Make the Most of Your Email Strategy So You Don’t Get Left Behind

Sellers, if the vast majority of your pipeline is generated from cold calls - listen up. While certain people tend to prefer calls over email - refreshing your email strategy can help you find better balance and ultimately more consistent pipeline generation.

Email can do more than “warm up” a cold call. Buyer’s consistently list email as their preferred channel. It’s a crucial aspect of the sales process.

Sales teams with a heavy preference for the phones tend to seek automated email solutions. Understandable: If the phones are driving the pipeline, it’s natural to want to automate tasks that might hold back call volume. This calculus is based on the belief that emails can only be “so” effective. But, that limited belief is typically caused by the message, not the recipient's preference.

Reframe the Sales Math

Evolving your email strategy starts with the math. Sales math is easy. Your success is the number of activities multiplied by the conversion rates of those activities. Sales teams often send out as many cold emails as possible to cast a wide net. Expecting a low conversion rate, sellers send a high volume to hit their targets. But, you can use this math to your advantage. If you double your reply rate, you only need to send half as many emails.

Aligning cold call and cold email metrics is logical. You’re heading for the same outcome, a meeting. But, this is too superficial. In cold calling, there are more steps than picking up the phone and booking meetings. You have a connect rate, the rate at which people answer the phone. You have a conversation rate, the percent of calls that turn into conversations. You then have your conversion rate to meetings. Email reply rates should be thought of like connect rates. You need to generate conversation before you can drive conversion.

Imagine if twice as many people answered the phone? You’d only need to make half the calls. This is the math.

View Email as an Essential Channel

While it might seem impossible to get 2x the people to answer the phone. It isn’t impossible to get 2x the people to respond to your writing. This is a limited belief plaguing sales teams.

The challenges typically stem from a conversion mindset instead of a conversation mindset, but this is measurable in the way we write emails.

Here are four key mistakes holding back reply rates.

‍1. Using email to inform

After analyzing billions of sales emails, Lavender data shows that detecting a single informative tone in a cold email reduces reply rates by 26%. When we inform, we’re talking at the recipient. We’re discouraging dialogue.

2. Making it about us

Another side effect of using informative tonality is the subject tends to be all about yourself. People want to talk about themselves and their priorities. Make this the focal point. Personalized emails in Lavender’s data set show 10x more replies compared to automated templates. This tends to be a large contributing factor.

3. Writing like a marketer

Sellers write great marketing copy. The problem with marketing copy is buyers can sniff it out from a mile away. A great example is that we write subject lines intended to attract attention because it’s what we think we’re supposed to do. The reality is the top performing subject lines don’t use the recipient's first name, don’t ask questions, use possessives, include numbers, and keep a neutral tone. They’re boring. They feel like an internal email.

4. Using phrases that work on the phone

When you pick up a call from an unknown number the first question is always “Who is this?” This isn’t what you’re wondering in an email. It’s “Why are you reaching out?" Introducing yourself in an email is a quick path to getting ignored.‍

Avoid Deliverability Issues

The wrong email strategy doesn’t just stop you from making sales now — it actually can get in the way of future deliverability. You may get blocked by sending too many emails without a strategy.

Think of your emails like a credit score. Sending hundreds of automated emails every day is like swiping your card repeatedly, but without paying the bill. Recipients aren’t responding to your canned email, so the bank isn’t getting paid back because the email is ignored. As a result, your credit score drops. It’s the same with email providers. Most emails go through either Gmail or Outlook, and the services can quickly determine if you’re a well-intentioned emailer or a spammer. Even if you are trying to make lots of sales, sending hundreds of nearly identical emails and not getting many responses can get your domain flagged as spam.

When emails from your company's domain are flagged, they don't end up in buyers' inboxes. Switching to another email address won't solve the problem because the entire domain will likely be black-listed.

You may burn through your total addressable market (TAM), making it harder for email to be a long-term sustainable channel for driving the pipeline. Sending too many emails is like setting your domain reputation on fire. It can become as bad as email services blocking all emails from your domain and having an embarrassing conversation with a prospect about why they didn’t receive your email.

The majority of buyers prefer email. By burning email and making your messages undeliverable, you’re eliminating the channel most buyers prefer and not maximizing the total pipeline you could be creating.

But when you strategically send personalized emails that people want to read, your emails will more easily arrive in inboxes, making it possible to grow and reach new prospects.

Moving past automated sales emails can seem daunting, especially for sales teams with many competing priorities. Don't put emails on the back burner. Prioritize personalized emails and transform your email culture. It's possible (and easy) with Lavender.

Ready to transform how your company emails? With Lavender, the AI-powered email coach, creating personalized and effective sales emails is simple. Get tips for stronger messages, improve personalization without being creepy, and write quality emails that get results. Click here to learn more.