Best Tips On Writing a Sales Email People Want to Respond To

What are sales emails and why send them?

Sales emails are the specific emails that companies send to promote their products and services, and increase revenue. Sales emails are an example of direct marketing, an approach to generating sales through email without the aid of a salesperson or a personal interaction. They can be sent to potential customers or to an existing customer base. A successful sales email includes information about the company and products, as well as pricing and contact information.

People send emails to attract new clients and to get higher revenue from the existing ones. Hence, the purpose of every email is to get a response. Sales emails are most effective when the offer is compelling, subscribers are engaged with the brand, the email template is of high quality, and delivery is not blocked by spam filters. In the next sections, we’ll present various useful tips on how to craft effective sales emails.

How to write a perfect sales email?

Let’s take a deeper look at the five distinct sections of a sales email and how they work.

Include an engaging subject line

Your sales funnel is like an inverted pyramid — many people enter the top, but only a few advances to the bottom. Each step in the sales process causes friction and means you’re less likely to make the sale. If a prospect doesn’t respond to your team, click through to your website, or read your pitch, the sale can fail. But the first step — and perhaps most important part of that sales-funnel process — is ensuring a recipient opens your email. The secret to great email open rate is compelling email subject lines for sales. Next, we are going to list the best tried-and-true strategies for email subject lines that make sales prospects excited to click and encourage them to read the email without even thinking.

3 tips for top-performing sales email subject lines:

• Keep it short, sweet, and human.
• Be creative, helpful, and/or bold enough to drive intrigue.
• Include one simple call-to-action.

In the example above the subject line is engaging as it is focused on the potential customer. It helps you to engage with prospects immediately avoiding any pushes. You also refer back to the subject line in the body of the email and make it the central idea of your email.

Write a strong opening line

The opening line directly states the purpose of your email. It is the first opportunity for the recipient to understand the intention of your message and learn more about what you have to offer.

Follow these tips to write a strong opening line:

• State the specific purpose of your message right away.
• Use the first-person statement.
• Tell something personal related to the person or the company you’re outreaching.

Include a helpful body copy

The body of your sales email should outline in more detail what your product or service offers to the customer, demonstrate its value and present research that supports your claims. An effective body section should remain simple and to the point, focusing only on the most valuable information to generate interest and persuade the reader to consider your initial proposal and then respond to learn more.

You want to give your sales managers a blueprint for repeatable results from their personalized prospect emails. However, it doesn’t have to be in the form of a template they use word-for-word. It can simply be a framework, personalized based on the prospect, company, industry, or a combination of all.

For example, your sales managers could follow this structure:

• Intro
• The information about the prospect (based on their job role), company or industry
• Pain points
• How you can help (value proposition)
• Relevant third-party proof
• Closing and call-to-action

The example above follows all the requirements for the compelling email template. It has an engaging subject line, relevant to the prospect’s problem. It provides information about the prospect, gives feedback from other customers who experienced a similar problem, presents the value proposition, and adds a closing call-to-action with a specific meeting link.

Add a CTA in the closing copy

The closing section of a sales email is where you can directly invite the recipient to respond to your email or schedule a phone call or meeting to further discuss your offer. It’s important to provide a clear call to action so customers know exactly how to take the next steps. Include a statement or question that encourages them to reach out.

Add a professional signature

The signature should include standard information including your contact details and availability. This is where you might also include links to your professional networking profiles or a website for the recipient to visit in order to learn more about the products or services you offer.

Tips on writing sales emails that get responses

So how do you write emails that will get somebody to answer?

We’ve put together the following list of things you can do to increase your response rate. If you take the time to check off each of these “boxes” before firing off your next sales email, you’re much more likely to see a response and be one step closer to closing your next deal.

Keep them short

The people who you’re reaching out to have a busy life and cannot spend half a day reading emails. When writing an email, place yourself in the prospect’s place. If you can scan the email and find the value immediately, then it’s ready for sending. If you cannot do that, return back and rewrite the email. You’ll never have time to make a second impression on your potential customer. Do not waste this opportunity.

Don’t be afraid to give details

To provide the prospect with something valuable and relevant information you have to go into some details. You have to make your email informative explaining to the customers how your product/service can help them out.

As a start, you can ask yourself the following questions:

• What customer problems does my product solve?
• What makes my product unique?
• Why is my product valuable for this customer?
• How have we helped similar prospects before?

Don’t be afraid to give deadlines

If you expect a response in regards to your proposal, give a deadline. It should not sound like an ultimatum, but you can input some friendly pressure to move the process forward. Use action words with deadlines and give the reason why it’s necessary to act immediately. Examples of phrases that should work are “limited offer”, “download now”, and “terms are valid until”.

Use new technology to your advantage

Sales managers send hundreds of emails every day. It’s hard to control this communication flow without the help of technology. It is even harder to make this communication effective. With email tracking software from email service providers, like Selzy, sales managers can:

1. A/B test various email sequences. When conducting A/B tests, test either the open rates or the reply rates — not both at once. To test open rates, keep the same email body in both sequences (called “variations”) and only change the subject lines of the emails. To test reply rates, you use identical subject lines in both variations, but change the body copy of the emails. Best practices include optimizing the open rate first, then testing to optimize the reply rate using the best-performing subject lines. The challenge is that your testing needs to have different body text so it’s hard to do as an A/B test with a single email address or set of customers. It is also good practice after optimizing your open rate to go back and optimize your reply rate with your new subject line.
2. Send mass emails. Contact a large number of potential clients and nurture them one email at a time by using email marketing software. In addition to getting direct access to your customer base, you can also track how your emails perform and test various methods to increase clicks and conversions.
3. Segment emails to customers. Segmenting your email list starts by looking at the differences among your recipients by:

• Demographic information: Who are they, and what makes them different?
• Customer information/insight: What plan are they on, how much do they spend, and when did they join?
• Email types: What types of email messages do you send?
• Engagement: How often do recipients open any of your emails?
• Activity rate: Are they logging in often, buying frequently, or hardly ever using our services?

4. Analyze which emails trigger the prospect’s response. That’s the feature to get both basic and advanced metrics on your emails in one place. The main metrics to consider are email deliverability, open rate, click-through rate, bounce rate, unsubscribe rate, and conversion rate. These metrics help to optimize email messages and scale the most effective ones.

As a result, sales managers will increase the response rates to their emails and establish long-term effective cooperation with new customers.

Always personalize

It’s not enough to write the standard email. Prospects receive hundreds of them. It’s crucial to make each email personalized and build rapport with the potential customer in the first introductory email. How can you do that?

There are several tips to personalize emails:

• Include any information about the prospect in your email.
• Explain why your product or service is valuable to this particular prospect.
• Present the successful case study of similar prospects.

Take it beyond the inbox

Do your best to initiate future communication with potential prospects. The role of your email is not to sell, but to raise interest in your product or service. Your initial interaction should be enticing enough to schedule a future meeting with the prospect or arrange a demo or phone call to discuss your product in detail.

Include a call to action

Do not forget to explain to the recipients what they have to do. It’s the most important part of your email. Your call to action has to be:

• Clear
• Actionable
• Easy to follow

Your prospects have to understand your intention at first sight and make a certain action after your first email to get better acquainted with your products and have to make this action easily.

Follow-up

We are all humans and we miss things. People can go on vacation without checking their inboxes. They can be busy and do not have time to look through emails each day. They can simply forget to check their inbox one day. It means that they might never see your email. But, you still need an answer, don’t you?

Follow-up is your lifesaver here. Never stop on the first email. Send three more to make sure that your potential customer has received at least one of them. Do not repeat the same information in each message. Try to be creative and do not forget about personalization.

Best sales email templates and examples

Let’s go through some of the great examples of email sequences that work. At Selzy, we’re constantly analyzing what makes the perfect email template. We’ve put together some of our favorite sales email templates that received top scores among our users and provided an explanation of why they work. If you follow these examples it’s likely that the response rates to your emails will increase immediately.

Cold outreach — do your homework

Cold emails are the most popular form of sales emails. Here, your primary goal is to gain the prospect’s trust from the first email. You’re to present a solution to the potential customer’s problem and explain why your product/service is the right choice. One of the options here is to make research for your customer like in the example below.

Establishing credibility is a key to gaining your prospect’s trust. In this example, you mention similar businesses that you worked with and which experienced similar problems. Do your research and demonstrate industry expertise, supporting your arguments with real industry examples. In such a way you build rapport with potential customers and overcome any initial fears.

Follow-up email after the meeting

The other popular example of the sales email is the email being sent after the meeting with the prospect, where you’ve got acquainted with the customer and displayed your product or services. You have to provide the next action steps in your future communication and visualize them in your email.

This example demonstrates a great list of the actions that the customers have to follow after your meeting. The list allows them to visualize the next steps in your communication and indicate whether anything is missing. You ask for the affirmation of your agreement with the prospects and they should be happy about that.

Follow-up email — no response to the first email

The other common situation in email communication happens when the prospect does not reply to your follow-up email after the meeting.

What can you do in this case? A good idea is to set a deadline for the answer to this email and to remind the prospect about the terms and conditions you’ve established at the last meeting.

What is the best time to send these emails

We can start with a little exercise: check the timestamps of the emails you’ve received in the last week. What have you found? For me, I’ve noticed that most of the emails are sent in the morning between 9-10 AM or at 5-6 PM. That’s probably not a coincidence. There are specific scientific studies that justify the best time to send an email.

GetResponse study shows that the highest click-open rates of the emails are 10 AM – 21%, 1 PM – 22%, and a spike near 6 AM. Hence, we can make a conclusion that the best time to send the sales email is at the beginning and at the end of the working day when people have the most time to check the emails.

According to our own study, the highest email open rates are on Tuesday (8.88%) and Thursday (8.63%). It means that people read the emails mostly in the middle of the week. Previously, research works confirmed that the best day to send emails is on Monday, but as we see the situation has changed recently.

Keeping your target audience in mind is also an important thing before deciding on when to send an email. As we’re dealing with sales email here the preferable time is during the weekdays at the beginning of each working day from 8.30 to 9 AM.

Wrapping things up

It is not an easy thing to get a response to your email. But if you follow these simple advices you’re likely to engage with many prospects easily:

• Do your homework — learn something unique about the person or company you outreach.
• Make a clear and simple structure of your email with an intro, value proposition, and call to action.
• Follow up several times.
• Choose the right day and time to send your email.

Before sending any email try to place yourself on the prospect’s side. And if you’re ready to respond to your own message just click “send” right away.