All of us receive several emails every day: work, personal, advertisements, promotional, and more, but how many of them catch our attention? And with a barrage of emails cluttering our inbox, the ones sent by the marketers have more chances of getting lost in the crowd. It’s also a challenge to develop new ideas and a fresh, engaging design every time, especially when you want to stand out with your email campaigns.
Even though it is the most effective method to reach out to the prospects, most marketing emails remain unread and go straight into the trash. However, the question is, if emails are efficient and the most effective way to engross the prospects, why does this happen?
The reason that these emails remain unread can be attributed to a couple of factors like:
- The emails probably lacked uniqueness and creativity to grab prospect’s attention for them to open and read it
The golden rule with emails is that they are supposed to be different from the rest, including even those who aren’t really a part of the marketing industry.
Let’s see some tips and tricks of the trade that can help marketers send emails that can lead to closed sales:
1) SEND EMAILS DURING OFF-PEAK HOURS
Not deluging their inboxes on the weekends, the middle of the week, is you should send most of your emails to the prospects. Still, the emails sent on weekends receive a higher open rate than the emails sent during the week. An email sent on Saturday has a 65% chance of being opened, whereas an email sent on Tuesday has a 58% chance of being opened. You can also rethink and redevise your strategy with an appropriate day and time to send your prospects an email. You can try sending them emails on the weekends to determine if this increases the open rates.
2) CHOOSE THE CONTENT WISELY
The prospects need a reason to click on the email. If the email is just about you and your product or service, the prospects won’t be keen to take a peek inside. The contents of your email should be topics that are interesting and relevant to the prospects. You have to design and deliver an email that will benefit both prospects and yourself.
- Make sure that emails aren’t too text-heavy as information overload is not appealing to the prospects at all-just enough content to explain their product or service is good enough
- Text blocks consisting of 100 to 200 words paired with a strong click-through-rate and call-to-action to the landing page is excellent and leads to successful marketing
- The subject is the first part that is highlighted and read. Therefore, what goes in the email’s subject often determines whether the prospect will read the rest of the email or not
3) KNOW YOUR PROSPECT
You need to think about their process of sorting through emails. After they’ve looked at the subject of an email, the first sentence of the message is critical to decide to continue reading or not. This hook is even more important while considering the prevalence of smartphones today: A phone will often show the subject of an email and a preview that includes the first few words of the message. Your first sentence should be highly personalized to show that they know something about their prospect and company due to this feature. If the email appears to be boilerplate, the prospect will most likely delete it.
4) AN EASY QUESTION IS THE KEY
Often, you may forget what the purpose of an email is in the first place. Closing the sale is not the aim of an email- the idea is to engross the prospect in a conversation leading to a face-to-face meeting or a phone conversation. Thus, you have to be sure that the emails inspire prospects to respond to them. Ending an email with an easy-to-answer question always helps engage them. For instance, questions such as “Is this a challenge that you face in your business?” or “What’s your biggest marketing-related priority right now?” By ending the emails with a question, prospects will be more likely to respond since you have engaged them directly. Secondly, you’ve removed the guesswork surrounding the kind of information you need from them to move forward.
5) EMAIL TRACKING SOFTWARE MAKES IT EASIER TO COLLECT DATA ON WHEN SOMEONE OPENS THE EMAIL
Earlier, the marketers couldn’t detect when the prospects opened their emails. However, with technological development, software such as HubSpot Signals and Yesware, it’s way easier to know exactly when a prospect opens their emails. Also, now that marketers know when a prospect opens their emails, they can follow up with a call and increase the chance of closing the sales. They can also track which emails get opened- and with that, you get a chance to test different combinations of first sentences and subject lines to witness what really triggers prospects to click through most often.
CONCLUSION
It doesn’t take much to increase the chances of closing a sale through email campaigns. Apart from the technical ricks of the trade and tips, it all boils down to marketers and their teams’ creativity in putting together an email campaign that’s interesting, attractive, and educational all at the same time. These simple methods help the marketers know how, when, and what to send to the prospect to gain maximum traction.