Professionals receive an average of 43 emails per day, including 10 of an advertising nature, according to the 2016 Sncd Email Marketing attitude BtoB study . Your objectives as a salesperson can be varied: get a first physical or video meeting, move your prospect forward in the sales cycle, send your best sales proposal or even ensure customer follow-up. Either way, you want to avoid sounding like a "spammer" that pollutes mailboxes, and bring real added value to your reader . Here are our 9 best practices for your prospecting emails to make a difference!
Above all, be GDPR-friendly!
In the age of GDPR , you can only send emails to people who
have given their consent to receive electronic communications from you .
Sending your newsletters and promotions to people who have never intentionally
asked to receive them exposes you to potentially very severe penalties.
Determine the purpose of your email
An email should not have more than one objective, at the
risk of losing your reader. Your goal is your “call to action” or CTA .
Here are some examples of email goals:
• make a
telephone or physical appointment
• registering
for an event
• know the
state of progress or the brakes of a sales process
• signing a
quote
Be interesting before you are interested
Your prospects receive dozens of emails per day, urging them
to buy. It is grueling and especially nowadays, very often badly perceived.
Differentiate yourself by taking a solution-oriented
approach , instead of bragging about your products, brand and services, talk to
them about things that interest them:
• Their
issues, current projects, objectives and challenges
• News from
a competitor or their industry
• Offer a
free service that could answer one of their problems
You can also apply this approach to prospecting on Linkedin,
by doing social selling . Seek to help, not to sell.
Be relevant through segmentation
To answer point 3, “be interesting before being interested”,
you still need to know who you are addressing : business sector, persona,
position in the company, objectives, challenges ...
Only the implementation of customer file management software
(also called CRM ) allows you to centralize the personal data of your prospects
and therefore to adapt your message to your contacts.
It is important to send your email to the right person, at
the right time and in the right context . There is no point in sending an email
“Do you know about our latest offer?” while this prospect is in the purchasing
phase with another sales representative from your company. This is very bad
news in terms of the customer experience .
Anatomy of a successful email
The subject of the email
• Have a
compelling email subject line , for example ask a question, "Is your
prospecting strategy bringing you the leads you want?"
• Add an “email
preview text” summarizing in a few words what this email could do for him.
The content of the email
It must be short, impactful and readable on mobile , because
there is a good chance that your readers will consult the email on their
smartphones.
Here is an example of a structure:
Impactful
introduction ; as a question of
preference. Allude to your prospect's issues.
Example: You have a swimming pool construction project for
your house with a budget of [X €]. Have you already defined the type of
swimming pool adapted to your land and your desires?
Specific
value proposition ; Briefly show how your product / service could solve this
problem.
Example: If you are not yet sure, don't panic! We have
created this configurator which will allow you to determine which pool best
suits your needs.
Clear
call to action ; in the cases of a prospecting email, you can end with an open
question to start a dialogue.
Example: I will also be happy to discuss your project face
to face, offering you 30 minutes of free advice. Are you available tomorrow
afternoon? Or book the appointment that suits you on my agenda ?
Email
signature that encourages
discussion ; It must make you want to
interact with you and “show that there is a human behind the email sent”.
Include a photo and explain in one sentence what your mission is (how you are
helping your customers). Your prospects are multi-channel, let them choose the
means of contact : phone, sms, email, social networks. And finally, insert an
unsubscribe link . It is a legal obligation.
Automate with sales automation software
When we know that salespeople spend more than two thirds of
their time doing administrative tasks , including sending emails and customer
reminders, it becomes essential to automate !
You will thus improve the productivity of sales teams and
their motivation by limiting tedious tasks.
To see more clearly, here is an example of marketing
automation for commercial prospecting , the objective of which is to have a
first contact with the prospect.
• Day 1:
Teaser email highlighting your customer's problem.
o Example:
(Name), Where are you with your swimming pool creation project? Underground,
semi-underground, polyester, above ground or masonry basins… It is not always
easy to navigate! I offer 30 minutes of free advice to advise you on the type
of pool that best suits your needs ...
• D + 7 ,
if no response to email 1 : Email highlighting the solution you provide or a
colleague who uses the same solution.
o Example:
(Name), TopPiscines974 has already built the dream pool for 30 clients in the
city where you live, Saint Denis, and is positioned as a benchmark in terms of
quality and reliability in the swimming pool industry. I invite you to consult
this customer testimonial in video here ...
• D + 14 ,
if no response to email 2: Email
proposing quick action
o Example:
(Name), I am writing to you following the sending of the emails sent below. You
probably must be very busy. To facilitate our discussions, I invite you to
answer me in one number only. If you are still interested in talking to me,
answer 1! If you would like to be contacted later on this matter, send 2. If
you are not the right person to speak to, type 3! If you are no longer
interested, answer 4 ...
• D + 30 ,
if no response to email 3: Last contact
attempt
o Example:
(Name), No replies from you to my last emails. I just closed your file so as
not to bother you any longer with my emails. I'm curious: why aren't you
interested? Is it because of something I (wrong) did? If you have anything in
mind that I could improve on, let me know. I am always looking for improvement
and customer feedback!
This sequence can be written in advance, and will stop when
the prospect takes the desired action.
Set up email templates
Among the emails your sales reps send, some can be
standardized . Here are the most common examples:
• first
contact or prospecting email
• follow-up
email
• reactivation
email
• sending of
quotes or RIB, or CGV ....
Be careful, these emails are used as a basis, and it is of
course necessary to add a touch of personalization : name of the person, name
of the company, sector of activity ...
Write these emails once and for all, make them accessible to your sales
team in one click from their email box and they will thank you!
Test and analyze your KPIs!
We recommend that you scan the emails you have sent once a
month . The success indicators to follow for sales emailings are:
• The open
rate: did your prospects open the email?
• The
response rate: did your prospects respond to the email?
• The
reactivity rate: what is the relationship bet*ween the number of responses and
the number of openings
Once you have these stats, compare them to the average rates
for your industry, but also to rates for emails sent in the past . Sales
automation software like Hubspot Sales (the one we use and deploy for our
customers) makes reporting easier, and what's more, it's free!
You could integrate these emailing KPIs in a commercial
dashboard for example!
Capitalize on the existing
If you have followed all the best practices, it's a safe bet
that you will be able to isolate prospecting emails that perform better than
others. Testing is fundamental in marketing, but so is the need to present
results to your management.
Write down the tests you want to perform on future mailings
somewhere and focus on the techniques that have generated more leads, or more
customers in order to apply them to more of your emails.
Examples:
• if you
see that emails containing animated gifs perform less well than others, do not
be stubborn, this modern side may not be suitable for your audience
• If you
notice that short prospecting emails are less read but more clicked, choose
this format for communications that are more at the end of the sales cycle
(because they have a better conversion rate).
Unless you have a department dedicated to emailing, the time
devoted to prospecting emails is therefore limited, use it wisely by re-using
techniques that have been proven to work with your prospects and customers.