Guest Blog: Important Tips On Creating Effective Sales Emails

There are many benefits of emails as a part of your marketing strategy: from instant communication with your current and prospective clients  to newsletter signups and subscriptions. A lot of managers and business owners consider
emails as a straightforward way of reaching their clients, but this can be a wrong approach. Neglecting basic email communication rules may have a dramatic impact on your sales, since this type of communication builds the exact first
image of your company. Below I highlighted some important rules that will turn your emails into a really effective business tool.

1. Create a magnetic subject line. This is virtually the most important part of your first-time email, since it has to be catchy, interesting to reader and involving. About 80 % of received emails are postponed or not read at all because of a bad-written subject line. Be creative: your goal is to make it totally clear (don't overload it with unnecessary words) and simple, yet to catch client's attention.
2. Include call to action. The CTA part is really important – even if your reader is interested, he needs to be pointed directly to you. It means that you have to include not only links to your website and social network accounts (they have to be easily found in the text body), but there should be links of interest: presentations, free guides, useful tools that only you can provide, and so on.
3. Respond promptly to all emails. This is crucial for your company's public image – delays will make you look amateur and can turn many of your prospective clients away. Even if you are not able to solve the problem right away, you have to make it clear that their message is received. It is extremely important to send personalized follow-up emails as well, since this attention at some point will convert into real sales. Many companies use follow-up software to save time. It can be fine-tuned to your schedule and personalized for each recipient.
4. Research your audience. You have to know exactly who you are sending an email to. The things you have to know about the recipient: how often he/she checks his/her electronic mail, how comfortable is he/she with this type of communication, what impression do you want to make, etc. This research will help you choose a correct tone and style of the letter.
5. Format your emails. It doesn't matter if your target audience is college teenagers or 40+ adults – your message has to look nice. The examples are: highlight important information with capital letters or bold text, separate paragraphs with blank space, use bulleted lists and so on. It is crucial to use proper spelling, grammar and punctuation as well – even if the style is informal, your letter should look professional. Create a rule to proofread every direct sales email before sending.
6. Always use the email signature with your brand name on it. Guess there is nothing to explain here.
7. Include links instead of attachments. Use attachments only if there is no way to make the file available, since many email clients tend to block or put them in the spam folder.

Sending sales emails is still one of the most popular and effective ways to get attention to your products or services, but it is not as straightforward as it seems. You have to always remember who are you communicating with – first of all, it is a real person, that may not be interested in your offers at all. So, your emails need not only to look professional, but also target towards the exact client group. The audience research shouldn't be overestimated either – this will
directly affect the style and even the structure of your emails. Try to provide some value, but still to stay interesting to your recipient. Do you have some more tips to share? Feel free to leave comments below.

Author’s Bio

Post by Alan Donton -  a community and marketing manager at Tickletrain.com, a developer of multifunctional email reminder solutions for businesses of any size with different client communication volumes.