Creating an attention-grabbing sales email can be a bit of a daunting task when you’re looking at starting, but it really doesn’t need to be.
Over 200 billion emails are sent out every day, so making an email stand out isn’t as easy as it may first seem. There are a lot of considerations that can’t be ignored or rushed when approaching your sales email, if you want to get it right. Let’s have a look at a few of these, to give you an idea of how to put together your own eye-catching sales email to improve your sales numbers.
Personalisation
One of the top things to do before sending out your sales emails is to figure out who you’re selling to. By knowing your audience you can tailor your messaging from the start which makes people more likely to open and read your emails.
It’s good practice to use people’s names in the subject lines and in the body of the email. These little extras tend to make an email feel much more personal which readers appreciate, instead of it feeling like a bulk cold email. It’s something addressed to them personally and is therefore more likely to peak their interest and get opened.
This really comes down to having warm leads; by getting to know your cold leads you can start to personalise messaging much more and you’re no longer an unknown. This means that they’re going to be much happier about giving your email the time and reading what it has to say.
One of the best ways to do this is by thinking in terms of “Show me you know me”, which is all about full personalisation and tailored individual emails. This method is much more time consuming but will deliver results guaranteed. Demonstrate to them:
- Why your solution is right for their company
- Why you are messaging them personally about this
- Similar work you’ve done for competitors. If you mention the right competition, this always sparks a response
Demonstrating all of these is likely to lead to more ‘opens’ and ‘reads’, which increases the chance for you to get your leads really interested in what you’re selling.
Content
You: The Sender
The name that the email is sent from (or the sender) is the first thing that your lead will see, so test if having your name, if having your company name or perhaps a mix of the two works best for you.
The Subject Line
The next section that’s seen is your subject line. Now this really is where you can create a hook and generate some interest. Keep it short and sweet and include some personalisation perhaps. For example, your email subject might be:
‘%FIRST.NAME% you’re not going to want to miss this’
You’ll notice that this subject line includes the recipients name first of all, which will catch their eye and generate interest straight away. The rest of the subject messaging is intriguing to the recipient and they will therefore be more likely to open the email to check out its contents.
The Message
Keep your messaging short and sweet whilst paying attention to the words that you use. Words are powerful in the feelings they create. For example, to say ‘a role has a lot of responsibility’ may be perceived quite differently by an individual to saying ‘a role has a lot of control’, even though they can mean the same thing. Words matter, so make sure you think about your wording carefully each and every time and always start with a draft or two until you get it right. Always run any copy past your colleagues, email copy included, as multiple minds are better than one and not only will they potentially spot mistakes but you can gauge their reactions and opinions on tone and phrases used.
Keeping your email short and to the point makes it less likely for the reader to become disinterested and either skim it or exit it completely without giving it the time of day. One of the easiest ways to keep their attention is by keeping it simple; avoid going too sales heavy, using too many fancy words or making the copy stale and unoriginal.
In terms of style, using headings to break up the email and putting some text in bold really helps make your key points stand out for somebody skimming over it, which is very common. This allows your contacts to absorb the full contents of the email and digest your main points without having to actually read every word. Another way to do this is to use bullet points. They’re easy for a reader to digest and show that those are the key bits of information that need their attention. The easier you make an email to read, the more people are going to read it, so avoid big blocks of text and try out extra paragraphs. What matters is how easy it is to read quickly and get the key points, not how perfect it is compared to the principles of writing.
To help keep things simple, stick to only one ‘sell’ per email. Keep the focus on that item that you’re selling so as to not confuse your message. You can always focus on other ‘sells’ in later emails. This helps to keep the email clear and easy to read and prevents the messaging from getting confused.
When writing email copy, it’s important to remember that you are human, not machine, so write like one! You’re selling to a fellow human at the end of the day, so use emotion to be persuasive in your sales. Some of the best ways to do this is to appeal to the individual, then the employee and then to the company. Use emotive language to do this by saying that ‘they’ would be a hero in their team and then how their team would be able to be more productive. Also, you can appeal to people’s competitive nature. If you know a competitor is using the service or product, then let them know and say what value it’s added for them. This can bring a sense of FOMO (fear of missing out) to the reader, which can help with getting sales.
Try to talk about the product by referring to the benefits of using it instead of talking about its features. So ‘the product can triple response rates’ should be used rather than ‘you can A/B test to get better email copy’. Carrying on from this, you want to show value instead of talking about it. You can do this by using case studies of how company X, who uses the product, doubled their quota because of the greater amount of leads generated from the tripled response rates.
Click Send. What’s next?
After you’ve sent out that first sales email it’s really important to have a plan of action in place to capture and nurture leads. One email, however well written, is almost definitely not going to be enough to get contacts responding straight away and moving quickly through your sales funnel. You need to make sure that you send out some follow ups to remind them that you are there, gauge interest and to see how they are getting on or if they have any questions you could answer.
When approaching these follow up emails, stick to the points outlined throughout this article, the same as you would have done with your very first outreach. Just edit the copy to push your ‘selling points’, go a little deeper and include more benefits, story and customer testimonials. Again, don’t feel the need to cram all of these things into one long follow up email. Spread it out over a number of days or weeks; whatever suits your business.
If a contact shows that they are not interested, that’s really the perfect time to send one back saying ‘okay but these companies X Y & Z are using it (maybe some of their competitors) but it might not be the right fit for you’. By bringing up successful companies or ones that they’re in competition with, you can instil a bit of FOMO, as mentioned before, which can get your lead to reconsider.
This really is where having your CRM set up in the background and workflow automations in place will help you and your business. You can plan what responses or prompts contacts will get in advance, based on their interaction with your initial sales email. For example, if contacts open the email but do nothing, they can get sent a follow up after a few days to remind them, but if another contact doesn’t open this email, they can just get sent the same one again instead. This is a game changer. To find out more on ‘CRM automations’ and how they make a great sales email campaign, check out another one of our blogs here.
Make sure that you keep testing! Every persona and industry has its own ways of talking about products and processes and your business will be no different. Keep trying to refine your own approach and you will see steady improvements in your open and action rates!