Sending emails that engage your inbound prospects
At insdieselling.org our speciality is the inbound process. An essential in the inbound process is making sure that account executives engage prospects in conversations.
Most modern day products are designed to be ‘self-service’ but are really not!
The role of a sales individual is vital when it comes to complex products or products that might easy to use but are powerful under the hood.
Before we start talking about how we tailored our emails, there are a few things that will help you achieve greater success with your emails. Major factors include timing, relevance and persistence.
To talk a little bit more about persistence. If you are expecting your prospects to reply to the first email you send them, your strategy is flawed not the emails.
We have already spoken about how you can get greater responses to your cold emails, some of the concepts will continue to be relevant here also.
Research, research, research
We cannot stress how important it is to know your prospect.
We recommend investing in a lead enrichment tool to make life simple for your sales team. Some of the important things that your research should tell you is designation of your prospect, company size, company funding and any recent notable events that centre around the organisation/prospect.
Pre-email research is a one-time exercise and will make life simpler for future interactions.
Make your subject catchy and relevant
A great experiment we got to run on numerous occasions was making our emails relevant to the industry type of the prospect. For example, if our prospect was selling coffee our subject would be something like: ‘The perfect brew for you’.
Another example, we sent a nautical navigation company an email like ‘Navigate your way with <company name>’.
The idea is, to make your subject line catchy without venturing into the cheesy.
Did we overdo it on occasions? Absolutely! But the only way to figure out what was working and what was not, was to try it!
Similarly if your pre-email research reveals a recent award or funding, you need to incorporate that in your email campaign.
Now that you have their attention…
Introduce yourself and then get to the purpose of sending them the email.
Don’t waste your prospect’s attention span in telling them more about the organisation you work for. Since this is an inbound sales email, they already have context and you don’t need to spend time on telling them how awesome your product is.
Depending on what you are looking to get out of your initial email, you should be able to explain to them the purpose of the email and why your call to action is good for them.
Here is an example,
Hi Prospect,
My name is InsideSelling and I am your account manager at XYZ.
I was hoping you could set aside 15 minutes for a quick conversation on how XYZ can help ABC increase productivity without having to compromise on data security in anyway.
We are trusted by organisations like <name dropping> and I am sure XYZ can add value to ABC too!
Are you open for a call tomorrow?
Regards,
One email will not get you a response (In most cases)
If you think that one solid email is all you need, then your strategy is seriously flawed.
At InsideSelling.org we are huge fans of picking up the phone and calling. However, when phone numbers are not available, your next best bet is emails (or social).
Then why stop at one or 2 emails?
As a sales individual you need to decide on your outreach strategy and plan on multiple follow-ups. We are assuming that you already have a separate nurture campaign for success running in parallel to your emails, but your emails too need to be persistent.
There are plenty of email tools that allow you to design a custom email drip campaign, but we are not fans of this approach. Emails should be customised to match your prospect’s behaviour. For example, if your prospect attempted to evaluate a feature in your solution and failed, you should attempt to reach out to him with assistance on that feature.
We appreciate that in some cases this approach might not work, due to massive inbound lead volume but in most cases this approach should help you.
Don’t rely on emails alone
A successful outreach strategy should rely on social selling too. Emails and phone alone will work in most cases but in complex and larger deals you need to invest in a social selling approach too.
The same holds true for calling prospects. Just because you don’t have a phone number does not mean that you cannot find one or put in some hard-work to get a hold of your prospect.
We hope the above helps you get more responses from your prospects. If you have any feedback just send us a tweet to @insideselling