Sending out sales emails can be a frustrating process. As marketers, we’ve been emailing potential customers for as long as email has been available to everyone, yet the conversion rates for email marketing campaigns are typically disappointingly low, usually somewhere in the vicinity of 2%. Still, it’s something that you need to do. Let’s look at a few steps you can take to make your sales emails more successful.
- Define your audience
If you want to write sales emails that will engage your audience, you’ll need to identify who they are. It’s reasonable to assume that there are perhaps different segments of your audience, and you can break them down by parameters like demographics, interests, source of the lead, and so on. You can think of these as the buyer personas for your email campaign, and it’s reasonable to write different email content for each segment of your audience. Try to think like they do, and you should see an improved rate of click-through from your emails.
- Use a catchy subject line
Be honest. Do you really want to open an email message that’s obviously trying to sell you something? I know I get an enormous volume of email every day between my business and personal accounts, and I can’t possibly find enough hours in the day to read every email in my inbox. And frankly whether I’m at work or at home, if it’s obvious that you’re just cold emailing me to sell something, your message is at least going to the trash, if not the spam file.
Now I’m not suggesting you deceive people into opening your messages expecting something else. Keep in mind that we like to approach everything according to inbound marketing strategies, and that means giving people some meaningful content. So a message with a subject line inviting the recipient to “learn” or “discover” some valuable information about a topic they’re interested in is much more likely to be opened and read than one that’s trying to push you to buy a product.
- Give them some value
I don’t mean just teasing them in the subject line. Your email should include some worthwhile information, or at least an invitation to click through to get some content of value. Whether it’s a new innovation in their area of interest or a possible to solution to a need, you’ve got to entice them with some worth taking the time to see.
- Be concise
Everyone is busy nowadays, and even the best written emails are somewhat intrusive, at least on the reader's’ time. If the message runs on too long, you’re going to lose their attention, and the email will likely be deleted before they take any action on it.
- Include a CTA
This seems almost too obvious, but it’s easy to forget that if you want your sales emails to convert the recipients into buyers, you’re going to have to ask them to do something. In marketing, this is known as a CTA (Call To Action). The CTA should be clear and compelling, and instill the urge to click. Use simple, action verbs as we mentioned above, enhanced with adjectives like “free” or “complimentary”.
Of course we’ll never achieve the goal we want, which would be a 100% conversion rate. But if you construct well designed emails keeping these factors in mind, you’ll be able to maximize the number of people who follow through and reach your website.
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