Emails have been in the mainstream since the past 3 decades. It’s been a useful tool of communication since then. The problem is that it’s so easy and inexpensive to send one that there are so many of them floating around in the virtual world. It’s no secret that your prospect or customer gets a lot of them everyday. An average person receives 100-120 emails a day. Switch the average person with a person of high importance (your customer falls into this category) you can easily double that number or more. When selling to a corporate organization, your prospect falls into the organizational hierarchy. He/she is going to receive plenty of emails from the management, peers and you. You can imagine where you’d fall in the order of priority.
Just a general rule of thumb, any successful salesperson should value themselves enough to be valued by others. This also extends to the emails you send out. In a sense every email you send to your prospect or customer is telling something about your value and also the value you ascribe to them. Hence a savvy sales professional uses email sparingly with known contacts. You want your emails and messages to be given their due. Each time your email is ignored or deleted you can imagine that your relationship has died a little. Ideally you shouldn’t get to a spot where your mails are not even looked at.
In the classic door to door selling, a salesperson has lots of thoughts running through their heads while approaching a door to knock it: what kind of mood will the inmates be in, will they be rude or gentle, will they open the door, will they slam the door on their face etc. Before you send an email, I want you to picture your prospect or customer too: Do you think they’ll be waiting at their desk waiting in anticipation of your email to open and respond immediately or will they be most likely to be running around between meetings, trying to respond to the important emails according to their criteria. I’m certain you answered that it’ll be the latter. Use that scenario in your head to write an email which suits that situation. Remember if your email is missed during the brief periods of attention that the customer has, there is a high chance that it might get relegated to a later period of time due to the timestamp and might not get opened at all.
Make it a resolution to help your customer (especially the ones you have a relationship with) quickly make sense of the email you have sent and respond to it appropriately with not toom much of an effort.
In this age of digital technology, most of the emails are being read on a hand-held device. While that makes it very convenient for the user, it also means that they have a limited screen to view the message that’s been received by them. In a lot of these hand held devices, the most the recipient can see is the subject and at max 2-3 initial lines of the message. With both your and the customer’s time in mind, it’ll be ideal if the message you want to send across can be communicated in a way that’ll fall within these parameters. If that’s not a possibility, then at least make sure that your initial few sentences are enough to trigger the customer to open the mail and read it.
With the subject line being a crucial driver for emails to be opened or not, here are some ways you can increase the chances of your email being opened and read:
- If you are responding to something your customer requested for: Start the subject line with: As you requested. As I have mentioned in some of my previous blogs, keeping your customer as the center of attention is quite important. It’s human nature to be valued, so if you do not give them the importance they desire, it’s very unlikely that you’ll get any attention back. The subject line here keeps the customer at the center of it, because it mentions that the information contained in the email was requested by him/her. In such a case it’s very hard to ignore the email.
- If you have a question that is important and needs to be answered by the customer: Start the subject line with: Critical: Request your inputs. Again the customer is at the center of the conversation and with the word ‘Critical’ you’ve conveyed that the message is important. Please ensure that the message is definitely important, because if you misuse the statement, you’ll be left with one less subject line to work with in the future.
- While following up: Start the subject line with: RESEND: <add the previous subject>. In the body of the email i.e. the first few sentences write: “I’m resending this email in case it didn’t get through to you. Request your inputs on the following:” Most email subjects that are sent with a follow-up start with “Re:”. “RESEND” in turn changes that to a more urgent tone and shall prompt a response.
- Important email: As mentioned previously throughout my blogs, it’s important to keep a multi-dimensional approach to contact your customers. Just having one medium will not get you the desired effects. While we are focused on emails in this blog, an effective method of getting a response to your email is to use another medium to let the customer know that an important email is on their way. A text message is the best so as to let the customer look at it at their convenience. A call can be used for supercritical messages.
- High priority emails: Noticed that there is a ‘High Priority’ button on top of the email you are about to send? Please use it sparingly if at all to your customers. Irrespective of how important the message is, chances are that people are going to ticked off seeing it.
CONCLUSION
Email is a very common mode of communication and used by almost everyone. In order to stand out, there are certain things you should keep in mind. Keeping your recipient at the core of the message is the key. Use the above tips at appropriate times to ensure that you get a response and move along your sales cycle.
