4 mistakes not to make when sending a sales email
Sales emails are great tools with high stakes and even higher chances of failure.
I don’t mean to sound pessimistic by this, as a good sales email is of course within anyone’s reach, it is just very easy to get them wrong, to miss a detail or to make a mistake only long time reps have learnt not to make.
So I thought I would share some of the great advice and warnings I have received about mistakes you should not make when sending a sales email.
Writing about you not about your prospect
For some, it will seem like I am stating the obvious but it is so easy to get lost in a sales pitch that is actually just a very detailed product presentation.
You are trying to sell your product so it seems only logical that you would talk about it, right? Well actually, not really.
Most people do not care about your product, not in a mean way, they just don’t want to go through a long email to figure out what the product is, what it does and from that decide if it could potentially be useful to them. They don’t have the time and as they receive your email they may not even realize they could use product like this, so why should they care?
And this question is the key to your sales email, why should prospects care about your product? What can it do for them? What problem does it solve? How will it improve their life?
You really have to put yourself in your prospect’s shoes, gather as much information as you can on your target audience and try to get proof of your assumptions from market studies. Really understand how your clients interact with your product to see why others would be convinced to do the same.
Do you help them save time on something, acquire knowledge, avoid issues, what issues do they have that they could fix thanks to you?
A social media automatisation company would for example contact me putting forward that they know start ups have small marketing teams and social media is a key tool for our communication but that it is incredibly time consuming to find the right stories everyday, but thanks to their amazing company I could take a step back and get back some time to focus on this blog. This message would be tailored, show knowledge of my particular situation and emphasize how I could benefit from it.
Not personalizing your emails
Yes, you have figured out what problem your product can solve for your prospects and how to let them know about it. But on top of being prospects in general all the people you are contacting are individuals and you need to do your best to let them know you are addressing each and everyone of them individually.
The minimum would be including their first name in the subject line and the greetings, mentioning their company in the body of your email but you could go the extra mile and include their job title or a reference to something personal: a blog post they wrote, congratulations for an achievement, comments on a news their company just shared.
Anything you can think of that would grab your prospect’s attention and let them know you did your homework and got information on them.
An important aspect of any sales email is also the timing. When your email is sent can make the difference between an email that is read and one that is binned without a second thought. To get the timing right your knowledge of your recipient is key, you can’t know for sure the best time for each individual but it is most likely to be during the day, probably early morning or right after lunch. At least you should make sure not to send anything in the middle of the night and for that you need to know what time zone they are in. Once you do, you can use tools to schedule your emails to be sent at the most appropriate time without having to get up in the middle of the night to press send.
As a general rule, you need as much information as you can to optimize your email’s chances of being opened.
Not testing your email
Getting the content and the personnalisation right is a challenge and it will for sure take you quite some time, but if there is one thing you should spend almost as much time on as creating the email, it’s testing it.
You can have the perfect content if it includes a typo, broken links or if it opens up with the formatting all over the place you will not get the sale.
I am not doubting your skills or your ability to write an amazing and grammatically correct email when I say this. It’s just that anyone who spent as much time as you probably have been drafting the perfect sales email no longer has the ability to take a step back and see if everything is perfect.
To make sure your email is as good as you think it is, ask a colleague to volunteer and get him/her in your contact list just as you would for any prospect. Follow the whole process and check with him/her what comes out of it, is the first name right, has any part of the formatting moved, does your colleague notice any typo, are all links active etc. Test it on several platforms too: web, mobile, apple’s inbox, make sure it always looks right.
You should also consider testing alternative content and subject lines, I’d recommend at least 2 different emails for each step of the sales process. Then you should analyse and adapt your emails with the result of your A/B testing to improve your emails with each series of prospects. If you are using html email try having a plain text version, as the latter may go through to your prospect’s inbox more easily, html being often recognized as promotion emails and ending up in spam folders.
Not following up
I have previously written on why you should follow up on a sales email and how to do it efficiently. If I were to relay only one essential fact from both these articles it would be that it takes an average of 5 follow up to achieve a sale as 80% of prospects say “no” four times before they say “yes”. So not following up is one of the biggest mistakes you could make, conversion rate for an initial sales email is about 2% maximum, so it’s not your email or your product that is not of interest to your prospect, it’s more likely to be one of a million things other than you.
You should not follow up mindlessly though, make sure to take on the same researching, personalizing and testing steps you did for your first sales emails. By all means you should also vary the content of your emails, do not get too repetitive, offer prospects additional information around your product not directly about it. Give them as much additional value as you can, trying to bring them back your product as a second step. They are more likely to open an email if they can get something from it other than just a sale’s pitch.
This article was written for Gmelius, the email management solution. It helps professionals and businesses save time and get organised with features including email scheduling and templates.
