3+3 rules to write emails which get 40% response rate. By Ankur Chaudhary

Increased Email Response

It takes only 2.7 seconds for a reader to decide if they want to take action to an email (reply, forward or delete). Your one self-focused line can be blasted away into oblivion with one click from the reader.

With today’s crazy-busy buyers, how do you get their attention? Jill Konarth one of best sales-thought leaders who has years of research in buyers’ behavior, discovered that readers evaluate an email on four key questions:

  • How simple is it?
  • Does this person offer value to my business?
  • Is this aligned with my objectives?
  • How big a priority is it?

Critical factors you need to think about before you craft a message:

Length: 80.8% of prospects read emails on mobile screens. The shorter, the better. Keep your emails under 90 words.

Subject Line: Be precise and action-oriented. There has been enough debate on whether length of subject lines matters. My experience being: they don’t matter. If you have a referral or relevant name to drop, always mention that. Subject lines that address immediate concerns, company changes, or critical business issues are always highly effective.

Here are some example subject lines that get reads:

  • Quick questions about next quarter’s sales targets
  • Ideas for disrupting the top of sales funnel
  • Sam Ribnick suggested I get in touch with you
  • 3 steps to improve social selling ROI

Personalize: If I had to pick a single most critical factor to help get a response, I would chose personalization of an email. Work to surprise your buyer with your relevant research on their challenges and needs. If there is a reference point for you to mention, please do.

Pique curiosity: Present a compelling value to your buyer, you can do this in following ways:

  • Refer prospect challenges. Example: If you are like most marketers today, you’re under a ton of pressure to increase your lead effectiveness.
  • Refer similar customers. Example: I thought you might be interested in what we did with…
  • Mention Trigger events. Example: The reason I contacted you is because I read about your (triggering event). Based on my experience working with other firms, when (triggering event) happens, it usually creates (problems/challenges) with …
  • Refer to industry trend. Example:In researching your competitors, I learnt that one of the prime initiatives this year for (Blank) industry is…
  • Direct Value Proposition. Example: We help large companies reduce cost of sales by …
  • Refer the competition. Example: Hi Marc, I had a question about your competitor “XYZ”. Did you know they were looking to implement our software? If you have time next week, I can help you with …

Value Proposition:Buyers don’t care about your products and services. They want results. State your value proposition in clear business terms. Corporate buyers are particularly attracted to phrases such as: increased revenue, improved customer retention, higher ROI, increased competitor differentiation, decreased costs, etc.

Close graciously: Do this by inviting an action. It could be a meeting request or a question which could be replied to in a few words. Example: If you are the appropriate person to speak with, what does the calendar look like early next week? If not, who do you recommend I speak with?

I have experienced that when you follow these simple rules, prospects want to open a dialogue with you and share their business objectives, needs, and challenges. I used these rules to achieve more than a 40% response rate.

What are some of the best practices you use while sending prospecting emails to your buyers? I would love to hear what has been effective email response strategy for you.

 

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Why Do Users Become Disengaged With Your Email [Infographic]

After visiting your website, making a purchase, or stumbling across your company’s blog, a customer has signed up to receive email from you. For a marketer, this is the most fragile, difficult relationship to maintain: email engagement. One wrong step can end in tragedy with your electronic correspondence in the spam folder. Look at this infographic below to find out how to avoid this tragic fate when sending your emails to the masses.

 

Created by Litmus

How are you using email?

Ditch your inbox: Luis Suarez interview

Luis Suarez is a social computing and business evangelist at IBM, but don’t bother emailing him to ask about that. Or do – but he’ll search for you on the social networks and reply that way if he can. Because he announced four years ago that email was inefficient so he would be abandoning it, and has subsequently cut 98% of his emails out.

If a colleague tells you they get too much email the usual default response is to nod sagely and carry on as if nothing was ever going to happen about it. This isn’t good enough for IBM’s Luis Suarez, who announced in 2008 that he was going to cope without it.

“I am not the guy who killed email,” he says, which is what a lot of press and bloggers have called him. “I can see good use cases for it.” One of these is when something is confidential and needs to happen on a one to one basis, such as salary discussions with an HR team. But there aren’t many instances in which he’d choose to use it.

“You can’t build your online reputation with email,” he points out. In the same way you can’t check someone’s credentials as immediately – click through their name on a LinkedIn message and you have their CV. “Communication needs to have a context,” he says.

This is why, if you want to contact him, the best starting point is to enter “Luis” into Google and you’ll find him on the first page. You won’t find his email address but you’re likely to be able to engage through Google+ or Twitter (his preferred contacts) and IBM-ers can use the company’s own internal network.

Email, outside a couple of good uses which involve legally or ethically confidential material, is open to abuse, he says. “People play political games and power struggles with the CC and BCC buttons,” he says. “I’ve had that and I’ve blogged it – the whole conversation.” Email can too easily end up as a weapon people use to fight each other in a business, he says.

Social interaction is different. If he’s away, for example, and someone asks him a question through IBM’s internal social communication system, then because it’s visible to all of his contacts there’s a good chance someone else will answer. This isn’t taking advantage because he’s on holiday, he says during his presentation – pronouncing the word “holiday” very carefully in case any corporate types have forgotten the concept. He does the same to help colleagues. And of course if he responds to something then his answer is permanently available in IBM’s knowledge base – so someone may not have to ask next time, everybody has access to it and it’s a lot more open.

He enthuses a great deal and after our interview he asks everyone at his presentation to stop responding to emails, which will cut their workload down. It’s clearly worked for him – but you do wonder how many audience members will actually be that brave.

Luis Suarez’ keynote presentation video ‘Thinking Outside the Inbox…There is no WE in Email‘ from Unified Communications Expo is now available ondemand in the Unified Communications Online Video Library.

Luis on Twitter @elsua

A world without email

 

Is Email Dying?

I am fortunate enough to work with Luis Suarez and get to share his thoughts and comments on a daily basis. If you not following him on twitter or reading his blog post please do, you wont regret it.

Unfortunately, as we sit in different parts of the world, it is not often we meet.

However it was fantastic to meet and hear him speak at the UCExpo in London this week. He was there to discuss “A world without email”, and whilst I will not rewrite his superb work, find it here. I will note a couple of things we should all consider when using email in business.

Noticeably:

Email is no longer king of collaboration, if you want to collaborate effectively you need to be using the right tools.

Email should be a messaging and notification portal NOT a repository of information, where is becomes lost and provides no value.

Of course there are use case’s for email, so whilst you can reduce the amount of emails you receive, it will never be none. Luis states that his personal reduction is from 100’s a week down to an average of 16. Thats staggering right!

I would value your thoughts on the use of email, such as ; Do you see it as a to do list? Is it the only way you communicate now?

ibm.com: IDC White Paper – The Future of Mail is Social

IBM has just posted a new white paper on the evolution of email, written by IDC analyst Michael Fauscette. The paper discusses the history of email, how companies are viewing email in the context of collaboration and social business, and then takes a converged view of the future of email and its evolution into a social business tool. Social mail consideration and adoption are then discussed.

As social collaboration tools become more available and are deployed to more employees, some companies and individuals are looking for these tools to alleviate the growing complaints and irritation of traditional enterprise communication tools, particularly email.  This IDC study takes a look at the current state of enterprise email and the perceived and real problems that surrounds its use.  Rather than envisioning “a world without email”, instead, a future is revealed where email converges with social tools and grows into an innovative hybrid productivity tool to help support the new collaborative enterprise.

The paper is available on ibm.com, with an optional opportunity to register and allow IBM to follow up with you. Please share the web page link rather than the direct file link, as tracking the success of papers like this is what allows us to justify doing more of them…

Link: ibm.com: IDC White Paper – The Future of Mail is Social >