Tactics for Effective Emailing
If you've read
my blogs over the last few months you might have noticed that I am a firm believer that email is without a doubt your most effective weapon in your teleprospecting arsenal. The phone ultimately closes the deal, but you most likely will not have the conversation if email is not an integral part of your call plan.
As important as email might be, it goes well beyond just sending out blind mass email after blind mass email hoping to get a few bites. Don't get me wrong, your timing could be spot on and you may happen to be lucky enough to find someone who might be actively evaluating. The unfortunate side effect is that you could turn off other prospects who could be interested down the road, but are tired of getting inundated with emails which obviously have not been customized to address their specific pain. Point is, since most of us utilize email as a primary part of the prospecting process we need to be more strategic with it's use. Now I'm not saying every prospect should expect a personalized email that took you 20 minutes to write...but there are techniques you can use for it to at least appear as if it is addressing them directly.
To start with, keep the subject line simple and to the point. I generally keep it to a maximum of 10 words. This is what is going to catch your prospects attention, so don't over-complicate your intro. If you have the capacity to customize the subject line- do it! Example "Hi {First Name}, Following-up regarding your wireless initiatives".
Other subject lines that seems to get us a solid response rate is to insert the date you last corresponded with the prospect. For example, "Hi {First Name}, Following up on our conversation on January 15th"
Another tactic that seems to work for us is to send your emails based on your prospect's "lead status". If you've spent a significant amount of time calling into a list, eventually your prospects will land in a particular bucket- from interested, decision maker identified, not interested, and so on. Take the time to draw up an email specific to each of these statuses. So as an example, with your "not interested bucket" let's assume you've taken the time to capture every competitor you've run into during the course of a particular campaign, and you wanted to make the no interest folks aware of your recent ascension to "leader" in the Magic Quadrant.
"Hi {First Name}, Last time we spoke you had mentioned you were working with {Insert Competitor} and we wanted to let you we are now considered the leader in Gartner's Magic Quadrant..."
Keep in mind, it is not necessary to draw up an email novella. Staying with the theme of your subject-line, try to keep your email to 60 second read. A big reason for this is that prospects may be more likely to check email on their mobile device first, so you want to make sure it's an easy read and will display correctly. Test it out on your smart phone if necessary. Also, with any introductory email, try to keep it as simple as possible and don't assume the person you are emailing would be involved in the decision making process. Something with a subject line stating- "Referral Help"- and the body of the email saying something as straight-forward as, "I hate to bother you, but could you point me to the person responsible for your lead generation," has gotten us a much higher response rate.
How do you make sure that your emails, or your BDR's emails get read?