6. Sales Email Best Practices
This document is designed to help guide you when it comes to your email outreach. These guidelines are helpful if your aim is to start the sales conversation with your leads by evoking an email response.
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Email Basics
Pick a personalized email address. Send your emails from an individual person at your company (not a generic email). Example: andra@cyberbytesinc.com will get a better response than contact@cyberbytesinc.com as people are more likely to believe the email was personally sent to them.
Plain text emails works best. Marketing newsletters are usually templated, have graphics and aren't personalised. Well written sales emails are in plain text and look like they are manually written from the sales rep to the prospective client (example below).
Include an email signature. If your company has a typical email signature that is used, include it in your email. This gives the recipient a quick way to learn more about your company.
Email Content
Segment your content. Take the time to tailor your communication to different segments of your list (e.g. communication for large B2B clients may be different than approaching a SMB). Doing this will improve response/engagement rates.
Use custom fields to tailor your emails. Example custom fields include:
Business location (e.g. city)
Business Industry
Business size
Short emails with a casual tone work best.
Desired CTA. What action do you want your prospective client to take? We recommend asking the prospective client if they're open to a 2 minute phone call (the less time commitment for them, the more likely they are to say yes). From here, all they need to do is reply with their phone number and your sales rep can call them to continue the conversation.
Keep subject lines short. We recommend using lower case and making subject lines ambiguous, which increases curiosity and therefore increases open rates. Here are some examples that have worked well with other clients:
re: tomorrow?
meeting?
thoughts?
re: 2 mins
Personal invitation for [[company name]]
Question!
Sending Best Practices
Test in small batches. This will allow you to get an idea of:
Subject lines that get good open rates
Content that resonates with your list and is most likely to elicit a response
The best time of day to send emails for your industry
Once you find a flow, this will enable you to send larger batches.
Send multiple emails. If you don't get a response the first time, don't be afraid to follow up. We see that often you may not get a response for 2-4 emails. Of course, do it in a tasteful way (example below!). If the contact does reply we've set up Outfunnel so that the contact is automatically removed from the drip sequence.
Cold Outreach Example:
Hi[first name],I’m John, 43North’s Director of Portfolio Recruitment. We operate a seed-stage accelerator program in Buffalo, NY and invest $5M annually into eight companies. We have a portfolio of 51 companies that have gone on to raise another $472M in investment.I came across[company name]in Pitchbook, and since it looks like there might be some alignment with what we look for in companies, I’d like to invite you consider applying start on June 23!You can click here to learn more, or if you have 5 minutes I can give you a quick call this week? Just reply back with your number.Thanks!Brian
Follow Up Example
Hi[first name]!Not sure if you saw my email a few weeks ago, but if not, I'm Brian from 43North - the $5M startup competition in Buffalo. We've awarded $20M to 37 startups over the last four years.I emailed you about how we thought your company could be a strong fit for our competition.Our prize structure for this year is:(1) Grand prize of $1 million(6) Prizes of $500,000$1 million in follow-on funding (to be awarded in 2019)You can click here to learn more, or if you have 5 minutes I can give you a quick call this week? Just reply back with your number.Cheers,Brian
Tailored Example
Hi[firstname],I wanted to personally introduce myself, my name is Lisa and I work with the team at Restaurantee. I found you on our Restaurantee platform and I wanted to reach out as we are launching new a program next month called RestOne.We want to invite you,[Restaurant Name], to apply to become one of five Mexican restaurants on the program. You can read more about the details here [link].We're only holding 5 spaces for Mexican restaurants, and since you're one of my favorite restaurants, I wanted to tell you about it before it launches to everyone else so you can save your spot.Would you be open to a 2 minute call tomorrow so I can explain more?[Email Signature]
Things to keep in mind:
It's no surprise that when doing sales outreach via emails, you'll get a variety of responses back.
Some people may ask to no longer be contacted, so make sure to respect their wishes.
The win is when you get leads agreeing to a call with one of your sales reps! These are leads you would have otherwise taken much longer to reach.
Good luck, we hope this document helps!
Additional Resources/Tips
