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Hall of Shame

This is the cold email hall of shame for the worst prospecting emails.

Avoid Sending Email Disasters Like These 5 Poorly Targeted Sales Messages

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Vague, suspect messages. False compliments. A subject line that’s almost too absurd to seem real. These are just a few of the gems in this month’s roundup of shame-worthy emails. If I had to draw one thread connecting all five of these messages, it would be the dangers of spamming a huge list of poorly targeted leads with irrelevant emails, or sending emails that are so general they’ll apply to anyone (or no one).

Behold, our latest SalesFolk Hall of Shame roundup:

1. Formatting Fred

Crimes: excessive and arbitrary formatting, too long

Where to begin? This is basically a marketing brochure the sender tried to turn into a sales email by tacking some empty pleasantries onto the beginning of the message. And that crime pales in comparison to the formatting issues here.

After reading up on what this company does and seeing the business mentioned by reputable publications, I was somewhat intrigued. But I had to do a lot of my own work to get to that place. Here at SalesFolk, it’s our business to thoroughly examine cold email, but the average recipient wouldn’t even be able to get past the links, bold fonts, italicized fonts, bold-italicized fonts, and bullet-point lists. So this email is a really good example of how a compelling product, service, or company can get lost if the sender spends more time focusing on cosmetic adjustments to the text than on communicating benefits to recipients. 

2. Mr. Sketch

Crimes: vague, empty words, lack of information

Hall of Shame March 2

Vague emails aren’t sketchy by definition, but in the case of this one, the lack of information definitely makes one raise an eyebrow: “an Agency,” “growth opportunities,” “errors.” Maybe I wouldn’t have questioned the legitimacy if I hadn’t Googled this company’s URL and gotten a Page Not Found with that little frowning face, not to mention an address that doesn’t actually have a building, according to Maps.

And even if it is a legitimate email, it’s too vague to be enticing in any possible way. Moving on . . .

Mr Sketch

3. The Aloof Recruiter

Crimes: detached tone, lack of details

HoS 3

I know it’s normal that recruiters don’t always include the company name in their initial emails, but this message seems to be actively trying to not include any useful details. What size company is it? Where is the job located? What do you actually know about my previous experience that’s led you to reach out?

When a sender withholds as many details as they’ve done here, it’s practically impossible to get excited about the message. After all, it’s hard to imagine yourself fitting in at a company that needs “various C-level positions.” My guess is that this is a mass, un-researched list sent by someone looking to fill a quota. Unfortunately, that tactic rarely gets responses.

Hos 4

4. The Performer

Crimes: putting on an act, obscuring the message

Hall of Shame 4

Most of us at SalesFolk are, in fact, invested in social issues, but we tend to keep those pretty separate from our work lives and avoid talking about our views anywhere on the company website. That unfortunately renders the opening line of this email a completely false pleasantry. A better tactic would have been to turn that assumption into a question: “Has SalesFolk ever considered investing in a worthy cause?”

The false tone continues throughout the rest of the email with phrases like “make your values visible” and “changing the lives of artists.” No one talks that way in a real conversation. This email is pure performance.

Hos 5

5. The Slacker

Crimes: that subject line . . .

HoS 5

Yes, that subject line is real. And yes, it was probably a mistake, which is yet another lesson in why proofreading is so important for cold email.

The Slacker shows up in some form almost every time we do this roundup. This time, it’s another case of marketing emails parading as sales messages. In other words, we didn’t opt into this email. More importantly, this highly un-targeted email tells me nothing about this event—what I’ll learn, why the topic is important. It’s just a list of speaker names, which the sender already included in the world’s longest subject line ever.

Never assume a recipient has seen previous emails sent. There are dozens of reasons why they may not have, so it’s best to make every email in a campaign tell it’s own complete story with all the necessary details.

Slacker

ClearSlide’s Latest Sales Email Is Murky. Here’s How to Fix It

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Even companies with established reputations and Fortune 500 clients have to learn the craft of sending a good cold email—and be wary of the bad ones.

Sales engagement platform ClearSlide obviously didn’t get that memo, if its latest message is anything to go by:
ClearSlide

I’m a big fan of ClearSlide’s sales automation tools, which is what makes this email so disappointing. Its generic nature leaves a terrible first impression on readers and damages the sender’s reputation in the process. The message is also filled with phrases that mean nothing and offer no value to me. And while many wouldn’t read past the subject line, I delve into the specifics here because, start to finish, this is a great example of how unappealing and forgettable a message can become in such a vague email.

Let’s take a deeper look:

1. The subject line is forgettable.

The subject “ClearSlide and your goals” fails to use basic tactics for subject lines, which is to appeal to people’s wants, needs, or fears about their business. “Your goals” could apply to my business, but it could just as easily go to a software developer or a coffee bean wholesaler. Such a lack of focus makes the subject line far from enticing, and any prospect, regardless of their profession, will likely glaze over this. ClearSlide has plenty of different features that they could easily turn into exciting benefits that would make their subject line pop.

2. The opening line is cryptic.

The opener makes me wonder whether ClearSlide is being intentionally cryptic or if the sender is just plain lazy. “Stay professionally top of mind” isn’t even a cliche; it’s a bunch of words flung together that collectively have no meaning. And “help you in being responsible for all key business initiatives” is also vague and confusing. Key initiatives mean different things to different roles. Mine will not be the same as the coffee bean seller, and it’s a huge turnoff when the email doesn’t make that distinction.

3. The sender didn’t research me or my business.

As far as the rest of this email goes, there’s nothing in here that tells me the problems ClearSlide solves or what benefits the service could give—to me or anyone else getting the message. The email tries, by explaining that ClearSlide helped other companies “engage with the right content at the right time.” That said, the message fails to tell us what the result of that engagement was, which makes the entire sentence pretty pointless. And how does the sender even know if I even care about content? They don’t, and it’s clear they took no time to research me or my company before sending this email.

4. The call to action wants me to do extra work.

This would be a perfectly fine CTA had the sender left out the second sentence. When you aren’t 100 percent sure who the correct person for your pitch is, go back and do more research. Asking me to supply the person feels like extra work. It’s especially discourteous when the email is so vague it’s impossible for the recipient to know who the right person would be.

5. Bonus: The included GIF is distracting and borderline unprofessional.

The animated GIF (you can only see a still here) included in this email is a huge no-no for cold email. It’s distracting, and it immediately indicates a mass-marketing email. I may have taken the time to read through and dissect this email, but that’s part of what we do at SalesFolk. Most recipients would take on look at the GIF and delete the entire message without so much as a second glance.

3 Things You Must Do to Start a Meaningful Conversation With a Cold Email

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If you want to start a meaningful conversation over cold email, you have to give the recipient a really good reason to hit the respond button. In other words, you need to start a conversation to which they can actually contribute. Whether it’s highlighting a benefit you know the other person will need or posing a question they won’t read elsewhere, an effective message is all about the potential client and building a relationship with them.

This is not the strategy this company took with its recent cold email:

SalesFolk Hall of Shame 0227

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

There are a number of mistakes littering this email, but three in particular illustrate just how unlikely it is this message will start a meaningful conversation. Let’s take a look at what went wrong and what can be done to to fix the mistakes.

1. The subject lacks any real information.

At first I thought I read the subject line wrong; it’s just the sender’s name and a reference to LinkedIn. Unfortunately, it seems this tactic was intentional. 

A subject line is the first impression you make with the recipient. It’s the point at which they decide whether to open your email and keep reading or trash the message altogether. Simply stating your name could work if you’re a household name (“Taylor Swift via LinkedIn”). Since most of us aren’t, though, the person on the other end of the email won’t have any idea of who you are, making this approach to subject lines completely ineffective. 

The Fix: Lure the reader in with a benefit or interesting question. For example, a line like “recapture the deal you lost” is intriguing enough to pique someone’s interest but mysterious enough to make them want more. This ups the chances your email will stand out in a crowded inbox and that the recipient will open it. 

2. The email is too self-focused.

Focusing on yourself rather than the reader is one of the worst blunders you can make in a cold email. Every paragraph of this sender’s email begins in first person, making them seem more concerned with promoting their business than solving the recipient’s pain points or learning more about them. Not only is this a huge turnoff, it also suggests you don’t understand or care about the other person’s business.

The Fix: Focus on aspects of your product or company the reader will find useful. They’ll be more likely to trust and engage with you when they see it’s not a one-sided conversation. A good copywriting trick is to always write in the second person, as it will help both you and the reader feel like you’re engaged in a two-way dialogue.

3. A lack of personalization makes the message boring.

To be successful, every sales email needs personalization—tailoring an email specifically towards a particular person or role. It makes the email more enticing to the recipient and also also signals that you’re familiar with that person’s business, or, at the very least, that you’ve done your research.

This email contains pretty much zero personalization. Sure, the sender included some tactics that could possibly benefit the reader, such as offering an on-demand team of software engineers. But that’s an overly broad benefit any number of potential clients could benefit from. Everyone needs on-demand software engineers these days, after all. There’s only one place benefits like these go: straight to the trash bin.

The Fix: Include details that are relevant to the recipient. That might include a known pain point or some recent industry news that will impact them. At the very least, this sender could have mentioned a post the recipient recently shared. Putting your reader at ease with these kinds of details is the simplest way to entice them and get them to respond.

If Your Sales Emails Look Like This, You’re Definitely Losing Potential Customers

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There was something undeniably frustrating about putting together this month’s Hall of Shame roundup. Maybe it was the sheer amount of information to pick through, or the awful formatting choices. How, one can’t help but wonder, do messages like these make it out of draft and into someone’s inbox?

People often mistake length for strength in a sales email, cramming as many features as they can into annoying bullet-point lists. Or they go the opposite direction, thinking an extra-general email will appeal to anyone and get more responses. It won’t. And in both cases, a crucial element is missing: the prospective customer and their business needs and wants.

Behold, February’s lineup of terrible cold emails:

1. Factory of Features

Crimes: length, mistaking people for features

Artificial Intelligence

You want to know the worst part about a feature list? When the items aren’t even actual features.

At quick glance, this looks like just another list of product capabilities (that’s inexplicably written in blue font). Closer inspection reveals it’s actually a list of employee types along with their tenure at the company. I realize the sender refers to these roles as “resources,” and sure, you can, technically, sell resources. But people are not faceless features. Treating them as such in a sales email just suggests you run the digital equivalent of a factory.

Conversations builds sales relationships, so make your text conversational. The best way to do this is to read out loud what you’ve written. If your voice drones on like a .matrix printer as you read, you might want to revise a couple times.

Factory Peeps

2. The Formatting Mess

Crimes: length, pointless formatting

Mess

I can’t decide which of this email’s crimes is more overwhelming: the enormous amount of information or the gratuitous amount of formatting.

In the span of one email, the sender covers: automation, stats from a new report, the role of salespeople in the digital age, and the job descriptions of multiple people. Laced throughout is arbitrary bold-faced font and the dreaded bullet-point list. To be fair, they did put a space between the paragraphs and bullet-point lists, which makes this email marginally more readable.

With only seconds to keep a reader’s attention, it’s crucial to be as clear as possible about what you want. The formatting issues combined with the numbers, names, and features, this email is just a mess begging to be cleaned up.

The Mess

3. The Bridge Burner

Crimes: length, untargeted, too many ideas

Bridge Burner

Its admirable this person wants to “bridge the gap” between Academia and Industry, but they’re not going to do it with an email this long.

Sales emails should be all about the other person, not a bullet-point list of your company’s history and accomplishments. Those may boost your credibility, but they’re better left for a phone call or, better yet, an in-person meeting where there’s time to go a little bit off-topic. As far as the list of what I’d be responsible for, it’s more in-depth than most job descriptions on LinkedIn. In other words, it looks like a hell of a lot of work and I don’t want to read about it in a sales email.

The goal of any good sales email is to make the recipient’s life easier, not more tiring. Pick a single idea and stick to it throughout, or you’ll wind up burning a lot more bridges than you build.

The Bridge Burner

4. ???

Crimes: completely un-targeted, utterly random

Random

I had to block out the names here, but suffice to say, a flower delivery company sent this, and the website the sender thinks is mine is actually a lead-generation site, which SalesFolk is not. Talk about a mass, un-targeted email. Then there’s the bit about “searching for moms.”

So we have flowers, lead generation, and parenthood in a single email. Combined, what lesson do they offer? That you should check your CRM data and take time to research your contacts before hitting the send button.

Un-targeted

5. You Had One Job

Crimes: length, faking an acquaintance

Job Description

This is one of several emails we received from this company, yet no one at SalesFolk has actually ever talked to the sender.

And for an email sent by a stranger, this one asks me to do an awful lot of work: pass the message to someone else if the content’s not relevant to me, answer a bunch of questions, and read through an enormous amount of text.

There’s nothing wrong with sending a cold email to gauge someone’s interest in employment, but you won’t get many responses if you post the entire job description in the actual email. For one, it kills any intrigue you might have created by holding some details back. And this much information is really just another form of a feature list. As we’ve discussed, over and over and over this week, features don’t sell, even when you’re the one offering to pay.

You Had One Job

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