A study by the UK-based Data and Marketing Association in 2019 claims that email marketing can earn you back between $30 and $50 for every dollar spent. Knowing how to tailor a sales email effectively is an integral part of ensuring a profitable ROI. This short read is aimed to show how you can use emails for sales effectively.
Email Marketing Best Practices
Every year, the rate of email users is growing significantly. According to reports, there will be more than 4.2 billion users by the year 2022. This also shows that an email marketing strategy is an effective tool when it comes to business communication. So, let’s begin by dissecting the components of a perfect sales email and show you how to write a sales email.
The Title
- Your subject line should look like it is addressed to a person, not a generic mass mailer. For example, an email titled "An opportunity to work together" or "Quick request to connect" is more likely to get opened than "Click Here to Grow Your Business!".
- Capitalize only the first alphabet of the title unless it involves more proper nouns. Anything that looks like a cold sale email is likely to immediately end up in the "Promotions" or "Spam" folders.
- Avoid titles between the length of 60-70 characters. A recent study showed that email titles below 49 words had the best open rate, with subject lines with ten or fewer characters having a success rate of 58%.
The Salutation
- Keep it personal. "Hi, Jake" will give you a better response than “To whomever, it may concern'' or "Dear Sir/Madam.”
- However, it is equally important to know your customer profile.
The Opening
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Your opening should quickly establish the purpose of the email. It helps you start building credibility and ease into your sales pitch.
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Keep it short and relevant. For example, "We at [brand name] have noticed the great work your team has been doing and we feel confident our AI tool can greatly help you increase visibility."
The Sales Pitch
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Be clear about the purpose of your sales pitch, be it to respond to a call to action, to subscribe to a free trial, or to agree to a product demo.
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Be brief about what problems you can solve for the customer, and then elaborate on your product's USPs.
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Use bullet points. Avoid long, boring emails.
The Closing
- Once again, keep it brief, no more than a couple of sentences.
- Make sure the closing includes a solid Call to Action (CTA).
Pro Tips
- Use images to make your emails more engaging.
- Increase your reach and success rate by optimizing your emails to be mobile-friendly. Most decision-makers lead busy lives, and accessing emails on the go is essential to them. Almost 50% of all emails are first opened on phones.
The Importance of Call to Action (CTA)
The importance of any sales email is to engage with prospective customers and guide them through the sales funnel. In that scheme of things, the CTA is what decides whether your pitch has been successful or if you're ending up in the "Spam" section of the customer's inbox. This means the rest of your email should be structured around the CTA instead of just leading to it.
A call to action could be a link to buy a product, sign up for a subscription, answer some questions or even schedule a live demo.
Building an Email List
Building an engaged email list is critical to ensuring a high ROI. Here are some tips on creating a list of people interested and willing to receive business emails from you.
- Have a signup form on your website.
- Drive sign-ups through social media campaigns.
- Increase your email list by running contests, giveaways, and free trial promos on social media.
Segmenting Subscribers
The success rate of your email sales campaign will increase vastly if you segment your subscribers according to their needs and interests. For some businesses, such as retailers, segmenting based on demographics (sex, orientation, age, etc.) helps them target customers better. Segmenting customers according to where they stand in the sales funnel can also help brands create content for their sales email automation campaigns.
A study conducted by MailChimp showed that segmented email campaigns achieved 100.95% more clicks, 14.31% more opens, and 10.64% more unique opens than unsegmented email campaigns.
Timing It Right
There is no hard and fast rule as to how often a sales email should be sent out. That depends on industry type, what the product is, fresh content, and many other variables. Bi-weekly and weekly emails have a better success rate. However, avoid sending out daily emails unless your product and the content supporting it warrants it as a ground rule.
Tracking Success
Here are a few metrics that you need to collect to judge the success of your email campaign.
Opens & Clicks
The number of people that opened your email and the number of responses to your CTA is always a good measure to use to track campaign success
Purchase Intent
If your CTA is a Shop Now link, the number of sales conversions via that link is also a great measure of the campaign's success.
Online Traffic
Ideally, a successful email sales campaign should show you a marked increase in the foot traffic your web store or website is experiencing.
Automation & Innovation
While sending a small number of emails may be possible to handle manually, as a brand's customer base grows, it becomes crucial to take sending a large number of emails out simultaneously.
Many service providers, such as Mailchimp and Sendinblue, offer their clients tools to automate the process of sending out these emails and handle campaigns more efficiently, including performance indicators, testing, email templates, and customizations. The use of these services is a surefire way for brands to extend their reach and increase the success rate of their email sales campaigns.