Donato Diorio
Gone are the days of effectively reaching your audience with mass emails. Today, sales emails must be targeted, relevant, and break through the noise and hurdles of our inboxes. To do so, I’m breaking email down into five stages, which cover data, spam, content, relevancy and results. To truly be effective at sending sales emails, you must overcome all of these stages.
Stage 1: Received
The truth is, an email will not be received unless you have the right data. Therefore, the first stage is about having good data and using great applications to find the missing data. This will ensure the right email gets to the right contact, each and every time.
Stage 2: Viewed
If your email went to the correct address, did it hit their inbox or their spam? Check your emails against an email spam system before you send them. New email spam systems pop up all the time, so go online and search for tools that can check to see if the email that you’re sending looks like spam.
If it does look like spam, and it gets scored like spam, it’s never going to be seen. Email spam systems break your email down, telling you what’s wrong, and allowing you to fix it.
Stage 3: Read
Spam emails can also be uncovered by simply reading them. It’s fairly obvious when an email looks like spam. During a recent webinar with Cirrus Insight, I did a spam test, where I showed four emails and asked the audience for the one that wasn’t spam. More than 50% found the non-spam email. As humans, we’re able to determine whether an email is spam by the visual structure of the email.
Before you send an email, have someone in the office take a look at it. Ask them if it looks like spam. We’ve been trained for many years on what spam is and is not. Simply exercise that capability.
Stage 4: Enticed
Now we shift our focus to the content of the email. It’s reaching your audience, but is it interesting? Should they care? Are you targeting the right demographic? Have you segmented the email? Does it assert influence? The message, audience, and content itself needs to grab attention.
Stage 5: Impacted
Impact is not about gut feelings. Impact is about metrics. Measure the impact of your email by the long-term success of the customer that comes from your emails. I focus on the real numbers, such as opportunities and pipeline, as a result of email. These numbers trump actions, such as open rate and clicks. An impactful email is one that creates a customer.
Learn how to build great lists for your sales emails with the free ebook below.
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