Sending cold emails as a sales rep is relatively easy to do considering all the technology at our disposal. The challenge, however, is getting a potential prospect to open it and, more importantly, respond.
If you can master the art of getting prospects to respond, it will make your job much more efficient and can help you avoid having your email sent to the dreaded SPAM folder.
Now, I’m not guaranteeing you are going to get a 100% response rate after reading this blog post, but I want to offer a few tips that I’ve found to be helpful when mixed into your outreach.
Research
There are plenty of automation tools that allow you to blast out mass emails to a handful of leads at a time, but the best success comes from quality research.
Quality wins over quantity any day in my book. Take a few minutes to look at the prospect’s website, blog, or LinkedIn profile to see how you can tailor your message.
Just think about how many emails marketers get in a day (hint: it’s a lot). Use this research to help you stand out. Bring up their latest blog post, talk about something they posted on Twitter, or maybe even discuss the city in which they’re located.
It’s so easy to be a human, but based on the canned messages and lack of personality, you’d think some sales reps are robots. Here’s how one of my co-workers used research to help him stand out:
Resources for researching your prospects:
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Know Your Prospect: How to Leverage Data for Smarter Sales Conversations [Uberflip]
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12 Places to Research a Prospect Before a Sales Call [HubSpot]
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How to Research Prospects on LinkedIn to Improve Sales [For Dummies]
Subject lines
This is fairly straightforward. No openy, no responsey…. one trick I use is to go into my personal email and look at subject lines that have actually made me open and try to adopt their tactics when I create a subject line.
Take some time to look through and determine how you can incorporate into your outreach. I have found that adding in a first name always increases the response rate.
Here are my two personal favorite subject types:
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The quick question – just ask them one question and if your email is concise it should be pretty quick
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A confirmation – great for a second email (I bet you open these in your personal Inbox all the time)
Resources for better subject lines:
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How To Improve Your Email Subject Lines: The Top Performing Words Other Sales Reps Are Using [Yesware]
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12 Effective B2B Email Subject Lines (And Why They Worked On Me) [Uberflip]
Humor & creativity
This one is my go-to—at least, that’s what I’m going for. Get out of your comfort zone and throw a little humor into your emails.
Think about it. Your recipient is probably sitting there all day worrying about deadlines, meetings, and smashing their results. The last thing they want is to get some scripted email from another sales rep.
If you can make them laugh, it can impact their day and they may just reward you with a response. Here’s one of my examples (don’t be afraid to be a little weird):
Resources for humor & creativity in sales:
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Sales Isn’t A Laughing Matter. But Maybe It Should Be? [Yesware]
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How Humor in Sales Can be Your Secret Response-Driving Weapon [HubSpot]
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How Using Creativity Can Help You Increase Your Sales Email Reply Rates [Uberflip]
Relevance
Relevance goes hand-in-hand with great research. After you have done your homework (yes you still have to do homework as an adult), it’s critical that your messaging is relevant and adds value.
Don’t take any more than 2-3 sentences to get your message across. Otherwise, you’ll lose your recipient in a wall of text and all the hard work you put into research and getting a laugh will be for nothing.
Rather than writing a novel (hate to break it to you, that’ll never work), share relevant content from your company’s blog or resource library. This way you can share more information with your prospect about your brand all while sharing something of value to them.
Pro tip: At Uberflip, we are always speaking to our senior-level team members to gain insight from them around the emails they receive. If you are targeting marketers, go talk to your internal marketing team and see what emails they respond to.
Tips for creating relevant sales conversations:
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Content Is For Closers: How to Leverage Content For Sales Enablement [Uberflip]
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4 Ways to Refine Your Sales Conversations [SalesforceIQ]
Intrigue
Think about your favorite TV Show (mine is House of Cards). What do they do every time at the end of a season? They leave you hanging and man-oh-man do you ever want to know what is going to happen next.
And remember how we just discussed not writing a novel? Don’t give it all up in the first email. Make your message intriguing and leave your recipient wanting to know more. This can be done through a series of email where you begin to build a story (or try to take over the White House).
Eventually, something of value you will click and they will want to strike up a conversation to hear what else you have to say.
Tips for keeping your prospects intrigued:
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3 Tricks That Will Magically Get Prospects Interested in You [HubSpot]
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How to Effectively Get Your Prospect’s Attention [Sales Readiness Group]
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How to Get Your Prospect To Create Their Own Urgency To Buy [Sales Engine]
Reaching out with a cold email or call probably may not be your favorite part of the day, but if you follow these tips, it can be a little less daunting. Let me know in the comments below if you have a tip for getting responses from cold outreach!
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