Writing successful sales emails involves science, art, and a willingness to fine-tune your strategy. At Union, we’re passionate about continually improving our formula and we want to share what we’ve learned with you. Outlined below are four essential rules for your email outreach toolbox.
Plan for a Set
Planning is the first step in creating sales emails that deliver big results. While many marketers dream of winning over customers with a single email, the majority of the time it’s a slow, steady process that involves sharing incrementally more at each step. Remember, you will have the opportunity to communicate important points throughout the campaign. Overstuffed messages, no matter how well-written, risk shutting the process down before it starts.
Planning emails in sets ensures you communicate a clear, consistent message about your brand with just enough information in each template to catch your prospect’s interest. It also differentiates you as a helpful resource who respects their time.
Write each email around one main point, building on the template that came before it. For example, in the third or fourth email, you might drop a link to a relevant blog article and introduce it along these lines: “Hi (prospect name)- Following up to share a resource with you and your team…”
It’s an Email Not an Essay
It can be tempting to load an email up with as many stats and product details as possible, but in sales outreach shorter is better. Simply put, the longer an email is, the more chance there is of losing your prospect’s attention before they finish reading it.
While there’s no magic number for word count, we see emails with 150 words or less driving much higher click and reply rates—and we frequently create templates much shorter than that. By concisely communicating a few strategic points at a time, you’ll make your messaging stand out to the prospect amidst a sea of lengthier emails that go unread.
This applies to the closing line, too. The most effective way to wrap up an email is a short and sweet sentence that clearly communicates what you want the prospect to do: “Let’s talk soon—next week if you’re free?”
Keep It Conversational
Keeping the tone of your email content conversational vs. promotional is key to writing sales emails that get results, and it runs counter to many marketers’ first instincts. Sales emails and marketing emails are two very different things—when you’re writing sales emails, you want clear, plain language that communicates how your services/products are of value to the prospect. There’s no place here for rhetorical questions, extra metaphors, or gimmicky phrases.
A good rule of thumb is to imagine that you’re sending the email to a colleague two doors down. If it sounds too overstated or colorful for a message in that scenario, keep it out now. This also means treading lightly with exclamation points. Remember, you don’t want your email to sound like an infomercial, as in “It slices! It dices! And it can be yours right now for only $19.99!”
When in doubt, keep it simple and direct, like this closing line: “Let me know if you’d like to connect, glad to hop on a call and explain more.”
It’s About Them, Not You
Your prospects are likely getting a slew of emails every day that come across something like this:
“Hi (prospect name)- Let me tell you all about my company and all the wonderful things we do. We’re the best, and you should hire us! Click here to set up an appointment…”
By turning the approach around and building your messaging around the prospect—their needs, goals, and pain points—instead of around you, you have a much greater chance of capturing their attention.
It can be difficult to personalize outreach at scale, but you know your buyer personas and you know what their industry’s current pain points are. A little at a time, offer valuable resources and details about your offerings that address those problems. Are they struggling with the shift to remote work? Share a thought leadership piece on the topic. Are budgets in their industry extra tight? Pass along a case study showing work you did for a similar company at half the price of the competition.
Here’s what that might look like in action:
“Hi (prospect name)- If you are looking for a powerful marketing engine that will execute on compelling digital campaigns for (company name), we can unlock serious growth for your business…”
In Closing
Union Resolute routinely leverages these four core insights to deliver powerful results across industries and markets. Combined with your content publication strategy, they will help ensure that your emails aren’t just delivered to an inbox, but actively elicit prospect interest and engagement in your brand.
