In our recent sales training webinar, “How to Effectively Use Email as a Prospecting Tool,” we outlined some small changes that you can make to improve your results. You can watch the recording and download the slides here. Below is a quick summary of what we discussed.

Also, Read How to Make Cold Calling Prospects Easy

Understand Your Prospect
A good place for you to start when trying to improve your sales prospecting emails is to stop and try to understand the prospect that you are trying to reach.

Here are four assumptions that we feel confident about making:

  1. The prospect is likely extremely busy
  2. Prospects get a lot of emails from salespeople
  3. The prospect is likely not in “buying mode” when they receive your email
  4. Prospects delete many emails after reading very little of what the email says

You might think that you can add a fifth point, which is that prospects don’t respond to emails. That is actually a result of these other four points. We believe that if you can adjust your message and your sales prospecting email strategy so that it takes these four assumptions into consideration, you can improve how prospects engage with the emails that you send.

5 Tips for Your Sales Prospecting Emails
Here are 5 tips that we think will help you to see an immediate improvement in your cold emails.

1. Use Brevity
Be as brief as possible in your cold emails. This can help you minimize prospects’ instant, sometimes unread, deletion of your emails.

2. Try to Avoid Sound Like a Salesperson
Since your prospects get a lot of emails from salespeople, we feel that you can improve your sales emails by minimizing how much you sound like a salesperson trying to sell something.

3. Focus on the Immediate Goal
If it is safe to assume that it is difficult to close deals over email in most situations, then maybe we should not write our emails so that we try to close the prospect of purchasing the product.

If we consider closing the sale to be the ultimate goal, then we could view closing the prospect at the next step in our sales process as the immediate goal. Focusing more on this goal can improve your sales emails.

4. Use a Multi-Touch Mindset
You may have been advised to use a multi-touch approach in the past and this involves trying to connect with the prospect on multiple occasions and also using different types of contact methods (phone, email, voicemail, direct mail, etc.).

When applying this to how you use email, plan on sending multiple emails to your prospect and having each message slightly different so that you can expose the prospect to more of the information that you want to send them. This may also increase the odds that one of the email messages ends up grabbing the prospect’s attention.

5. Educate the Prospect
Try to design your cold emails to educate the prospect about why they should meet with you.