Email is crucial to sales. Cold calls, drop-ins, and referrals all play their part in the sales cycle, but the email message is the easiest and most common way of business communication today. Since it’s so important, when tailoring your message, you’ll want to make sure you’re doing the most you can in order to actually get a response.
The average email user receives almost 150 emails every day, so how can you differentiate your pitch to make sure you stand out and get the feedback you want? To help sales teams email more effectively, we looked into the factors that really matter when it comes to getting someone to respond to your message.
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Apply the following rules to your email outreach, and watch the responses roll into your inbox:
● Write like a third-grader – Somewhat surprisingly, the higher the reading level, the less likely a recipient is to respond to your email, so don’t be afraid to dumb it down. Research shows that you should aim for a third-grade reading level when drafting a message, and the best way to do that is to keep sentences short and use words with few syllables. There are also online tools that let you paste your message before generating the reading level, which can be useful.
● Write with emotion – Positive or negative, it doesn’t matter much. As long as you’re moderately sentimental, you’re more likely to get a response than neutral messages. You’ll want to avoid overdoing it by being excessively flattering or unnecessarily rude but showing some emotions can be key to getting an email response. Sprinkle in words like nice, thanks, bad or unacceptable, and when appropriate, use a sentiment analyzer, which offers a “sentiment score” that ranges from -1 (negative) to 1 (positive), with 0 representing a completely neutral email.
● Keep it short – Email messages that fall somewhere between 50-125 words received responses more than 50% of the time, while response rates declined slowly as messages included more words. It’s important that you avoid rambling, but you also want to get your message across, as a 25-word email works about as well as a 2000-word one. Word processors all have word count tools, but it’s good to aim for two-to-three paragraphs in the emails you send.
Whether it’s a cold candidate or a warm lead, in order to sell your products or services, sales professionals rely on email. It’s the preferred method of communication across the entire business setting, but especially sales, who are in constant contact with potential customers. When crafting your perfect pitch, consider implementing the tips above, and watch your sales surge.
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