A decision maker is hit with an insane amount of e-mails every day. Learn to capture their attention so you can capture their business with this effective strategy you can apply to every email you send.

Video Transcription

Guys today we’re starting a series on Sales and Marketing e-mails. And I still believe e-mailing 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 e-mails 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 hundred and twenty-one e-mails a day. So it’s no joke. It’s going to be super difficult to cut through all that noise, all the e-mails 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 e-mails you’re sending and see do your e-mails apply these principles. So let’s dive right in.

Short and simple.

The first one is keep your e-mails short and simple. Gone are the days where people want to read two paragraphs in an e-mail. 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 e-mail 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 e-mail 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 e-mail short, but keep them simple to understand.

Focus on your subject line.

Second point. 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 XY 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.

One call to action.

Now the third and final point I’ll make, is make sure you only have one call to action in your e-mail. 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 e-mail that you send.

The takeaway.

So there you have it. Look at the e-mails 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 e-mail? Take action on this today.