The Marketer’s Power Quarter: Improve Sales Emails

This is the seventh in a 12-part series of quick-fix tips to improve your digital marketing results. Catch up on our last tip, and subscribe to our newsletter to get the rest.

When marketing and sales are in sync, the odds of conversion success can only rise. Part of what keeps that collaboration working at peak levels is sales enablement—where marketing like a volleyball setter serves the ball up for sales to spike home with helpful information and tools.

To that end, here’s some email marketing guidance that marketers can provide sales to help them meet their main goal: 75 percent listed closing more leads as their number one priority.

Email first impressions matter

Outreach emails are all about making a connection with a prospect that encourages them toward the next conversation on the way to becoming a full-blown lead. Much like meeting a new person, first impressions matter. And that means the opening lines of sales emails are extremely important.

Seemingly innocuous introductory email lines like “My name is …” or “I work for …” cause recipients’ eyes to glaze over before they tune out and click the trash bin. Like all things in marketing, strategy is essential. And that’s the helping hand you can provide to your sales team to set them up for more success.

3 great opening line strategies for sales emails

Put yourself in the shoes of a prospect. What do you want to see when you open an email? What’s going to matter to you? “Hi, my name is …” is meaningless to them. Hit them with info that connects.

1. Personalize it. By using a company name or the name of a mutual contact in your opening line, you greatly increase the chances a prospect will keep reading because they feel some recognition as soon as they open your message.
2. Add urgency. Timing is everything, especially when it can make or break quotas. Add some of that to the mix with a compelling statistic like, “Companies like Bonfire Marketing saw a 200% increase in their lead-to-close ratio in just 6 months with content marketing.” If it’s personalized to their needs, odds are prospects will be intrigued.  
3. Touch on a pain point. By empathetically addressing a problem you know a prospect has (closing leads, gaining MQLs, etc), you not only show you understand their needs, but you set yourself up as a guide and partner who can help them overcome that pain point to achieve better results.

The average email read time may have increased to 11 seconds, but that’s still a very short amount of time. You need to hook prospects quickly with a great opening. Touch on something that matters to them and watch your success rate grow.

Next week in part eight of The Marketer’s Power Quarter blog, get info on addressing stagnant database information.

Related resources

• The Marketer’s Power Quarter: Email Segmentation Plan
• 6 More Rules For Writing Effective Sales Email
• How To Write A Sales Email People Want To Respond To