Bad Recruiting Email: Are You Making Any Of These 5 Simple Mistakes

By Leave a Comment

Normally I wouldn’t use the SalesFolk Hall of Shame to critique an email where English wasn’t the sender’s first language, but this email is really untargeted and just plain spammy. Since these offenses are usually way more problematic than a couple misplaced words, I decided I had to rip the message apart.

As someone who studied Japanese for seven years and also lived in Japan, I recognize a tendency in Japanese communications toward excessive formality. But for an audience that’s mostly (if not completely) English speaking, this message is entirely ineffective as a cold email.

Remember, whether English is your first or fifth language, it’s crucial that you understand how to effectively communicate with your target audience. Learn what this company did wrong to make sure you’re not making the same mistakes.  

このビデオを見てください. 🙂 

Check out my critique of this recruiting email to see what went wrong:

If you enjoyed this video, please let me know by leaving a comment or sharing it on social media.

I’ve been recording a lot of new video material that I’ll be sharing with you over the coming weeks, but it’s never too late to request new topics for future videos. If you have a particular topic you’d like to see on an upcoming video, or a particular question you’d like me to answer, just comment below, and you may just see your request on one of my next videos.

Happy cold emailing! 🙂

-H

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

By 5 Comments

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 my new email outreach video course with Hubspot.

4 Ways This ‘Business Continuity’ Sales Email Could Have Used Better Planning

By Leave a Comment

Everyone loves a good tangent—that is, if you’re reading a science-fiction novel or listening to a story over happy hour.

Cold emails, on the other hand, are one of the worst places to wander away from the main point of the message. You have literally seconds to grab the reader’s attention with a sales email, and you won’t do that with long, convoluted messages.

This person apparently didn’t get the memo when emailing me about disaster recovery and business continuity plans. See email #1, below:

Email Disaster

With a little more focus, the topic, why companies should plan for unexpected disasters, would be relevant to a lot of people out there. But there are multiple issues with this message that make it feel like less of a first cold email and more of an identity crisis. Let me explain:

1. It wants to be sales email and marketing newsletter simultaneously.

The email starts with a potentially interesting fact: there’s a difference between disaster recovery and business continuity. Now, it just so happens that understanding this difference is a current “hot topic” in business, so maybe the sender has something to tell me about managing it (although I’m probably not the most qualified lead for them, since we’re still a lean startup).

They don’t. The email quickly becomes a marketing promotion that explains “business continuity” with dramatic phrases like “essential to the future” and “statistics don’t lie.” Then we’re told to download an e-book. What happened to that compelling fact the email started out with?

Just because someone reads the first line of your email doesn’t mean they’ll finish it if you don’t give them a good reason to. In this case, an interesting idea I’d love to discuss gets waylaid with blatant product promotion. Not only does it leave me feeling confused, I also feel tricked.

2. Multiple “main ideas” are overwhelming.

In one email, the sender covers: the relationship between two areas of business, the definition of business continuity, the risk of not having a continuity plan, and why I should download the free e-book.

Any given email in a campaign should stick to just one idea or value proposition. If you have more than one idea, that’s when using a multi-touch email campaign comes into play.

Alone, each of the above ideas would make a solid email. Thrown at the reader all at once, every one of them loses value, and we’re left wondering what, exactly, the sender is trying to tell us.

3. The information repeats itself.

Even riddled with multiple ideas, the email still manages to club us over the head with the same statement: you better plan for disaster, or your company will meet an untimely end. Although disasters do happen, saying it four different ways tends to diminish the effectiveness of the statement.

A much stronger way to highlight this fact would be an opening line like, “Did you know that 73% of companies without a business-continuity plan fold when a cyber-disaster strikes?”  The number alone would frighten most of us into action, or at least into hitting the “reply” button, but there are plenty of other openers that would work as well.

4. There are multiple calls to action.

The sender has a few different requests: download a product, consider having a conversation with them, and to send an email or make a phone call. That’s too much to ask a stranger over one cold email.

The email would have closed much stronger had there been one simple call to action that didn’t require much thought: “Let’s talk about preparing your business for the unexpected. When do you have 10 minutes next week?”

That doesn’t make the other calls to action, like the e-book download, unusable. This is one of the reasons eight-touch email campaigns are so important. They give you a chance to offer different kinds of call to actions to see what works best.

5. It gives too much away in the follow-up message.

Email #1 didn’t provide any real value, and email #2 seems determined to make up for that by giving away more than any company should realistically share for free:

Email #2:

Email Disaster

The second email gets one fact right: business continuity is a daunting task. But the length and detail in this email don’t make it any less cumbersome. We don’t need to see all six steps of the planning process in a single email. While this may be appropriate in a slide deck during a meeting, none of this belongs in an email to a stranger. Not to mention, providing all six steps and a free ebook removes a lot of the incentive to respond to this email.

The moral of the story? Be mindful of how much value you’re giving away over a sales email. Give too little, and recipients will instantly forget your email—if they open it at all. Too much, and they’ll bypass your expertise and get the job done themselves for free.

Be a goat, not a sheep!

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

Want help with your cold emails? Request a call: