Jason Hubbard
Email remains the number one communication method. 87 billion emails are drafted daily around the world. Ninety-four percent of Americans regularly use email. More than half of us check our inboxes first thing in the morning. Email is one of the most effective sales communication strategies. Even more effective are personal emails.
When possible, send emails that are either personal, or if automated, appear to be personally from you. Get away from the templated HTML emails and send plain text emails where you’re actually reaching one person.
Here are some helpful tips around personalized emails.
1. The more personalization, the better
Historically, most of the emails sent, particularly around first outreach, were templated HTML company emails. They’re the emails that we get all of the time, and we’ve all become really good at just deleting them. We generally don’t pay any attention to them. The more you can personalize the email, the more you’ll show that you actually did your research. You know the recipient, their company, common traits, etc. The more personalized, the more likely they’ll engage back.
Our findings have shown a three to four times increase in response from personal emails. Even if you’re loading a Salesforce template where 90 percent of what you’re sending has already been templated, you can spend a minute customizing the email. It makes a huge difference in your response rate.
2. Add [brackets] to your subject lines
We’ve seen a 50 percent increase in cold email outreaches from effective email headlines using brackets. Brackets are effective because they convey the topic of the email in one word. You don’t have to read the entire subject line and then guess whether it is about a webinar or an ebook. With [Webinar] they know this is an email about a webinar. Then, they can determine whether the subject of the webinar is of interest.
You can apply bracketing to emails for meetings, calls, follow ups, etc. Bracketing gives recipients a quick indication of what the email is about. It is extremely effective in open rates, and since they’re more aware of what they’re opening, they’re going to be more engaged.
3. Convey a sense of urgency
Convey urgency in your emails. Appeal to people’s innate fear of missing out. “Don’t miss,” “last chance,” “happening today,” etc. are extremely effective at getting recipients to open and engage in those initial outreach emails.
4. Try an element of surprise
In an effort to keep our subject lines shorter, we removed our name from email subject lines. In doing so, we had a 30 percent increase in open rates. Not only was the shorter length effective, but by not being clear about whom the email was from, more people were willing to open it up to find out.
5. Don’t forget to test
The biggest email tip of all is to always test. You never know what’s going to be particularly engaging for your audience.
Learn how to build targeted list for your personalized emails with this free ebook.
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