Email Marketing Best Practices
Updated: Aug 27, 2019
To remain highly factual or to strike a collegial tone? Stop jokes or sprinkle with tasty humour? Disclose insider knowledge or just make them curious? These are just three of
the many questions that arise when faced with the task of optimizing sales processes with suitable emails. For this purpose, I present you in this blog post 9 best email marketing practices for your sales.
1. No statements à la "I know how you feel"
Such a saying may easily go over your lips or flow into the keys. However, it is rarely true. The addressee knows that very well. Even if we are convinced to meet the needs and concerns of the reader, there is no way one can get away with this.
So do not pretend to be half-ignorant or not knowledgeable, but rather formulate in the direction: "This whitepaper was very helpful to one of my colleagues in your industry. That's why I'd like to share it with you." And first, find out exactly what your Buyer Personas needs, problems and challenges are.
2. Clarity wins
It may be that your colleagues value you for your sociability and sparkling wit. But a sales email is the wrong stage. Present yourself as a serious and trustworthy professional whose mission is to assist the addressee in his business needs. This also includes giving a statement to each sentence and deleting filler words. Are statements repeated? Summarize them!
3. The extra dose of knowledge
Make your sales emails irresistible by offering something that no one else has and, more importantly, that you cannot easily find on Google. That you are offering a phone call with a stranger is not quite attractive by itself. Offer added value. Present a survey, a statistic, an interesting industry fact - in short: a content that surprises and supports the reader.
4. Read the correction. Proofread. Proofread
This tip may seem like the most well-known and well-worn, right? I'm not sure if it's really that famous. Because one always stumbles over typos and - particularly embarrassing - letter turners in the name of the addressee or even a very wrong name. Of course, you do not have to do a weekend course with Wolf Schneider or Bastian Sick.
But apply the basics of English grammar, spelling and punctuation. And above all, be able to spell correctly your esteemed reader. Only when the cover letter succeeds immaculately, you can lay an important foundation for the optimization of your sales processes.
5. Read aloud
Before you implement this tip, you'd better inform your (otherwise possibly irritated) colleagues. But it may well be that these initially irritated colleagues imitate your behaviour soon: namely read the email out loud.
The loud reading will definitely make you discover where sentences are too complicated or too long. And also where you might have even digressed from your thoughts. Are you stumbling while reading? Or are you after the third paragraph mentally suddenly at the evening supermarket shopping? Then come to the point earlier!
6. Get feedback
This step is very crucial BEFORE sending the email. How often is an email read and corrected by a single person? Maybe the boss's eyes are still flying over it. The chance of
getting more out of the email thanks to critical voices is lost. Send the draft to your team and ask for their opinion. Is anything too offensively formulated? Too confusing?
7. Send the email to yourself
If at present no colleague is available, at least send your email draft to yourself. This will present the email in a slightly different format than in the window in which you created it. This sometimes shows you mistakes that you previously overlooked. In addition, you will quickly notice if the formatting is crooked.
Even if your email draft seems to be perfect, there may be other reasons why your email is not being read.
8. Include your signature
By this I do not mean that you squeeze your career into the signature or put on a cute cat GIF. Here, too, offer the reader added value. How about the link to an educational
video or other relevant media or blog topics?
9. Write out of the box
We are all habitual animals. Because it makes things a lot easier. But it also makes for a lot of boring stuff. When you sit down to compose a new email, chances are very good that you're going to use exactly the same sentence structure and very similar phrasing as in the last email.
Give your mind muscle a little training and try to approach your next design from a different perspective. On the one hand, this gives you a pool of templates and, on the other hand, it helps you to address different customers in different ways.
Compare your sales email with a personal letter. If you sign up with good friends, you probably do not copy the same text countless times to different people. The customer
approach is also about building relationships! If you really want to optimize your sales processes with meaningful email marketing measures, you need to be a little more
creative.