The Irony of Growlabs’ Bad Sales Prospecting Emails

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When your leads lists are hundreds, or even thousands, strong, it’s impossible to research and address the specific business challenges of every single contact. After all, nobody has the time or energy for that many people, and the more people you can tailor your message to, the better, right?

Wrong.

When you need to address a large audience, it’s easy to fall into the trap of thinking generic is better, whether it’s with the benefits you mention or the sentences you write. In reality, if you don’t infuse every word and sentence with value for the reader, you risk producing an email that’s so bland that nobody will bother reading it.

Unfortunately, Growlabs, an outsourced lead generation firm, does just that in this cold email:

More than 75% of the email is dedicated to pleasantries, a reference to a previous email I may not have read, and a lengthy, very passively phrased request for a call. It’s completely void of persuasiveness and lacking in specifics regarding what their company can do for me.

If this is what their own sales prospecting emails look like, I can only imagine what they must be sending on behalf of their clients.

Let’s take a look at another email they sent me:

The campaign continues with another blandly written email with a vague subject line (“Fit”) that does nothing to entice or encourage me to get in touch with them. Not to mention they screwed up my name in their mail merge, an obvious sign that the email was mass and that they didn’t spend any time to clean up their contact data. If they can’t write (or send) a good, compelling email, how good will they be at setting appointments with quality leads for my company?

Now let’s get to the last email in their boring campaign, a generic break up message asking me why I haven’t gotten in touch with them. They mention how Salesfolk and Growlabs are a “perfect match,” but don’t give any reasons why.

It’s ironic that some of the worst cold emails I see usually come from outsourced lead generation firms, which are to be trusted with sending emails to generate sales meetings with qualified leads on behalf of their clients. But, given the fact that many of these companies try to substitute volume with sending quality, targeted messages, this really isn’t so surprising.

Here are four ways Growlabs could have improved their generic email templates and probably gotten many more responses:

  1. Open with a line that sparks curiosity.
    Instead of adding value from the start, the email’s sender goes for the standard greeting of people everywhere who aren’t sure what to say: “I hope all is well.” Pleasantries like this take up valuable real estate in your email, but add no value whatsoever. Instead, hook your prospect with a compelling question about their business, or provide them with an interesting statistic about their industry they might not be aware of.
  2. Focus on new info, not what you already said.
    Referring to a previous email or reiterating a point from a past email isn’t an effective way to appeal to any audience. If they read your last email, repeating the same information probably won’t make them respond; if they didn’t read it, the information probably wasn’t compelling to begin with. Each email in the sequence should contain a fresh, new value proposition for your prospect.
  3. Be specific about your accomplishments.
    Generic language like, “We’ve worked with companies like yours…” is a huge red flag that signals the sender knows nothing about me or my business. Instead of shooting in the dark, as the email above does, think about who your audience is and come up with some past clients that actually are similar. Then explain the results you’ve gotten: “We helped sales teams at X, Y, and Z double their number of sales appointments in only three months.”
  4. Make it clear that a follow-up call will offer further value.
    Banish generic language from your call to action. In place of it, explain to your prospect exactly what value they’ll gain from spending some time with you on the phone. This could be a new idea to help them double their conversion rates, or you could reiterate your value proposition in a new and unique way. Once they accept, having that context can help helps give you a place to start the conversation.

Have bad cold emails in your inbox? Send them to us!

Help us fight the thoughtless spammers, one crappy cold email at a time by sending us the worst cold emails you’ve ever received. We’ll put them up anonymously on the “Hall of Shame,” and shoot you an email when they go live.

Please send all submissions to “[email protected]” (And feel free to suggest what you want to nominate the bad cold email for!)

Your Sales Pipeline Could Be Suffering If You’re Making Any of These 12 Email Mistakes

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Cold email campaigns are one of the most effective ways a company can begin sales conversations that drive new revenue.

That said, too many businesses fail to recognize that sending cold emails is a bit like playing with fire—it’s easy to hit “send” too soon and get burned. Send out an error-ridden or confusing message and put your reputation at risk. Email an unqualified lead and find yourself caught in a spam filter. Blast a campaign from the wrong email platform and watch your IP address get blacklisted.

Every week, businesses large and small burn sales leads on easily avoidable mistakes. Take note of these common outbound-email errors if you don’t want to fall victim to them:

don't sabotage your sales efforts

1. Sending a bulk email campaign without testing

Too often, companies try to scale their cold email campaigns without first understanding what works and what doesn’t. Outbound-email campaigns should be rolled out in incrementally larger batches. Why risk burning an entire list of potential leads with emails that won’t convert? Instead of blasting on a large scale, test your emails on a smaller sample at each stage to see what works. Refine, revise, and test again.

2. Emailing above the decision maker

There are a number of so-called sales gurus who will tell you to always go straight to the top and get referred down to the decision maker. But why waste time on unnecessary steps?

Sure, you probably don’t want to speak with every entry-level rep at the company, but it’s also a waste of time to ask the CEO about, say, who you should pitch your job-application-tracking software to. Rather than aiming for the biggest title, reach out to the most relevant decision maker—the head of human resources, in this case. This is especially important when selling into larger organizations.

3. Chasing the wrong leads

Just because someone responds to your emails or takes your meeting doesn’t mean you’re making progress toward closing a deal. Talking to the wrong people—like gatekeepers or buyers without budget—is a waste of everyone’s time. By better qualifying your leads up front, you can make sure you’re speaking with someone who has the interest and the decision-making power to purchase your product or service.

4. Embracing automation too soon

There are tons of amazing sales tools out there, but even they won’t make you or your company bulletproof against basic human error. In fact, where mistakes exist in your campaign strategy (such as missing campaign details or product-market mismatches), an efficient tool will only make you fail faster.

Don’t just subscribe to expensive platforms that try to automate everything. Instead, make sure you’re selling your product to people who are open to buying it. Build your campaigns around real sales conversations and apply the knowledge you’ve gained from past closed deals.

5. Sending emails one by one

Having your sales team manually send emails one at a time is a drain on resources, and there’s no reason that interesting, personalized emails can’t be produced on a larger scale. Where you’ve had success with one-off emails, try to “reverse-engineer” them into email templates you can send out in bulk. Not only will you save on human resources, you’ll also have a more concrete sense of how your individual email campaigns are performing.

6. Sending lazy or untargeted emails

Don’t use impersonal, canned email templates. What may have worked five years ago will now be easily recognized as overplayed and underwhelming. If you want to get responses, you have to write for a specific buyer persona, targeting your messaging and personalizing your cold emails with custom inserts.

7. Forgetting to proofread your emails

Error-ridden sales emails will instantly kill your credibility. Before sending, reread your emails aloud to check for obvious spelling and grammar mistakes. Never send a mail merge without first test-emailing it to yourself to make sure all merge tags work correctly and that the formatting doesn’t look weird.

8. Failing to pre-screen your data

Nothing scares a potential customer away faster than referring to their company—or them—by the wrong name. A company’s legal name may be listed as “Eastman Kodak Company,” for instance, but if you called them that in an email—instead of simply “Kodak”—you’d give your message away as a poorly-screened mail merge.

Don’t ruin the personalized impact of your carefully worded email. Check and clean the contact info on your mailing list before sending out a campaign, especially if the list is built with software or purchased outright.

9. Overlooking gaps in your data

There’s nothing better than a highly personalized email template, but you need to be sure that you actually have the personal information your email includes.

Let’s say you write a mail merge template that references a company’s client with {!Client}, but you don’t have that information accounted for in your list database. The minute you send, your email template will be revealed. Sure, it’s not the most damaging error, but it definitely defeats the time you spent personalizing your campaign. And you’ll look, not to mention feel, foolish.

To avoid this, have a backup at hand for any customized fields. For the example above, you could include code that would substitute the words “your client” wherever there’s data missing in your list database. That way, you can keep personalizing without putting your campaigns at risk.

10. Sending boring follow-up emails

Sending a series of bland and boring emails that repeat the same things over and over does not qualify as following up. In fact, it’s a surefire way to get your emails marked as spam. If you want to send follow-up emails that get results, make sure you add unique value and new information to each email you address.

11. Giving up too soon

Thirty-three percent of all responses come from emails five through eight in an eight-touch campaign. In other words, don’t give up if the first one doesn’t get a response. Unless you’ve already had contact with your prospective customer, you should plan on sending the full eight emails. Persistence pays off when you have the courage to keep at it.

12. Hitting a dead end… and still going

Yes, persistence pays off, but you don’t want to become an obnoxious e-stalker. If your target hasn’t responded after eight emails, or if they ask you not to contact them again, it’s okay to throw in the towel. Shift your attention to new prospects, and don’t forget to apply what you’ve learned when you next reach out.

Do you have other questions about best practices for cold emails or outbound sales? If so, just write them in the comments below, and I’ll try to answer the best I can (if they’re complicated, I might just turn them into another article!).

Are You Making These Mistakes With Your Follow-up Emails?

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bad follow-up emails

Don’t you just hate it when a salesperson decides to spam your inbox with useless, boring, and repetitive emails because they just want to “follow-up” with you or “bubble their message to the top of your inbox”?

I’m in sales, so I get that salespeople are told they need to be persistent and relentlessly follow-up with leads if they want to close the deal–and they do–but that doesn’t give you a right to send 7 redundant follow-up emails either.

It’s true that if you don’t send 8 emails, you’re probably missing out on 33-60% of responses (or more) from qualified leads. After helping more than 480 B2B companies optimize their sales emails and running our own experiments with more than 360,000 emails, we’ve concluded that about 1/3 of your total positive responses in a campaign will come from touches #5-8.

But those numbers are only true if you make the time to craft thoughtful and targeted emails for EVERY step of your email campaign. Otherwise, you won’t get any results, and you might even develop a spam complaint problem that tanks own email deliverability, sabotaging yourself from even reaching the prospect’s inbox.

Avoid these seven mistakes if you want to get responses to your follow-up emails instead of being marked as spam:

1. Don’t assume they saw your last email.

Sometimes you might get lucky and have a prospect engaged, reading your every email. But a lot of times, a prospective customer might have never read anything you sent them until the 4th, 5th, or even 6th email. And even if they did read what you sent them before, you can’t assume that they remember what you said, or that they cared for anything your email said. After all, if they had been compelled by those previous emails you sent they probably would have responded by now.

2. Perseverance isn’t always respected or appreciated.

There are a lot of automated email tools out there that make it really easy to send “bump emails,” you know–those “RE: ” threads that contain a chain of all the emails you sent in your attempt to reach the prospect. But contrary to popular belief and claims, sending bump sales emails aren’t always the best way to get a positive response.

In fact, sometimes reminding prospects about all the previous emails you sent them can sabotage your current efforts.

Consider these 3 scenarios:

  1. The prospect didn’t open your message, and never read the body. This means they probably weren’t interested in your subject line. Your subject line might suck, but if it is at all related to the benefit/pain point you were focusing on, chances are they aren’t interested in that.
  2. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they weren’t interested. In that case, you probably don’t want to be reminding them about that concept that they already decided wasn’t worthwhile discussing with you.
  3. The prospect opened your message, but didn’t respond because they were busy. If they were really interested in what you had to say, but didn’t make an effort to respond, you still haven’t won yet. You might be getting closer to their needs and pain points, but chances are that timing is wrong or what you’re talking about doesn’t resonate strongly enough with them, since they didn’t respond.

There are plenty of tools to help you know if someone opened your message or not, but you still don’t know why they didn’t respond.  That said, if someone did actually read your message AND found it interesting, they’ll probably remember it. And if they don’t, it’s not actually that interesting.

That’s why in most cases it’s better to not remind people that you’ve already sent them 6 emails with a giant thread of unsolicited “RE: RE: RE: RE: RE: RE”‘s that never had a response. In most cases, those “RE”s are a red flag that you’re probably an annoying salesperson who’s spamming them, and they’re much more likely to hit delete or even mark you as spam.

There are some cases where either mentioning another email thread or using a “RE” bump email might make sense, though. For example, if one of your emails is “building upon a previous one,” meaning that you’re adding new information that is referencing a previous email you sent, then it makes sense to reference that email or even include a copy of that email thread below your new message for context.

3. Don’t be redundant.

Many follow-up emails don’t work because they’re damn boring and repetitive. Just like your first sales email must be compelling, every follow-up needs an interesting new angle that gives the prospect a reason to keep reading and respond.

I realize that crafting great sales emails is hard. And crafting 8 of them is even harder. But rather than seeing this as a giant chore, see those 8 messages as different opportunities to test a different message that might excite your prospect into responding.

Even if you’re sending targeted messages to a specific and well-defined “buyer persona,” it doesn’t mean that everyone in that audience thinks and feels exactly the same. Not all Chief Marketing Officers are going to have the same taste, and everyone will have slightly different problems and goals at the time they get your message. That’s why you need to try different things in your email campaign, and these 8 emails are your opportunity to do so.

The more you differ your messages (while still keeping them relevant to your audience), the more total opens and responses you’ll get from your campaign.

4. Don’t write a novel.

Avoid the temptation to ramble in any email you send, especially follow-up emails. The most polite thing you can do in an email is cut out all the unnecessary pleasantries and filler that will bore your prospect to death. The shorter your emails are, the better.

As a general rule, keep your follow-up emails to 3-5 short sentences or less. Just make sure you’re getting your point across clearly in those sentences so that the prospect isn’t confused.

5. Don’t forget about the Call to Action.

Whenever you write an email, you should have a particular goal in mind. Maybe you want to schedule a phone call with the prospect, or you want them to watch the video you’ve linked to. But whatever the desired action is, you need to explicitly ask the recipient to perform it in your Call to Action (CTA).

Follow-up emails are no different: you need to have a clear ask and provide a good reason for the prospect to do what you’re asking.

6. Don’t just follow-up once.

How many emails are you sending before you give up on a prospect or an account? It’s good if you’re following up at all, but just sending 3 follow-up emails after your first isn’t enough. Persistence pays off: remember that about one-third of your responses might come from emails #5-8, so if you quit before then you’re losing all those potential customers.

And sometimes, when you’re testing new things, email #6 might actually get the most messages in the campaign. If this happens, you should probably consider moving it much earlier in the campaign, but you’ll never know which email works best until you try, and each email in your sequence is another chance to get even more responses.

7. Don’t forget to say Goodbye.

You shouldn’t be sending infinite follow-up emails. At some point there’s diminishing marginal returns, meaning that if you keep following up you will probably not get much benefit for your time spent. Likewise, sending people TOO MANY emails will actually increase your chances of getting marked as spam, since you might be driving them insane. Based on our own research and experiments, we recommend ending your campaign at 8 emails, but feel free to test that for yourself to see what works best for your buyers.

When you do finally end things, you need to make sure you let the buyer know it’s “goodbye.” As corny as this sounds, letting them know that this is your last outreach attempt can often have an interesting rescue effect. Whether it’s a sense of fear of loss or some other human psychological reaction, good breakup emails will always capture a few people who were silently reading your emails without responding.

But instead of sending that corny “little green aliens” or “alligator” breakup email, try writing a thoughtful message that actually adds value to the recipient. There are lots of ways you can do this, but the more you can end on a positive and helpful note, the more likely they are to either have a change of heart and respond to you, or reach out later when the timing is better.

I can’t tell you how many times I’ve gotten emails from people I prospected years ago, who finally leave their companies and go to a new role or start companies of their own, telling me things like:

“Heather, I got your email [x time ago], and I really wanted to work together then, but it just wasn’t going to work because [reason x]. But I’d love your help now…”

Follow these 7 pieces of advice for follow-up emails (lame pun intended!), and I promise you’ll get more positive responses to your sales emails.

If you liked this article, leave a comment or ask a question. And if you want to hear even more cold email tips, subscribe to our newsletter.

Sales Lessons From the FBI’s Former Lead Hostage Negotiator, Chris Voss

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sales negotiation tacticsHave you ever wondered why you didn’t get a response to a sales email or how to avoid saying things that could blow major deals?

Award-winning author and former FBI lead international kidnapping negotiator, Chris Voss, has a rare talent for negotiations. He has worked on cases such as the “Blind Sheikh Case,” the TWA Flight 800 catastrophe, and many other hostage negotiations. During Chris’s 24 year tenure in the Bureau, he was trained in the art of negotiation by not only the FBI but Scotland Yard and Harvard Law School. This was the inspiration for his book, “Never Split the Difference.” (I really recommend reading it if you haven’t yet, it is one of the best business books I have read in the last 5 years.)

Chris has been testing and perfecting his negotiation techniques for years, and currently teaches business negotiation at the University of Southern California’s Marshall School of Business and Georgetown University’s McDonough School of Business. He has also lectured at Harvard, the Kellogg School of Management, and many other international institutions.

So even if you’re not negotiating with war criminals and drug lords, you can still use his negotiation tips in your work and everyday life in order to win more deals.

At the end of 2016 I began to plan my 2017 reading list. Several of my friends, both of which are CEOs at fast-growing tech companies told me that Chris’ book was one of their favorite reads of the year. I downloaded the book on my Kindle, and started reading it on my way back to the Bay Area from Kuala Lumpur, and in the first few pages, I was hooked. As a writer, I’m very skeptical and critical of other people’s writing. I have a hard time “reading things for fun” because I’m always thinking about what the writer’s intention was, and what their angle is. But when I was reading Never Split the Difference, I just got sucked in: it was gripping and entertaining, but every page was packed full of actionable advice and useful examples.

By the time I landed in San Francisco I decided there was only one thing to do: cold email Chris Voss and ask him to do a webinar interview. The following recording is from our recent webinar.

In this recorded webinar, you’ll learn:
  • Why salespeople should actually be afraid of YES
  • What many of the “classic negotiation tactics” you hear about are missing
  • Simple tips to become a better negotiator
  • How to use tested negotiation tactics to quickly develop rapport and trust with even the most skeptical buyers
  • Strategies for proactively confronting and overcoming even the toughest objections
  • And more

Watch it for yourself now:

Be a goat, not a sheep!

We always strive to create captivating copy that is unique, actionable and adds value to prospects’ lives.

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