What Makes a Good Sales Prospecting Email GREAT?

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By Paroma Sen On Feb 5, 2020

Salespeople spend most of their time writing emails and statistics suggest that they spend just a third of their day actually talking to prospects!

The great thing about prospecting over email is that every prospect is checking emails throughout the day. But here’s the catch.

Thousands of other sales reps are already vying for the same prospect’s attention as you are.

By crafting your sales prospecting emails strategically enough, with the right response-evoking copy and content, you can easily increase ROI from every prospecting cadence.

An earlier B2B Survey by ChiefMarketer showed that email is the best channel to generate leads and also the best channel to produce the highest ROI!

Another Reason To Optimize Your Email Prospecting

Several technology-buying decisions within B2B organizations are made basis the inputs of the millennial workforce. Given that in technology sales today, a certain percentage of your prospects will belong to the millennial cadre, it helps to keep in mind that their most-preferred of business communication is email.

Here’s what can help make your email prospecting great:

1- List building is THE MOST Important aspect

As a channel, email is more targeted and gives you better control over who you reach out and with what message. However, you have to start with the right target list besides ensuring that you broadcast the right message at the right time!

Every salesperson’s prospecting email should follow the:

Right Message at The Right Time to The Right List rule!

While building out a target list, identifying the most relevant person from the company to reach out to is crucial.
Identifying the right person who is responsible for making buying decisions helps align your sales and prospecting message more effectively.

Brandon Bornancin, CEO and Founder of Seamless.Ai spoke to us about the importance of list building in this recent podcast episode, have a listen to grab some interesting tips!

2- Personalization Drives Better Results

Several studies have proven how effective personalization is to prospecting. Entire cadences and marketing techniques are based on the benefits of hyper-personalization. We all know how Account-based Marketing thrives on hyper-personalized omnichannel messaging, for instance.

Besides the fact that personalized emails improve click-through rates by 14% and overall conversion rates by 10%, a study by the University of Texas had found that personalized content is more effective in driving consumers to make a purchase.

In an earlier state of email marketing report, personalized email proved to be the most effective email strategy for 2017.

Email marketing tools can help you make your emails more personal, compared to other channels like Ads which are usually generic broadcasts, emails can easily be personalized no matter the size of your target list.

3– Knowing Your Prospect…Helps!

Various business intelligence tools or customer insights platforms can tell you more about your prospect’s typical buying journey. However, knowing and understanding who your prospect is helps you plan how you’ll write to them more effectively.

You can’t build an effective email prospecting cadence if you don’t know your prospect well enough!

A few standard parameters that helps every sales person know enough about their prospect to start an effective prospecting cadence:

· Company Size(annual revenue, number of customers, number of employees)

· Geographic Location

· Industry – they serve and have served in the past

· Age of Company (how long they’ve been in business)

· Product Offering

· Projected Sale Size

4– Subject Lines can Make or Break the Deal

35% of recipients open emails based on the subject line.

“If your subject line fails to get the recipient to open the email, everything else you do doesn’t matter.” – Steli Efti, Close.io

Here’s what can help:

Include the first name of the recipient in the subject line for a better click-through rate
Keep your subject line under 50 characters, short attention-grabbing subject lines receive more replie
Make use of a Subject Line Checker to rate your subject line’s ability to result in more opens.
Avoid subject lines that can put your email in spam, stay away from click bait gimmicks and words like Buy Now, Don’t miss this offer!
Ask a Question to Evoke a Reaction, for instance-> Is this what you need to drive results?

5- Keep it Short, Simple & Sweet, to Communicate The Core Benefits of your Product

There’s a reason that short, simple and sweet works. The shorter the message, the faster it will be to read through it.

An analysis of more than 40 million emails discovered that people tend to respond to shorter emails far more often.

Your prospecting email doesn’t have to be long as long as it tells a story and focuses on the benefit to the prospect. By stating a key benefit your prospect would derive from your product or a specific pain point that would be solved, the main objective of your prospecting cadence will be easier to achieve.

The goal of every prospecting email is to evoke a response. The best way to do so is to lead with a value proposition or benefit you can offer your prospect in order to secure a meeting over the phone, video, or in person as quickly as possible.

Conclusion

On average, an email user gets 147 emails a day but deletes nearly a half of them within minutes. Only 24% of sales emails are opened. Which means that over 75% of prospecting emails are ignored!

It’s crucial to make your emails stand out in your prospect’s inbox and get them to respond faster using innovative tactics everyday.

Drive revenue by establishing a prospecting process and model that helps establish a predictable lead generation engine via email.