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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

Here’s What Happens When Carelessness Takes Over a Cold Email

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Here’s a glaringly obvious fact about cold sales emails: they are not hard to write. Running a marathon is hard. Performing open-heart surgery is hard. Taking the time to research a prospective client and send them an email full of useful details is not hard.

So including clues—intentionally or not—that tell a prospect they’re part of an arbitrary mass list makes you look lazy and untrustworthy, and won’t help your response rate.

This company clearly didn’t consider that when it wrote its latest cold sales emails:

Let’s take a look at what went wrong and how this company could fix their future messages.

1. The recipient has to do all the work.

The first strike here is that instead of providing an explanation about what an “explainer video production company” is, the sender merely references a previously sent email. Maybe that message included an explanation; maybe it didn’t. The point is, the sender wants the recipient to go to the trouble of searching for that initial email, which is more work than you should ever make a prospective customer do.

Why? Because referencing an old email doesn’t count as an explanation—you can’t assume that the recipient saw any of your previous messages. Each email should be unique, with wording and benefits the recipient will relate to. Messages that need to be decoded almost never entice people.

2. The sender openly admits to doing no research.

Never include a line like, “PS: I don’t know where you are, but I’m hoping that you are not affected by the hurricane.”

Not knowing someone’s location underscores the fact that you didn’t research your prospective customers and that this message is part of a mass list. In the case of this email, it’s also callous. The message basically says, “I would love to sell you something even if your life was just severely impacted by a natural disaster.” I probably wouldn’t respond to this message on principle, even if it applied to my business.

Instead, the sender should have checked their recipients’ locations and adjusted the message going to those impacted by the recent hurricanes.

3. The sender relies way too much on filler text.

The second email from this company is more of the same:

SalesFolk Hall of Shame 12-21-2

You only have limited time (seconds, actually) to capture a prospect’s attention, so making them work through empty questions like the opening one of this email won’t inspire prospects to read on. The subject line here is also empty of meaning. (Also, why is there a crown involved?)

Finally, the end of this email takes up almost as much space as the main message itself. Telling someone to “hit the reply button” is pointless, even as a pleasantry. Even “let me know what you think about it” falls flat as a call to action (CTA). A better route for this sender would be a simple ask like, “When do you have 15 minutes this week for me to talk to you more about this infographic?”

Finally, there’s that smiley face at the end. I realize a lot of folks believe it can set a pleasant tone for the end of the email. As a salesperson, you should never rely on emoticons to set the mood of your emails. Your time would be way better spent brushing up on basic copywriting skills.

Read any bad cold emails lately? Send them to [email protected] for consideration, and we might include them in our next Hall of Shame post.

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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