One of the best sales tools on the planet is something most of us use every day: e-mail. However, when it comes to cold outreach, very few sales people leverage email correctly; often abusing it so badly that we hurt our chances of starting a conversation through any channel we use thereafter.
The goal of this blog series is to help MSPs use email the smart way for cold communications. For the record, our tips aren’t regurgitated from another’s marketing eBook, they come from our own data analysis after sending our fair of emails to small businesses throughout the United States on behalf of our MSP clients.
Implementing these tips can help improve open rates, click-through rates and even response rates.
Sound good? Let’s go then.
When a sales representative is assigned a new batch of cold leads, the temptation is to email everyone the same template.
Copy and paste never sounded so good!
But you know the deal. Copy paste produces abysmal results. Open rates of under 1% are a miracle. The problem may not be the template though, it could just be that you, the sender, were caught red handed in your copy-paste venture.
For example, these emails below are a screenshot of my spam folder. Gmail put them there without even asking me.
I don’t know the specific reason why they're in my spam folder, maybe because other recipients marked the same emails as “spam” and Gmail reacted accordingly, but at a quick glance of the subject lines and first sentences, I can tell Gmail was right, these sales people were lazy.
I think you can tell that I'm not attracted to lazy people. Are you? No. No, you're not.
So, how do we scale cold e-mail without coming off as lazy spammers?
By investing a little bit of time researching the person we’re emailing to personalize the first part of the first e-mail...
That's it. Just show that you put some effort into learning about them and people will respond by at least reading your e-mail.
For example, in a cold e-mail I received from a job candidate he said “I noticed you had a restaurant in Costa Rica!” and those nine words alone showed he'd done his homework.
His effort on display me made me want to give him my attention.
The moral is simple: I like to work with people who give a damn.
If you personalize your message beyond the standard “Dear [First Name],” then you’re already ahead of your competition.
A great way to learn someone’s background is to find them on LinkedIn and to see if company website has anything about them or written by them.
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