Want Your Sales Emails Opened? Don’t Make These Subject Line Mistakes

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Nothing ruins a sales email faster than a bad subject line.

In fact, 33 percent of recipients open an email based on the subject line. That sounds like a pretty solid number—until you consider that 69 percent of email recipients report messages as spam just from reading the subject line.

The fact is, we’re inundated with poor subject lines, and we no longer have the patience to investigate whether something is spam, a marketing promotion, or a legit sales email. If it doesn’t look like it came from a human, it goes straight to the trash. So if you wrote a persuasive sales email to a prospect but have yet to receive an answer, chances are, you sent it with a lackluster subject line.

Want to avoid that situation in the future? Check out these five basic tips for writing the kinds of subject lines that get sales emails opened.

1. Keep them short.

From a purely practical standpoint, a long subject line will get cut off in most inboxes. On a mobile phone—where we increasingly view our mail—it’s even worse.

If a subject line makes no sense because it’s chopped mid-sentence, there’s small chance the potential customer will click through and read the actual message. Brevity matters for all aspects of a sales email, but it’s most important to remember for subject lines.

Practice writing out what you have to say in as few words as possible. About 40 characters is a good limit to set. I also recommend coming up with a few different ones, and A/B testing them if you’re able.  

2. Sound (and look) human.

Your subject line is one of the key ways to separate your sales emails from spam that was written by space droids. While part of this has to do with the words you choose, formatting plays a role, too.

At SalesFolk, we’ve tested more than 100,000 emails and found that lowercase subject lines get better open rates. It makes sense, since most of us write in lowercase in an increasing amount of the communication tools we use.

Excessive punctuation, all-caps lines, and emoticons should never be part of your subject line, as they’re an easy way to trigger spam filters. Remember, the easiest way to make your subject line sound like an adult human wrote it is to keep it as natural as possible.

3. Use custom fields wisely.

On the note of keeping things natural, custom fields can be great for adding personal touches to your email, but it’s very easy to ruin a subject line by overusing them.

Using someone’s name in conversation can help build rapport. But email isn’t a back-and-forth conversation. If you use someone’s name or company more than once in an email, you’ll just wind up looking like a marketing newsletter. Once again, you’ll find yourself with low open rates and radio silence from potential customers.

4. Don’t use deception—ever.

It’s tempting to think you can fool someone into thinking they met you and just can’t remember the conversation. Many of us have done this by using “re” in our subject lines, thinking that label will at least get the recipient to click through and, in the process, up your open rates.

Resist the urge to do this. It almost never works, and it’s yet-another way to trip the spam filters. Besides, if a potential customer calls you out on the lie, you’ll feel ridiculous and also probably wind up with a damaged sales relationship.

5. Use audience-appropriate language.

The best sales professionals know that doing upfront research on their potential customers is vital to the process of any email campaign. That includes understanding the type of language these people will relate to—and what will offend them.

Your subject lines should utilize all this good research so that their words and tone are appropriate. For example, if you’re emailing a Vice President at Chase Bank, a subject line like “make email writing easy AF” will get the whole message dumped in the trash. On the flipside, you don’t want to sound too stiff, or your email won’t stand out from everyone else’s.

If you’re new to sales, or just looking to improve your email skills, this may seem like a ton of rules for one line of a message. Rest assured, once you’ve incorporated these elements into a few campaigns, crafting an enticing subject line will get easier and faster. Commit to learning it now and you’ll save time later on—when all your competitors are still scrambling.

For more on writing the perfect subject line and other sales email tips, check out our Cold Email Crash Course. There are free previews of lessons, along with actionable worksheets to help you create your own optimized cold email campaigns.

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!).

Why Your Marketo Emails Don’t Get Opens or Responses

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Does your team send cold emails or sales prospecting emails through Marketo or other marketing automation software?

Do you know that this simple decision could be decreasing your open rates and response rates by 5x or more?

I’ve already written 2 different blog posts about how to avoid going to spam and why mail merges have better email deliverability than Marketo. However, based on recent conversations I’ve had, I still don’t think everyone completely understands the different nuances and psychologies behind cold emails (outbound emails) versus drip marketing emails (inbound emails).

While marketing emails usually aim to educate, inform, and persuade a large audience, sales emails are the start of a conversation.

The Technical Differences Between Marketo & Mail Merges

Although it somewhat depends on how your recipients’ mail servers are configured, about 97% of the time Marketo emails will say “sent via Marketo.” 

The same is true for MailChimp and others.

To savvy prospects this phrase is a red flag that the email they just received was mass and not personal.

Why does this matter?

It’s all about managing expectations with your audience.

When people sign up for your newsletter or a webinar, they expect to receive mass drip marketing emails from you. Unless they’re living in the 70’s, they probably don’t believe that your HTML-ridden Marketo newsletter full of bright and shiny images is being sent to them, and only them alone.

human cold email robot

Why Cold Emails Have Different Expectations Than Marketing Emails

Why on earth would you ever take the time from your busy day to respond to an impersonal email that looks like it was written by a robot and sent to one million other people? 

In order for outbound emails (AKA “cold emails”) to be effective, they should look like “one-off emails,” even if they’re actually mass.

Yes, many cynical people who work in sales and marketing regularly assume that most of the cold emails they receive are mass, but you usually can’t know for sure.

The best and most effective cold emails are the ones that you don’t even think twice about. These are the emails that put a smile on your face, make you laugh, and make you excited to respond. These are the emails that feel like the beginning of a new conversation with an unexpected stranger who might actually add value to you or your business in one way or another.

Even if you’re sending cold emails via mass templates to hundreds of thousands of people, your recipients should feel like they’re getting a personalized one-on-one email if you’re doing it right. You can do this with personalization by using various custom inserts like “first name,” “company,” “location,” “competitor,” “industry,” etc. Writing in a personal and conversational tone to a highly targeted audience also helps. (You can use this guide to learn tricks and strategies to personalize your cold emails at scale.)

The Goals of Sales And Marketing Emails Are Just Not The Same

Whenever Salesforce or Zenpayroll send me a mass marketing email with HTML through their marketing automation software, I usually don’t respond.

And I’m assuming you probably don’t either. …Hopefully…

Generally speaking, no marketer expects or wants their readers to respond to their newsletters or other mass drip emails either. Occasionally there might be some kind of weird call to action to respond and give your opinion or share your thoughts, especially if it’s from my favorite “Kopywriter,” Neville, or some small startup with an inbound email list.

Instead, the goal of most “marketing emails” is to have the readers click on some kind of link, and that’s what their call to action is centered around.

However, in the case of cold emails that are sent for business development, sales development, or other relationship-building purposes, you almost always want the recipient to respond.

There are some cases in which outbound email is used by self-service SaaS companies that just want their prospects to click a link and enter their sales and marketing funnel to be nurtured. Usually, this is because their price point is too low to have sales reps talking to every individual prospect. However, for products and services with higher price points, especially those that are higher than $10,000 a year, the goal is always to solicit a response that will ideally lead to an appointment with a sales person.

So the question becomes, Why would anyone want to take the time to respond to an email that seems like it’s been sent to thousands of other people?!

Everyone wants to feel special, and high-level executives want to spend their time engaging with intelligent people who seem like they are capable of adding value to them.

A C-suite executive at a Fortune 1000 might click a link on a marketing email to sign up for an interesting webinar or read a thought-provoking white paper, but it’s highly unlikely that they will ever respond to a mass email that’s covered in HTML.

Likewise, Marketo and other marketing automation tools often by default only send an HTML version of their emails. Not having a plain text version of an email is a red flag to many mail servers, and will also decrease your deliverability. (You can read this previous post for more information on how email deliverability and reputation differs between Marketo and mail merges.)

why 98% of cold emails suck

A Final Word About Outbound Email Prospecting: Don’t Be Lazy, Or Just Don’t Send Emails!

Organizations that rely on sending mass emails through Marketo and other email marketing tools do so because they don’t want to invest the time or effort into a more thoughtful and targeted approach. They don’t want to risk getting their own mail server IPs blacklisted or risk complaints from google. However, that fear is only a reality if you haven’t done your homework and have zero understanding of who you’re targeting, and what messages do and don’t work.

Companies that have this “volume-driven” mentality are short-sighted and will run into an increasing number of problems at they attempt to scale. 

All you have to do is look at the failures of startups like Living Social and Fab, who tried to combine volume with scattershot sales and marketing tactics, and you can see that blind spamming does not ever scale cost-effectively.

So, if you’re not willing to invest in more thoughtful approaches to outbound email, please save everyone’s inbox the spam, and just don’t send email. You won’t be successful and you’ll probably just get your IP blacklisted.

But if you’re struggling with getting good response rates from qualified leads, read this guide and learn how to create highly effective email campaigns at scale. And if you’re serious about your inside sales efforts, and would like help starting more thoughtful conversations with qualified leads, just drop us a line, and we’ll audit your existing email templates. 

Why Mail Merges Are 5x Better Than Marketo

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What if you could get your outbound sales emails seen by 5x more people just by making one simple change?

If you’re sending your (cold, not “opted-in”) prospecting emails using marketing automation software like Marketo, simply sending those emails with a mail merge via Gmail might increase your open rate by 5x.

One of my email consulting clients was sending their cold sales emails using Marketo, and had an open rate of about 8% when we started. Before we created the copy for their new email campaign, I insisted that they switched to sending their sales emails through mail merges instead of Marketo. They soon saw their open rates shoot up to 53-66% on average.

While I often tell people to not obsess too much about open rates and optimizing their subject lines, having open rates below 35% is a strong indicator of deliverability issues that needs to be immediately fixed. It is important to have a highly targeted email list with low bounce rates and have thoughtful subject lines. However, just changing how you’re sending your emails can dramatically increase open rates, and therefore also increase response rates by getting your message in front of more eyeballs.

I recently wrote a blog post explaining the basics of email deliverability and how to avoid going to spam. Following that post, I had some questions about switching out dirty mail server IPs for new “clean ones,” as well as other questions about services like SendGrid, and so I decided to write another post to explain more about deliverability.

Why You Never Want to “Go Cheap” With Your Mail Servers

No one wants their alcoholic uncle to embarrass them in front of their colleagues at the company Christmas party by getting plastered and making a huge scene. The reputation of your mail server’s IP is even more fragile than your own, and each time an email that’s sent from your IP bounces or gets marked as spam, your IP’s reputation and trust decreases. 

If you’re trying to cut costs and send emails from an undedicated mail server IP, you’re running the risk of having your IP tarnished by any “drunk uncle” that goes on a spamming spree using your shared IP. Most users of Marketo and other marketing automation software share their IPs with the lowest common denominator of spammers. This means your good emails get to pay for their sins, and no matter how many good emails you send, that IP’s trust can be destroyed by their crummy spam.

The same goes for those who are using the cheap, basic version of SendGrid.

sendgrid pricing email deliverability

Notice the difference in pricing between “Essentials” and the “Pro” version?

You can send 100,000 emails with SendGrid for only $19.95 a month with no dedicated IP, or you pay $79.95 for the same volume of emails, but with your own private IPs.

The price difference is 4x higher for a dedicated IP, but your deliverability might be 5x higher or more with a dedicated IP to send from.

marketo feels mass

Why Just Buying A New “Clean” IP Won’t Fix Deliverability Problems

So you can just buy a new “clean” IP from a service like SendGrid, and you don’t have to worry about email reputation or deliverability problems anymore, right?

Wrong.

Every new mail server IP starts out with a neutral reputation of zero. So, even if you decide to set up your own mail server, that new server’s reputation will be much lower than if you used Gmail.  This decreases your chances of inboxing.

If you are highly competent with mail servers and email reputation, you could spend months “warming up” your mail server’s trust and reputation by sending out thousands and thousands of emails that don’t bounce or get marked as spam.  

So either you buy and manage your own dedicated mail server with zero reputation or you’re stuck sharing a dirty mail server with terrible reputation. In both scenarios, you won’t be able to inbox as well as Gmail can.

Because Gmail’s mail servers have an amazing reputation, sending your emails directly through a mail merge in Google Apps (or some other sales automation software that plugs into Gmail and automates this process for you) has the highest deliverability. Google does limit how many emails you can send each day through one account, but this is because they want to protect their own mail servers’ trust.

Important Information: It’s important to recognize that your reputation is NOT based on your email address’ domain, since that can easily be changed. The only thing that affects reputation is what email server you’re sending from.

Gmail Mail Merges Are The Easiest Solution And Have the Best Email Deliverability

While you might not be able to blast out thousands of emails a day through a single Gmail account, using mail merge with Gmail is the easiest way to achieve high email deliverability.

If you’re doing your outbound prospecting correctly, it should be targeted enough to get somewhere between a 10-35% response rate from your outbound campaign. When each of your salespeople gets that kind of response rate, you don’t need to do crazy volume of outbound emails in order to get a response rate.

Almost every time an organization tells me that they can’t send enough volume through Gmail to meet their sales quota, I know they’re probably doing a lot of things wrong. You shouldn’t need to send 10,000 emails in order to get 11 responses from your leads. I can send an email campaign to a list of 100 leads and easily get 20-40 responses.  So in sending 1/100 of the same volume as that company, I can get 2-4x their response rate.

Part of this is deliverability, part of this is effective targeting, and part of this is having great copy in my cold emails.  

What it really comes down to is taking a more careful and thoughtful approach to doing outbound sales prospecting, rather than taking a careless scattershot approach, and praying that brute-force somehow magically works. And if you’re not willing to invest the time and attention to create a thoughtful approach to outbound sales, please just do everyone a favor and stop sending email. You won’t be successful and you’ll probably just get your IP blacklisted.
For more advice on creating highly targeted cold email campaigns from email campaigns that have made fast growing SaaS companies millions of dollars in sales revenue, please check out this free guide to learn how to create highly targeted email campaigns. And if you’re serious about inside sales and would like some extra help with your cold emails, just drop us a line, and we’ll audit your existing email templates.

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

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