Write Better Sales Emails with the Right CRM
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) systems have long been loved by marketing professionals who use them in conjunction with marketing tools to optimize the success of their campaigns. However they can be just as powerful (if not, more so) if used by your sales team to write better sales emails.
CRMs are software systems that store prospect and customer information — things like name, company, email address, phone number, and any other information that you might want to refer back to. These systems also help you to track interactions with your contacts, including emails, phone calls, voicemails, and meetings.
And, if integrated with your Content Management System (CMS), a CRM can also be used to track website visits (including what pages a prospect viewed and for how long) and they can even help serve up “smart” content to a prospect based on his or her interests.
CRMs foster effective collaboration between marketing and sales teams, allowing them to share resources without duplicating their efforts.
Most significantly for the sales team though, CRM systems can help craft highly-relevant, timely emails that cut through all the clutter in prospects’ inboxes. Want to know more? Here’s how your sales team can use a CRM system to write better sales emails.
Research
CRM systems are a treasure trove of valuable data. Before you ever make contact with a prospect, you can check the CRM system for things like geographic location, company size, number of employees, revenue, and more. Once you identify leads that are a good fit for your product or service, you can carefully customize and personalize your emails to get the conversation started around prospects’ plans, goals and challenges.
Context
81% of people conduct research online before ever talking to a salesperson. This makes “cold calling” less and less effective. But, a well-timed email filled with relevant context is one of the most valuable tools in your sales arsenal. The context of your email can be informed by things like the prospect’s industry, role, interests, common connections that you share, actions they’ve taken on your website or previous social media interactions. All of these things help you to write better sales emails by providing you with insight into what they’re interested in and how they like to interact best.
Personalization
One of the biggest advantages of CRM systems is that they allow sales reps to make more productive use of their time. Email templates help to eliminate repetitive tasks such as typing and sending practically identical emails over and over. But just because your email is built using a template, it doesn’t have to sound like it. Email templates aren’t the same as email “automation” you might hear the marketing team talking about. With email templates, salespeople can personalize prospecting emails with contextual data and greatly improve the likelihood that the prospect will open the email. In fact, research shows that emails with personalized subject lines are 26% more likely to be opened.
A/B Testing
Some subject lines work better than others, as do some CTAs, layouts, and countless other variables. A CRM with A/B testing capabilities allows sales reps to optimize their emails for the greatest open and click-through rates. As long as you’re testing one variable at a time, there’s no limit to the tweaks you can make to create the “perfect sales email.”
Build Relationships Using Social Media
Salespeople can improve the likelihood of connecting with prospects via email by first reaching out to them on social media. People are more likely to engage with you via email if they have an existing relationship with you on social media (or at least recognize your name). A CRM system with social media integration can automatically pull in all social accounts related to the email address you have on the contact record. Using that information, you can reach out on social media to make the first contact by following their account, liking, sharing or retweeting their content, or commenting on their posts to start a conversation. Doing so will provide them with a sense of familiarity when you reach out with your sales email. You can even mention the social exchange in your subject or first couple of lines of text.
Time it Right
Geography alone makes knowing when to send emails difficult, but when you throw in personal behavioral patterns it’s almost impossible to know when the best time to send an email is. However, that’s all changing with CRMs like HubSpot which optimize email sends based on a recipient’s previous email engagement. Previous email opens are used to determine when that individual is most likely to read and respond to email. This gives your sales reps a competitive advantage when trying to cut through inbox clutter.
Add Meeting Links
Another way to write better sales emails is by cutting down the number of emails required just to schedule a meeting. Instead of sending an email like, “Hey when’s a good time for you to meet?” or even, “Are you free on Tuesday for lunch?” sales reps can cut out all the back and forth by adding a link to their calendar to their email. Personalized meeting links give prospects an easy way to book time and free up their time (and yours) for more productive tasks.
The world of sales prospecting has changed. Buyers are no longer receptive to unsolicited “spam” and they are more likely to notice the difference when a carefully crafted, highly-relevant email lands in their inbox. CRM systems offer plenty of ways to get people to notice your email. And that could be the difference between getting ignored and making the sale.
If you need help to write better sales emails, or to you want to lean other ways to sell better and faster, download our free guide.
Originally published at blog.undergroundcreativegroup.com.
