Email Best Practices
How to make your emails more effective
Emails are a major part of sales cadences. Using email best practices will help you to grab attention, avoid spam filters, and find the balance between email or other forms of communication. We combined our huge data set with billions of sales, call, and email transactions, several surveys about cadence and rep behavior, and thousands of anecdotal interactions with top sales leaders to create these email practices.
Email Dos and Don’ts
Keep these tips in mind as you craft your subject lines, introductions, email body, call to actions, and email signature.
| Do | Don’t |
|---|---|
| Keep subject lines around 65 characters. Example: Thanks for your interest – Here’s what we can do for you. | Use sales buzz words. Example: Guaranteed, free, incredible, amazing, cheap, cutting-edge, once-in-a-lifetime opportunity act now!!!! |
| Personalize the introduction of the email to be about the customer. | Don’t begin an email with your name or company’s name. |
| Make your email brief. | Don’t make your email generic or unbelievable. |
| Create a call to action. Ask direct questions. Be very clear about what you want. | Don’t be soft, but don’t be rude. |
| Make your email signature stand out. Give the most direct means of contact in your signature. | Don’t make your signature distracting by including unnecessary contact methods, links to multiples websites and obnoxious banners. |
Email Best Practices
When drafting and sending your email, there are lots of elements to consider. We have found these practices are most effective.
- Best day to send an email is Saturday or Sunday.
- Best time to send an email is 6 to 7 AM or 8 PM.
- Email length should be less than 300 words.
- Use pictures sparingly to avoid Spam filters.
- Keep the content of your email at a third-grade reading level.
- Have no more than one link or attachment to avoid Spam filters.
Some of these practices have been built directly into Playbooks. The SmartSend feature calculates the best time to send an email for your recipient. Once you have created an email strategy that works best for you, use the Email Templates feature in Playbooks to maintain consistency and save time.
Email Strategies
Email best practices are a good start but take it to the next level by developing email strategies. Here are a few samples to get you started. After viewing these, work with your own team to come up with several stategies that can be quickly grabbed/used/referenced as needed.
- Success Story – Buyers love to see proven success. Have a few ready to cover different industries.
- Pain Elimination – Identify pain points and show how you can eliminate them. You Might have something from your marketing team that will work here.
- Research – Educate the recipient not just about your product, but also about the related industry. Use internal or external research to set yourself up in a partnering, consultative role.
Now take the email strategies you created and put each one in an email template in Playbooks. Those templates can be woven into a Play or used individually with Click-to-Email. For more information on building Plays, best practices and sales cadence strategy take the Play Maker Course.
