Your Email Is (NOT) Important to Us!
When an email starts with “Your email is important to us,” you can be sure it’s been generated by an automatic responder system. In other words, it hasn’t been written specifically to you by some attentive person who’s actually read your email. It’s a lie.
And yet how many of us write personal emails to clients and people we do business with – i.e. real people – and sound just as phony, just as impersonal? Worse, we write emails to clients that address our own needs and interests with little attention to them and their needs.
Email – like it or not – has become a huge tool for sales and marketing people. Yet in spite of all the information and good advice about email, it’s still mismanaged and annoyingly abused in offices worldwide.
What are the essentials of persuasive client emails we need to learn? How can we improve client engagement through the way we write emails? How can we harness this horse before it turns into an elephant?
More and more I’m hearing comments from my clients and seeing blog posts and articles about email mistakes sales people make. That is why I wrote one myself on Email Persuasion: How to Get Clients to Respond.
Let’s end the bad emails and start writing persuasive emails. Please.
Last week I facilitated an email persuasion workshop for a client team that manages and leverages existing accounts. Their sales leader is committed to honing the team’s communication and sales skills and establishing standards in all key client touch points:
- Email communications
- Face to face sales meetings and presentations
- Faceless sales meetings and presentation (virtual)
- Voicemail
The Immensity of Email
Why did my client start with “email communications” as their first priority?
Given the enormous volume of email his team deals with (300 plus per day) and the amount of time spent on email writing each and every day (90%), it’s a smart strategy to learn how to crack this nut once and for all.
The manager of this sales team is copied on many of these client emails. As a result, he reported having 7,000 messages in his inbox right now!
The Importance of Good Email
Email is a critical touch point for sales people. It’s an opportunity to create a lasting first impressions, build trust, and provide information. If you don’t write effective persuasive emails, you’ll never get to face-to-face meetings.
Here are a few of the personal challenges professionals face when it comes to email:
- Rushing when writing emails
- Relying too much on spell check
- Creating interesting subject lines
- Repetitive subject lines when forwarding
- Back and forth email battles – Ping-Pong
- Inappropriate use of ‘cc’ function’
- Managing emotional tone
- Email hoarding and management
In addition, because of the rush to get through your inbox, few of us spend adequate time preparing what we want to say and how we can say it with the focus on the client. Instead, we blurt out what we want and move on to the next email.
Sound familiar? Who hasn’t done this? There’s a better way to go about it. But it requires conscious and deliberate practice. It’s nothing like rocket science. And in many instances, you’re most likely already employing these essential sales and marketing principles in your other client contacts.
So why is it you forget to use basic sales principles when it comes to writing client emails?
Here are five essential areas to focus on if you want to write persuasive emails:
- Write a magnetic subject line
- Make your first sentence compelling, invoke curiosity
- State your message and purpose clearly
- Check your email formatting for “eye-friendliness”
- Specifically ask for what you want them to do (call to action)
Stay tuned for this series of blog posts on writing persuasive emails. If you don’t want to miss one, why not subscribe to get each blog post delivered in your email inbox?
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