Decision-makers are bombarded by email marketing to the point that hundreds of messages stay in their inboxes, unread for weeks until they are deleted. If you want their attention, follow these three cardinal rules and apply them to every email you send.

Video Transcription

Guys today we’re starting a series on Sales and Marketing emails. And I still believe emailing is a super effective way, an efficient way, to reach a prospect. But, some stats that you should be aware of, is there’s literally an estimated two hundred and five billion emails sent a day. That breaks down to 2.4 million e-mails a second, and I read that the average office worker is receiving a 120 emails a day. So it’s no joke. It’s going to be super difficult to cut through all that noise, all the emails they’re receiving to try to get some of your prospects’ attention.

So what I want to do, is I want to give you guys three overarching principles, and I want you to look at the emails you’re sending and see do your emails apply these principles. So let’s dive right in.

Keep it short and simple

The first one is keep your emails short and simple. Gone are the days where people want to read two paragraphs in an email. In fact, I barely want to read a couple sentences. I tell my sales guys a good benchmark is ten lines or fewer. Keep your email super short. Not only do you want it to be short, you want to look at what you’re presenting to that prospect and is it simple to understand? Write your email as if you’re writing it to an eighth-grader. You’re literally going to have five seconds of attention from that prospect. Are they going to understand what you’re pitching to them in that five seconds? Keep your email short, but keep them simple to understand.

Focus on your subject line

Second, focus on your subject line and your first sentence. I’m going to use the 80/20 rule here, that overused business rule, but I think it’s a good point to make. Literally eighty percent of your time should be focused on crafting a great subject line and a great first sentence. You literally will have one out of three people determine whether or not they open your e-mail on the subject line alone. Now I’m going to link in the description below to an article I wrote on crafting a great subject line so you have that. But a tip I’ll give you is wherever you can, personalize the subject line and the first sentence. You can literally boost your open rate by twenty- two percent. Don’t be a generic salesperson introducing yourself in the first sentence saying, Hi my name is Luke Acree, President of ReminderMedia. No one cares. Focus on who you’re sending to. Maybe you’re sending an e-mail to me and you noticed I just wrote a blog about cold calling. Say Hey Luke I just checked out your blog on cold calling, and I thought the points you made in X, Y, and Z we’re great. I like to hear about myself, I don’t want to hear about you. So focus on crafting a personalized subject line and first sentence wherever you can.

Include one call to action

Finally, make sure you only have one call to action in your email. I think this is where sales people get the most tripped up because we get overanxious I guess and put everything into our e-mails that we can fit in, and we end up confusing our prospect. You want to make it super simple for your prospect to know what the next steps are. If you want them to call you back, make sure that’s just the call to action. Maybe it’s checking out a landing page. Make sure you have just one call to action in every email that you send.

The takeaway

So there you have it. Look at the emails you’re sending today guys, and look and make sure are they short, is it simple and easy to understand, and then are you spending the majority of your time crafting a great subject line and first sentence, and then last but not least, do you have just one call to action in your email? Take action on this today.