that leaned into trust, emotion, and urgency.
From that process, I developed four distinct messaging strategies:
Empowerment & Control – positioning the user as the hero
FOMO / Scarcity – urgency-driven, loss-aversion framing
Social Proof & Trust – using credibility and community validation
Urgency & Personalization – exclusive, limited-time tone
We tested the FOMO, Social Proof, and control messages in a multi-variant campaign. I handled full implementation in SendGrid and ensured end-to-end funnel tracking — from email open to contract signed.
The MVP test ran for 3 weeks, followed by a 16-week rollout with backend automations and lifecycle triggers layered in.
Trust Was the Top Performer
The Social Proof email outperformed both the urgency-driven and control variants across every major metric — from opens and applications to offers selected and contracts signed.
50%
higher application rate
(compared to control)
60%
lift in contract completions
(compared to control)
Key Takeaways
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Trust beats urgency — in considered decisions like lending
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Timing matters — engagement drops sharply after the 6-month mark
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AI excels at ideation — helping break stale patterns and speed up creative thinking
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Follow the full funnel — success isn’t clicks, it’s completed actions