Go ahead and check your email inbox. Go on—we’ll wait. Was there anything good? Did your coworker forward you a funny email chain? How many sales emails were in your junk folder? A lot? Oh, yeah, I’m sure. How many of those do you plan on opening? None? Why is that? Oh, they didn’t interest you? Fascinating…
People receive sales emails all the time. Even in 2022, email marketing is still an integral part of a company’s growth efforts and is up to 40 times more effective than social media. However, many businesses struggle with writing compelling sales emails because they don’t know how to craft the perfect email campaign to resonate with their target audience.
In this blog, we’ll highlight the following topics:
What Is a Sales Email?
A sales email is a sales enablement tactic where sales and marketing teams create and distribute email content to potential buyers regarding their company’s product or service offerings. Sales emails aim to create top-of-mind awareness, build relationships with prospects in the sales pipeline, establish credibility, and set sales appointments with qualified leads.
In addition to potential buyers, sales emails can also be sent to existing customers. Sending sales emails to current clients is a vital component of the loyalty phase of the buyer’s journey because it enables your customer success managers to ensure clients are happy with your business. These sales emails can introduce your ongoing clients to new product and service offerings, giving your customer success reps an avenue of upselling opportunities.
Why Are Sales Emails Important?
Sales emails are ideal for connecting with prospects who may be hard to reach over the phone. In addition to cold calls, sales emails are important because they enable your sales reps to nurture leads until they’re ready to make a purchase. Sales emails are significant components of your sales enablement strategy because they support:
Creating Top-of-Mind Awareness
In a compelling sales email, sales and marketing experts should include additional sales enablement materials such as blogs, case studies, promotional videos, and more. This creates top-of-mind awareness, so key decision-makers (KDMs) are aware that your business exists if they didn’t already. Additionally, if something goes wrong with their current B2B service provider, then your company will be the first one they think of when they’re looking to make a switch.
Building Relationships
Building relationships is a crucial part of the sales process, whether by cold calling or emailing. Without relationship-building efforts, you risk setting appointments with unqualified leads and letting high-quality leads slip through the cracks. Sales emails are important because they nurture potential business relationships. They enable your sales reps to connect with prospects and uncover possible pain points with their current B2B service solution.
Establishing Credibility
Sending sales emails helps your sales reps establish credibility in your target market. Establishing credibility positions your company as a thought leader in the industry you serve, making your business a reliable source of business. While there are various ways to establish credibility, many B2B companies establish credibility by writing thought leadership-focused blogs and sharing case studies that highlight your successes.
Setting Sales Appointments
Overall, a compelling sales email aims to set sales appointments with qualified leads. If you want to make sales appointments via email, there are many ways B2B businesses approach prospects in the sales pipeline. However, there are right and wrong ways to do it, so it’s essential you know best practices for writing sales emails that convert leads into customers.
Best Sales Email Writing Tips
While writing sales emails may seem like an easy way to generate new business opportunities, there are right and wrong ways to approach your sales email efforts. Here are some of the best sales email writing tips for your sales and marketing teams to follow:
Write an Engaging Subject Line
A sales email subject line should be engaging and spark a reader’s curiosity. It’s important to remember that prospects receive sales emails all the time, so what makes your email stand out among the rest?
When writing a subject line for your sales email, it’s important to make it short, clear, and direct. If a prospect even remotely has to think about why you’re contacting them, then they’ll more than likely leave your message unopened.
There are various subject line approaches you can take when crafting the perfect sales email. However, it’s important to keep the intent of the sales email and buyer persona of your target market in mind when crafting subject lines.
To increase sales email open rates, consider using engaging subject line approaches, such as:
- Asking a question
- Acknowledging their accomplishments
- Praising their company
- Finding common ground
- Providing valuable insight
Keep It Short and Sweet
Have you ever been sent a sales email with an engaging subject line? But then you open it, and it’s basically a novel? Yeah, that’s what you don’t want to do. When crafting cold emails, it’s essential that your sales teams keep it short, sweet, and to the point.
Readers will immediately bounce back to their inbox and delete your email if a sales email is too long at first glance. The initial goal of writing a compelling sales email is to catch their attention, starting with the subject and opening line. The point of the first sales email is to start a meaningful conversation with the prospect. From there, you can build relationships with them over time and offer them valuable insight into your company’s product and service offerings.
Personalize Email Content
When a prospect opens an email, they immediately notice if it’s a sales email. If a prospect can tell it’s a sales email from the get-go, you’re doing it wrong. One of the best ways to separate your sales email from the rest is by personalizing the email content.
Personalizing email content is essential for encouraging prospects to open your email and engage with it. There are a variety of ways you can personalize sales emails, such as including their name, company name, job title, the industry they serve, and more. Personalizing email content allows prospects to feel more connected with your company than just another name on your prospecting list.
When writing compelling sales emails, it’s essential to do research on the prospect beforehand. You and your sales reps can research prospects in the sales pipeline by reviewing their website and social media profiles. This can allow you to find your best point of contact about your company’s product or service and personalize your content to resonate with their business and the industry they serve.
Additionally, you can use these platforms to discover their company values and uncover potential pain points. This could enable your sales team to offer a different perspective than other companies sending similar sales emails because you can acknowledge their company’s pain points and mention how your company will relieve them.
Within this personalized sales email, you can also send prospects relevant case studies about how your company has helped businesses in similar scenarios. To make it even more effective, present a case study about a client in the same industry. This kind of proof can be very persuasive when convincing prospects to attend B2B sales appointments.
Provide a Call to Action
What do you want to achieve from a sales email? Do you want the prospect to browse your website? Look at your marketing collateral? Schedule a sales appointment? When writing compelling sales emails, it’s essential that you’re transparent with the reader and tell them what your goal is by sending the email. The best way to be clear and straightforward with the email recipient is to provide a call to action.
A call to action (CTA) is the part of the sales email where you tell readers what you want them to do with the information presented to them. While this is a crucial component of the sales process, sales and marketing experts often forget about it when crafting sales emails. To ensure you don’t forget a CTA, it may be beneficial to create a sales email template for each stage in the email sales process.
When choosing a CTA for your sales email, it’s vital that it aligns with the prospect’s stage in the buyer’s journey. If it’s the first sales email, start with a CTA directing readers to your website, whether specific pages or your blog. Here’s an example:
“For more insight on how we collaborate with [YOUR INDUSTRY] businesses like yours, check out our impact: [LINK TO INDUSTRY PAGE].”
After a few more emails, it may be beneficial to add a CTA that directs them to case studies and other forms of marketing collateral. Here’s an example:
“I attached some resources on how our business enhances day-to-day operations for [INDUSTRY] companies like yours. Let me know your thoughts!”
Once a prospect is closer to the end of their sales cycle, you should provide a CTA that encourages them to attend a sales meeting with your internal sales team. Here’s an example you can use in your sales emails:
“I’d love to set up a 30-minute conversation between you and our business leaders to talk about how we could enhance your business operations. Does [DATE/TIME] or [DATE/TIME] work best for your schedule?”
To further boost your chances of scheduling a sales appointment, it would be beneficial to attach a Calendly (or similar application) link so they can quickly choose their preferred date or time for the meeting.
Present a Timeline
Timelines may seem definite, but they present more urgency with the prospect and increase your email response rate. While you don’t want to seem pushy, you also don’t want to be too hands-off. Overall, the goal of writing a compelling sales email is to present urgency without making potential clients feel like they’ve been given an ultimatum—you just have to find that sweet spot.
Use Sales Technologies To Your Advantage
Writing compelling sales emails prospect-by-prospect is a tedious process and can be avoided by implementing sales tools and technologies into your sales process. Sales technologies are ideal for automating these processes while still personalizing each sales email.
A customer relationship management (CRM) platform like Salesforce enables you to send emails to specific prospects in the sales pipeline. Salesforce Cloud products, like the Sales and Marketing Cloud, allow you to design and segment emails to prospects based on their stage of the sales cycle, the industry they serve, and their buyer persona.
When you implement Salesforce products like Pardot, you can also view email open-rates, discover how they navigate through the email, and discover what they interact with on the sales email. This allows your sales and marketing teams to explore what email receivers are interacting with and where there may be some lag in the email marketing strategy.
Key Takeaways
Sure, we get sales emails all the time—but what makes one sales email stand out among the rest? Next time you decide to open a sales email, take note of the following:
- Did it have an engaging subject line?
- Was it a quick read?
- Was it personalized to your wants and needs?
- What was the call to action?
- Was there a promotion that had a deadline?
Every sales email you send should be compelling and persuade prospects that they can’t go on without your company’s product or service. When integrated with cold calling efforts, you can maximize a prospect’s likelihood of building a relationship with your company and converting them from a lead into a customer.
At Abstrakt Marketing Group, our sales reps are well-equipped to make cold calls, write compelling sales emails, and set appointments with qualified leads. When you’re ready to boost company revenue, contact the sales reps at Abstrakt Marketing Group to get started!
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