The Trick To Getting Responses To Your Sales Emails
The first step towards a successful sales email outreach campaign is to understand the psyche of your prospect. When evaluating this, here are a few questions you should be asking yourself...
Emails are a fundamental component of any sales outreach. Be it inbound or outbound, emails are extremely effective in communicating with a prospect you are looking to connect with. Unlike a phone call, emails are not sent and read in real-time. This makes it possible to initiate a conversation with your business prospect at a time that they are not caught up with something else. But with the average person receiving as many as 92 emails each day, capturing the attention of your prospect and eliciting a response is no easy task.
Understanding the psychology of the recipient
The first step towards a successful sales email outreach campaign is to understand the psyche of your prospect. When evaluating this, here are a few questions you should be asking yourself:
- Does the recipient know you? If yes, how do they know you?
- How do you know your recipient and what do you know about them?
- What is one thing about yourself (or your firm) that will make you look credible in front of the recipient?
- How does your recipient benefit from your conversation?
- What is the bare minimum response from the recipient that you would be willing to count as a success?
The four stages of contemplation
An email recipient typically goes through four stages of contemplation. It begins with the email subject - this is often considered the gatekeeper to your message and so you must avoid overly vague and clickbaity subject lines. While this may trigger higher open rates, they bring down the credibility of the sender and are therefore less likely to bring the desired results. A short, yet clear subject line like “Exploring partnership opportunities” would work much better than “Re: You will definitely want to know this.”
The first paragraph of your email is the ‘make or break’ deal. This sets the tone for the rest of your communication and should be used solely for the purpose of establishing contact and demonstrating credibility. Let the recipient know how you know them. You may also congratulate them on recent milestones (like a promotion or funding announcement). In short, the first paragraph breaks the ice and communicates to the recipient that you are not just another spammer and may be trusted.
The second paragraph is where you deliver your proposal. While you may talk about what your business does or offers as a service, make it a point to focus on how your recipient benefits from knowing about this.
Do not have more than three paragraphs in your opening email. The final paragraph should be short and focus on eliciting a response. Do not go for a conversion. Instead, seek the minimum response that you would count as a success. Would you be happy if the recipient agreed to a phone call? How about a meeting in their office? Make this call to action the final part of your email.
Email drafting strategies
While all of this may seem like a lot of information, you must make it a point to keep your email message itself extremely short. Your recipient may not have too much time on their hands and are most probably skimming each message they receive to know if they are worthy of their time or not. A lengthy monologue on your business, or worse, yourself, is not helping your case. The most successful outbound sales email campaigns have opening messages that are fewer than 150-200 words.
Sales emailing is an art and marketers can definitely hone their skills with experience. Study the performance of each of your campaigns to understand what works and what doesn’t. User behavior continues to evolve all the time and so does the success of your email outreach campaigns. This is why experimenting is key to being on top of what’s successful with cold email outreach.