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

August 3, 2017 By Heather Leave a Comment

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:

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!).

6 Things You Should Never Confuse Between Sales and Marketing Emails

July 18, 2017 By Heather Leave a Comment

Sales emails are not marketing emails. This sounds simple enough, but you wouldn’t believe how many sales emails I see in my inbox that resemble long-winded marketing newsletters. And I’m guessing they’re also in yours

So what’s the difference between the two?

Cold emails, as the name suggests, are sales emails sent without any prior connection or context in the hopes of starting a conversation with a potential customer. By contrast, most marketing emails—often referred to as “drip nurture emails” or “warm emails”—are meant to educate their audience while building awareness and rapport over a longer period of time.

For cold emails to even have the slightest chance of working, you need to understand some key ways they differ from marketing newsletters. Pay attention to these 6 cold-email tenets if you want to succeed with your outbound sales goals:

1. Nobody opts into cold emails.

People generally opt in to receive marketing newsletters, but no one chooses to get cold emails. This simple fact is one of the most important differences between the two.

2. Cold emails arrive without context.

Since you opted into marketing emails, you generally expect to receive information. Whether you attended a webinar or signed up to receive a company’s latest best practices, you already have some context as to who this company is. People sending sales emails don’t have this advantage. In many cases, a cold email might be the first time the recipient is ever hearing about you or your company. Likewise, you haven’t yet earned their trust or attention yet.

3. The best cold emails lead to offline relationships.

While marketing emails sometimes focus on upcoming events and conferences, for the most part, involvement with them remains on the computer screen. In contrast, great cold emails capture their recipients’ attention and build a “virtual rapport” that leads to offline conversations—phone calls, coffee meetings, dinners. In that way, everything about your cold email should take this long-term goal into account.

4. Cold emails don’t brag.

A line like, “Our groundbreaking new software will change your employee’s lives” is acceptable in a marketing email. In a cold email, it will make you look really obnoxious and self-promotional to a stranger. Instead, collect interesting statistics and testimonials about your offering, and let them do the talking for you. When you have a truly compelling pitch, you don’t need to dress it up with bragging.

5. Cold emails are designed for individual recipients.

Your recipient doesn’t want to feel like they’re one of 1000 people getting the same email. Given that, your cold email should include a field for their first name, at the bare minimum. That way, when Josh at ACME sees his name instead of “Dear Sir” at the top of the message, he’ll feel a greater sense of connection to you and be more likely to read on.

6. Simple design speaks volumes in cold email.

Email newsletters tend to include graphics, bright colors, bullet-point lists, lots of links, and unusual fonts. Avoid all of these things when sending cold emails, as they’ll only distract the recipient from the main message—how you can help solve their business problems. Not to mention, they signal to recipients that your email to them is completely mass.

Your parents would probably be pretty skeptical that you wrote them a personal message if you sent them a crazy colorful HTML email asking how their week was. Your prospects are the same, so don’t do that to them either.

How do you keep your sales emails from turning into marketing? Please share your tips and tricks below!

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

June 8, 2017 By Heather 11 Comments

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:

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.
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.
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

March 27, 2017 By Heather 2 Comments

Have 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:

Why Velocify’s Sales Emails Shouldn’t Rely on Bold Jargon

December 20, 2016 By Heather Leave a Comment

The lead generation space has become more crowded than ever. While there isn’t a lot of differentiation between most sales prospecting tools, there seems to be at least a dozen new ones every week.

In this increasingly competitive and commoditized market, companies struggle to stand out in their cold emails. But bold font is not the solution to differentiation.

Our readers nominated Velocify’s cold email for the Hall of Shame because of their curious and excessive use of bold font, but there are actually several deeper issues worth solving first.

Let’s take a look at their email, below:

From the start, the intro is too self-focused and doesn’t relate to the recipient’s needs at all.

The rest of their email is just stuffed with every possible feature, combined with weird bold text and jargon (high velocity outbound prospecting of accounts?!). I can only guess that this is an attempt to show-off.

When I read this email as a recipient, I think:

“How is this any different from the dozens or even hundreds of “sales acceleration” software out there? I don’t feel like this is interesting enough to reply to, since none of the features are all that impressive or compelling. There isn’t any social proof. Plus, all this bolding is making my head spin. Can I hit the delete button NOW?”

Attempting to highlight all their features in their first email just overwhelms the recipient, and decreases the chance of ever getting a response. The better approach would be to share one savory benefit per email, planting intrigue into a prospect’s mind and giving them an incentive to respond.

How to Fix This Bad Cold Email:

Instead of tackling every use case the product provides, the sender should approach it from one specific pain point, and paint a story for the recipient.

For this example, if I was to rewrite this email to target a Director of Sales, and I was going to focus on the benefit of increased sales productivity, I might say something like:

Subject: sales productivity hack for {!Company}

Hi {!First},

Most sales reps spend only 39% of their time each week actively selling.

[Have a descriptive 1-2 sentences on what the other 61% of time is eaten up by.]

[Explain how you’ve helped one of your clients make their sales reps more productive and efficient through automating 80% of their daily manual tasks. It’s important here to quickly describe how you were able to do this; focus on what sets you apart from another sales acceleration solution.]

Would you like to see how this could work for {!Company}?

Thanks,

[Name]

In the rewrite framework, I’ve addressed these issues with Velocify’s cold email:

Hooking the recipient with a statistical nugget that quantifies a pain point

Describing a single pain point Velocify solves for the presumed decision maker, with a possible solution for that problem, in the form of a mini-case study that provides social proof

Eliminating jargon and bold from the email that would overwhelm and turn-off prospects

Bragging about every single feature you have doesn’t work well for cold emails, especially when you’re in a commoditized and crowded space, like lead generation tools. Instead, just focus on telling a story around a specific pain point, and how you can solve this problem for the recipient.

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