Anyone can send out emails.
Getting prospects to read them and then do something with them is a different situation altogether!
Ask yourself this question: “Do I read emails I receive from people I don’t know?”
I doubt you do. I know I don’t. Face it — we all can hit the delete key in a nano second when it comes to deleting emails we don’t want.
Below are 6 things you can start doing now to increase the likelihood of prospects reading your email AND responding.
(And yes, at the bottom of this post is a sample prospecting email to give you an idea of the point I’m sharing with you).
1. Make the subject line something that will interest the prospect.
It’s not about you, it’s about the other person.
2. Never start the email introducing yourself and extolling all kinds of fluffy talk.
Sorry, those days are gone. The person receiving the email may very well be viewing it on a smartphone, which means they’re going to decide whether to read or delete based on the first 5 or 6 words. Don’t waste words. Make the first sentence beabout something that’s going to grab their attention.
3. Skip the attachments, hyperlinks etc.
Using those in a prospecting email is merely inviting the other person’s spam filter to catch and throw you into the dungeon called spam.
4. Keep the email tight with no more than 6 sentences and a total of 3 paragraphs.
Nobody wants to read a doctoral thesis, heck even Reader’s Digest doesn’t exist anymore. Keep it tight, one thought/idea and one specific call to action. We all have a natural tendency to ignore long emails an if it’s already coming from somebody they don’t know it’s even more likely to get deleted.
5. Keep your signature clean with no graphics, cute logos, etc.
It’s amazing how many times signature lines can cause an entire email to look horrible, due to it not coming through properly. Don’t risk it. Create a very clean and simple signature line you can use for all prospecting emails.
6. Don’t pepper anyone!
By this I mean don’t send anyone the same email twice, thinking they didn’t see it the first time. Secondly, don’t send email after email thinking they have to at least open one of them.
Sending too many emails to a person in too short of a timeframe is a great way to get picked off by spam filters. My preference is to never send more than 4 emails to a person in a six week period before backing off if they have not responded to you. I back off for 90 days and then will do like it says on the back of shampoo bottles: “Repeat.”
What does a great prospecting email look like? It looks like this:
Subject: New fed. regulations released
The federal government has completed updating regulations, and companies will now have 18 months to comply. The changes are quite extensive, although there are ways to comply without disrupting business.
We have new information I would be happy to share with you. Here at Brown Consulting, we’ve been monitoring this situation closely.
Call me at 999-999-9999 and I’ll be happy to share the information with you, so you can avoid any compliance issues. Randy, thanks and I look forward to talking with you.
Mark Hunter
Brown Consulting
999-999-9999
Mobile friendly, six sentences, 3 paragraphs, and it’s all about what will interest the prospect. Is it going to get a 100% response rate? No, but I bet it will get you a far higher response than other emails you’ve been using.
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Copyright 2015, Mark Hunter “The Sales Hunter.” Sales Motivation Blog. Mark Hunter is the author of High-Profit Selling: Win the Sale Without Compromising on Price.
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One Response
Reader’s Digest DOES still exist! It is THE best-selling magazine in the entire world; they sell over 17 million copies a month in more than 20 languages and reach 70 million readers! It’s also known for its SHORT stories not long theses so I don’t even understand the reference here… I mean, I agree with what you’re saying about keeping emails short but…What?!?