Nothing to Personalize Your Cold Email With? Build Relevant Back Ups.

You may run your personalization process and come up empty-handed. If you spend more than 5 minutes looking, don't keep looking! (Obviously, the standard is different for enterprise selling.)

Cold email results = output * conversion rate. Having a backup is key to keeping your output high.

At Lavender, we have a killer backup. Our advisor, Kristina Finseth, wrote it for us. It works because it's relevant, simple, and focuses on common problems.

It gets above a 10% reply rate.

Why? It follows a specific cold email framework.

Check out the email below. Then let's talk about the elements that make this framework … work:

Subject: Sales Email Enablement

{First Name},

In chatting with other sales enablement leaders, two key problems they're experiencing are:

1 - enabling sales team to write better emails - faster

2 - getting visibility into key email metrics for coaching opportunities

We’re helping sales teams at Brex and Relode spend less time personalizing emails with more positive replies with our in-inbox email assistant.

Is this something you struggle with, too? Open to a quick chat?

Cheers,

Will

How to make this sales framework work for you

This example follows a specific framework. Your email doesn't have to follow this word for word. (In fact, it shouldn’t. It should still sound like you!)

Focus on why it works, not what it is. Your backup could be a different combination of these things.

(Remember: It's about frameworks, not templates)

1. In the absence of personalization, lean on relevance.
   
   When you think about “personalization,” you should tie an observation back to a likely challenge.
   
   This framework achieves that goal via loose title structures. It recognizes the recipient’s title and hints that the message will be relevant to them.
   
   Hint: Your subject line can make or break the effectiveness of this approach.
   
2. It leads with a problem.
   
   If you're in sales, you should know bullet points typically hurt reply rates in cold email. “Typically” is the key word here … usually bullet points are connected to features or benefits.
   
   This email leads with problems. Junior reps lead with features. Decent reps lead with benefits. Great reps lead with problems.
   
3. Providing Credibility
   
   Instead of dropping a link no one will ever click… this message creates a credibility sandwich.
   
   “I talk with others like you. Here's a couple problems that should resonate. Now here are two clients that we work with.”
   
   Sprinkles of credibility are dropped throughout the note.
   
4. It provides a concrete answer to a problem.
   
   "Less time personalizing and more positive replies.” It tackles the #1 problem in one phrase.
   
   Why not touch on both problems? Mainly length, but it also makes it easier to understand.
   
   Email visibility is novel to the market. It's much easier to conceptualize our solution to the first problem.
   
   It's also somewhat implied that we solve the second problem somehow. (Why else would we bring it up?)
   
   This curiosity gets replies. We solve that first challenge via an inbox assistant. Our goal with inbox assistant is to create a concrete understanding of “what” we provide.
   
   We use a simple enough phrase to describe what it is. That way, you can understand you're not buying a new inbox and we work within existing systems.
   
   The goal is to create a wedge to break though and catch their attention via problems, solutions, and clarity.
   
5. An interest-based CTA
   
   At Lavender, we love the idea of a conversation starter.
   
   This CTA asks if there's interest in a conversation while also starting it. Worth a chat is yes or no… but you could also dig into answering if it's a problem.
   
   You wouldn't likely answer yes and no, so it creates a double confirmation for the next steps.

Building sales email backups is critical to building efficiency. It sets the baseline for what to expect.

You may have noticed this backup was built for enablement leaders. There are multiple backups for different segmented lists we would approach. Those list segmentations drive example clients, problems we discuss... basically every building block.