Writing an effective sales email is a daunting task that requires planning, intelligence, and some serious practice. In order to engage prospects and win the recipients’ attention, you have to be interesting and empathetic. Unless the prospect believes that you have their best interest in mind, they aren’t going to respond or at least even open your emails.
The challenge is that you have to do this in a short passage consisting of a few sentences.
This is a challenge, of course. But what if we tell you there is a way to manage it, and you can write attention-grabbing emails.
Most prefer egoistic conversation, in-person as well as in emails. When we write lengthy and self-centered emails, they go unnoticed because they offer no value to the recipients. That is why only 25% of the sales emails are opened, and the rest get deleted or marked as spam.
In the following, we are going to share some thoughts and best practices to help you be better at sales emails.
We’ll primarily answer the following two questions.
- What is a solid email structure (based on the best practices)?
- How to increase email effectiveness?
1. Email Structure
You can read a lot about email bodies and structure, but most pieces bore you to death due to repetition and lack of substance.
We aren’t doing that here. :)
There are five critical elements of a good sales email, and they are:
● Subject line
● Opening
● Body Copy
● CTA
● Signature
Each of these elements has to be thoughtfully created around the shared goal of attaining and retaining prospects’ attention and interest.
In the following, we are breaking down each component and sharing some examples of what you can do at each stage. Before you jump on to the section of your interest, have a mindset of rapid experimentation and learning because cold call emails and prospecting is all about experimenting and optimization.
Let’s get started here.
Subject Line
It is one thing that separates a Pro from an average sales guy!
I’m sure you have been receiving some terrible subject lines in your mailbox - containing gross grammatical issues, dramatic words, and misleading phrases. They break the trust right in the first moment of the interaction.
Sales professionals agree that your subject line is the most important part of the sales email that decides if the recipient will open and interact with the email or not. Therefore, be real, engaging, authentic, and empathetic.
How to write the best subject line?
Think for a moment if you have to write a sales email to your friend or someone in a close network, how would you craft it?
The first thing you would do is to avoid verbosity and unnecessary complexity. Spamming jargon and sales verbiage can land your email in the ‘promotion tab or spam folder instead of the Gmail inbox. That is a clear red flag to avoid.
What should you do then?
Well, the most notable best practice of email subject lines is to keep them short and enticing. Remember, your goal is to invoke the reader's interest and not sound like a credit-card seller.
Take a few examples of sales email subject lines.
● Question about (quite some trigger event or goal they want to achieve)
● Have you considered (recommendation)?
● “Quick request”
Or better, be direct if there’s a reference involved. For example:
● Paul recommended I get in touch.
Bonus Tip:
Talk to your sales team or check their call records if you are using a conversation intelligence tool. Then, gather the most prominent question, request, or concern and phrase those in the email subject.
Examples:
● Questions about your SharePoint inquiry last month
● Paul suggested you need some marketing help
● Lisa, have you hired the cloud architect?
Opening
Email opening should look like the continuity of your subject line. The waterfall-like flow will ensure your reader remains interested and responds.
The first thing you need to decide is how to address your recipient? Depending on the region and ICP, you can decide on a formal or informal title. However, we prefer to use the first name.
After all, nothing sounds sweeter than your own name.
The second thing to consider is to connect the beginning to the subject line. There’s nothing worse than receiving an email with a fabulous subject line but getting a mood swing right after reading the first line.
So, what should you do here?
An effective email opening does the following:
● Engages the prospects
● Explain the context of your email
● Offer a line of credibility
● Transit from introduction to pitch
Now, with these pointers in mind, craft two or three lines while remaining on the subject.
Let’s look at the example,
Hi <First name>
Paul Silva from Tesla gave me your details and suggested that you need some help with SharePoint migration and upgrade. We have been helping companies with SharePoint solutions since 2013 and have worked with similar companies like …
Once this baseline is established, you should naturally move towards the pitch and explain what action item the recipient should take.
Bonus Tip
When you aim to build connection through context, make sure to check your CRM for notes and recordings of the previous conversations with the lead. If a prospect had a particular issue, your conversation intelligence tool should guide you on it with a quick search and help you craft a better opening line.
If you could mention their core pain point (like we mentioned SharePoint migration above) that would be an immediate connection builder.
Email Body
This is your core message and pitch where you have to build a case for your business. You should highlight and personalize their pain point alongside some social proof.
If you had faced a similar situation before and helped a client, pass on their example as solid proof. You can quote some client names, statistics, case studies, or testimonials to add more credibility.
For example, “We help marketing agencies increase their lead generation by 5X and have a proven record of delivering profitable ROI to our clients.”
The main body would heavily rely on the intelligence you gathered through CRM and the conversation intelligence tool. If you have the call/meeting points or some other data to create a story for the prospect, that will make the whole conversation a lot more credible and personalized.
Here, you can ask questions that are in line with your research.
For example, “Are you still looking for help with lead generation?” OR “In our last chat, you mentioned that budget approval might happen sometime in April. Do you think it’s a good time now to connect and chat?”
The point is - you have to build a story indicating that you know the prospects' pain points, goals, and potential solutions. A few solid proof points and the right offer, and you are pretty close to the deal.
CTA or Closing
The closing statement should acknowledge and thank them while putting forward a clearer call to action. The purpose of reaching out to the prospect is to determine whether they are the right fit to be your customer or not.
So, you should end with a clearer call to action that could be said as yes.
For example,
● Are you available for a no-obligation call with our engineers? It shouldn’t take more than 30 minutes.
● Let me know if a meeting makes sense as a next step. I’m happy to arrange a call with our technical team per your schedule.
● Let me know if SharePoint migration is still a priority for your business. Else, I can circle back sometime next quarter.
Bonus Tip
Some people make some common mistakes while drafting the CTA or offer for their sales emails. Make sure you avoid common errors like:
● Not having a clearer CTA
● Having multiple CTAs
● Having a difficult and complex CTA (like it’s tough to decide in yes or not)
● Asking too much in the CTA
Your research should help you draft the right CTA for each audience segment. Not every segment or ICP (ideal customer profile) will have the same interest; therefore, one cannot afford to have multiple or lame CTAs.
Make sure to consult your tech stack and intelligence tools and come up with an offer that your recipient cannot refuse.
Now, let’s move to the last part of the puzzle.
Signatures
Your email signature is your identity and one of the most underutilized pieces of communication in any email. If you could play smart, the signature can help you sell more and even cross-sell.
Here are a few suggestions about signatures.
● Keep it branded, simple, and professional.
● Add your contact details.
● Include links to the website, online profiles, and Calendly
● Do not add lengthy quotes or images
Depending on the email client you use, there are multiple scenarios and solutions that you can employ. Tools like WiseStamp and HubSpot’s email signature tool can help you design a template for you to follow.
Conclusion
We hope the suggestions will help you ideate, craft, and send better emails that grab attention and close better deals.
2. How to Increase Email Effectiveness?
OR How to Employ CI for Email Effectiveness?
We have talked at length about how to structure your sales emails and how to present your ideas/offers to potential prospects.
Now, when you have a formal structure of email, the next big question is how to improve upon its performance? How would you ensure that people read your email, click on the call to action, and perform a business-friendly action?
The most crucial element of a sales email is the content that goes into it. The email copy requires some serious background research on what would make a compelling pitch/offer for one or a group of customers.
So, here are some tips on how to do the right homework for your email marketing, and this is where conversation intelligence will be your best friend.
Conversation intelligence can help you at three different but highly important areas. Look at the following and make your notes.
1. Knowing your audience
The famous KYC (Know your customer) mantra never gets old. In email marketing, the first and foremost action item is to know your audience before you send them any communication or message.
There are some old and tested practices like building a customer persona or ICP based on research and tracking your web/social interactions. You can do that and use social media platforms like LinkedIn and some market research tools to gather the interests, keywords, and trends.
Conversation intelligence can help you be better at this assignment. By offering you notes and ideas around the pain points, key comments and concerns, and use cases, CI helps you build the right profile and understand their pain points well.
2. Building value proposition
Now, when you have a customer persona, the next step is to send them an email with an offer. However, how would you know what they need?
Your CRM and revenue intelligence tools can be the best buddies here. They should help you with important insights like their key pain points, objectives, goals, and much more. If you are using conversation intelligence tools, you can track records of your previous meetings/calls and build stories around your offer.
Now, when you have a fair understanding of your customers' pain points, the next logical step is to build use cases around your solution. A simple “Value Matrix” exercise will help create the right value proposition for each customer segment. Let’s say – your conversation intelligence tool tells you that legacy applications are one of the big pain points of your prospects.
The sluggish apps, outdated infrastructure, and lazy services are making your customers' business suffer and slow down. So, you can come up with an offer that targets the customers with application modernization at a reasonable cost. This use case or value proposition will not be a guesswork, rather backed by data.
Emails with a fair understanding of the audience and an appropriate value proposition can lead to better results on KPIs. People will read them and respond back, because they know you’ve done your homework.
Conclusion
We hope that our suggestions will help you write better emails and be more effective in generating business through email marketing. Marketing teams today invest a lot in email marketing, automation, and list-building tools, but there is less or no investment on the research and revenue intelligence side.
We do not want to overemphasise, but in the absence of a viable conversation intelligence tool, your email campaigns can be extremely poor. Therefore, we strongly advise on investing in a revenue intelligence system that could help understand the audience well and execute better campaigns.
About Meet Record
At MeetRecord, we are committed to helping our clients do the right intelligence for their marketing collateral and campaigns. We do this by helping you capture intelligence from video calls and web conferences.
Our customers can record and analyze all online meetings, track team behavior, advise actions, and grow audiences. If you are planning a new drip campaign, our platform can help you find the right pain points and use cases from the previous customer interactions and calls and help you draft better emails.
Our tool is built for all teams – sales, marketing and product. Moreover, you can integrate it with all leading CRM tools like HubSpot and Salesforce. The best part is that you can get started for FREE, giving value coupled with affordability.