Thursday, October 15, 2009

Email Strategies That Reach Your Prospect

Have you been firing off emails left and right, with no real response to your efforts? You may be making one of these mistakes sales expert Wendy Weiss warns against. Read on to make sure you're not including any of these in your e-correspondence.

1. Create an attention-grabbing subject line. If your prospect does not open your email or worse still, deletes your email you are nowhere. Make sure that you have an attention-grabbing subject line. Go to the newsstand and look at magazine headlines. Use magazine headlines as a model. You are looking for a formula to follow. The topic is, of course, different.

2. Subject lines that use the prospects name and/or subject lines that ask questions frequently work well. If you have a referral put that referral's name in the subject line, "Jane Jones recommended that I contact you."

3. Keep your email short and to the point. No more than one screen in length. Remember that your prospect may be reading on their desktop or they may be reading on their Blackberry.

4. Just like a voice mail message, make sure that your email focuses on a benefit or result that you/your company/your product or service achieves for customers.

5. Make sure that your message includes a call to action. What action do you want your prospect to take? If you want a phone call you must say, "Please call me." Don't expect that your prospect will guess. It's your job to ask.

6. No attachments. Remember that your prospect may be reading on their desktop or they may be reading on their Blackberry. In addition, attachments will frequently get caught in spam filters, which means that your email will not be delivered at all.

7. No HTML or fancy graphics. Remember that your prospect may be reading on their desktop or they may be reading on their Blackberry. In addition, some graphics can get caught in spam filters, which means that your email will not be delivered at all.

Wendy Weiss is known as "The Queen of Cold Calling." She's written a bestselling e-book called "101 Cold Calling Tips for Developing New Business in a Downturn." Find out how it can help you sell more by phone here.

1 comment:

IncreaseSalesCoach said...

Wendy has some great advice to improve your chances for getting your emails opened.

Unfortunately, all too many email subjects lines misunderstand what it means to be "attention getting".

You know the ones the try to shock you, be funny, are self-serving, or generally annoying.

What really gets a readers attention is a subject line that speaks directly to exactly what they are looking for.

You need to understand the receiver and get in their head so when you write that subject they simply have to open your message to see what you have to say.