You’ve followed best practices, written the perfect email and reviewed it multiple times before hitting send. And with a click, you are one step closer to new client and potential customer conversations...right? The truth is, while email marketing is an incredibly effective way to reach and engage consumers, it’s rare for contacts to respond after just one email. Sending one cold email is one small drop in a very large bucket.
To compete with the noise and make an impact, consistency and follow-up are essential. Therefore, the secret to successful sales outreach is not rooted in the results of the first email. Instead, email marketing should be viewed similarly to phone-based sales communications, and include a series of prewritten messages that are tailored to the various steps and stages of the sales outreach process and early customer journey.
Because email is cost-effective, easy to deploy and widely accessible, it remains an attractive marketing channel. However, when it comes to email, consistency is key. According to saleshacker.com, open rates tend to increase as the volume of messages increase. Specifically, it may take “an average of 2 emails to get to a 12% reply-rate and 3 emails to get to a 15-16% reply-rate.”
When deployed with the right combination of relevant messages and proper distribution scheduling, email is an opportunity to connect with current customers, re-engage with former prospects and establish a connection with new clients.
As we enter the final weeks of the first quarter of the year, sharpening your email skills can help you reap strong ROI and drive conversations. Here are eight easy and effective tips that can help you craft successful sales email follow-up messages.
Do not start sending out emails until you have identified the KPIs you want to track and measure. Start by determining what metrics are the most important to you. Maybe you are striving for better open rates when sending emails to new leads, but care more about the click-through rate for emails sent to current customers.
When designing your follow-up sales email workflow, prepare to write multiple emails. Plan to send between three and seven emails. You might want to consider starting with a workflow containing fewer emails so you can analyze its performance later and determine what changes could impact your results.
The timing of sales emails is almost as important as the content with the emails. You want to avoid sending too many messages too soon, but you also do not want to have too much time in between emails. When it comes to follow-up sales emails, try to keep your schedule authentic, aiming for the perception of organic interaction. Be aware of the times you schedule emails to be sent. For example, you don't want to deploy messages after 11:00pm or before 5:00am, if you want the message to seem as if it came from you directly. To start, focus on scheduling emails to send every two to five days between the hours of 8:00am and 8:00pm.
Subject lines are the first thing contacts see when they receive your message. The most effective subject lines are often direct, creative, or personalized. For example, more sales emails have started to use emojis, which can add a new element of creativity. Personalization tags or tokens are easy to add to email messages and can also be impactful. According to liveclicker.com, 74% of marketers agree targeted personalization in email helps to increase customer engagement rates.
Sending multiple emails gives insurance agents multiple chances to reach, connect and engage with consumers. In addition to stronger open and reply rates, a consistent frequency of deployed sales emails can help contacts develop more brand recognition and awareness for you and your services. While you work to enhance your sales strategy by adding email follow-up workflows into your mix, also consider if you need a new strategy for customer acquisition.
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