Email is a prospecting channel widely used by salespeople. However, the high level of competition on this channel requires you to work in depth on your messages (in other words, each email) to stand out from the crowd.
In fact, most prospecting emails go unanswered. To succeed, you must adopt the best practices in commercial emailing. In particular, you will benefit from focusing on the personalization – contextualization – automation triptych of each email.
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Email prospecting is a practice commonly used by salespeople to obtain appointments. Inexpensive, emailing is affordable for most businesses . It is also perceived as less intrusive than teleprospecting by decision-makers. In fact, they can consult an email at the time of their choice without necessarily interrupting their current activity.
However, the success of email as a marketing channel has led to saturation in customer inboxes. In B2B, a decision-maker receives up to 100 prospecting messages daily.
Therefore, if you want your messages to be opened, read and generate engagement, you must optimize every element of your email campaign. Recipients quickly detect messages sent in mass and without real added value. These will be deleted or placed in spam.
To achieve your goals, you need to create emails that stand out from the crowd. And, for this, it is important to focus on the personalization of each email.
The email prospecting file that you have created probably includes different types of target customers.
Indeed, they can differentiate themselves by the position they occupy, the type of company or even the sector of activity. In addition to socio-demographic data, behavioral data can also show you divergent interests. But above all, not everyone has the same maturity in relation to your offer. For some, the purchasing intention is strong while, for others, it is not yet evident.
In your prospecting campaigns, you are not going to send the same message to a mature prospect as to a prospect who barely knows you. Likewise, you will create separate messages for recipients with different profiles.
To do this, you must define segmentation criteria that are relevant to your offer and your objectives. Then, you will create messages tailored to each segment. By segment, we designate a homogeneous group of individuals with similar characteristics.
Segmentation allows you to:
Sending automated emails to segmented lists is useful when prospects are still relatively immature, in a lead nurturing logic. On the other hand, further along the purchasing journey, in the context of making commercial contact, personalization still needs to be refined.
Segmentation allows you to group prospects with common characteristics. It is therefore a good marketing starting point for building an argument responding to shared issues.
However, it is not enough to guarantee high performance for your commercial emails. Indeed, competition in inboxes is so severe that only the most engaging messages will deliver results.
To succeed, you must create emails that are perfectly aligned with the issues of your recipients. This is why it is essential to do preliminary research before sending a prospecting email.
First, you can display their prospect file in your CRM tool to consult their profile information and history. Then you will also find relevant information on LinkedIn in different places:
By doing this research, you will be more likely to find an engaging hook for your message. In fact, you will be able to pick up on one of its latest posts or on a recent success of the company or important sectoral information.
For example, if you do international management consulting and discover on LinkedIn that your prospect's company will soon open new offices in England, you have an ideal angle of attack.
Prospecting marketing emails work well when they provide value to the prospect. This is why personalization is imperative. But personalizing a message does not just mean integrating the “first name” field into an emailing template. This is far from enough.
More than personalization, we should even talk about contextualization. An email is effective when you send the right message to the right person at the right time. The level of performance of an email campaign largely depends on the sender's ability to understand and use the context.
For this, it is necessary to:
Indeed, you must adapt your messages by providing value at each stage of the sales cycle. Emailing is built in sequences. Most contacts will not react from the first message but only after several contacts. With each new message, you have to think about providing value and not causing rejection. The first contact email is not used to sell. It serves to provide the means to engage the prospect to continue the conversation.
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You can have an exceptional offer and write the best sales emails in the universe. All this is for nothing if recipients don't open your messages.
During the first contact, your recipient does not necessarily know you. In this case, the subject of the email is the only thing that can decide to open your message. The average opening rate in B2B emailing is between 20 and 25%. But this is not inevitable. We can greatly exceed these scores by adopting a few good practices.
Let's assume that you have well segmented your database and done preliminary research on your recipient. Now you know that in their inbox, your message will compete with other commercial messages. In a few fractions of a second, the prospect will decide whether your message is heading to the trash bin or whether it deserves their attention. What will make the difference?
The subject has only one objective: to make the contact want to consult your message. Don't try to sell or say too much. That would be counterproductive.
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The prospect opened your message. Well done ! But the game is still far from won. At the first sign of trouble, he may still decide to throw your email in the trash and cut short the commercial relationship that you wanted to initiate with him.
After the subject line, the hook phrase is your second opportunity to make a good first impression. This is why it absolutely must be contextualized on the basis of your preliminary research.
A common mistake is to introduce yourself in the introduction to the message: “Hello, I am Jean-Pierre Durand, sales manager for Dupont Mobilier, Franche-Comté leader in office furniture for businesses…”. However, at this stage, your interlocutor is not yet interested in who you are.
By starting like this, you have every chance of falling by the wayside. Policymakers already receive dozens of messages that start this way. So you don't differentiate yourself. Worse, you don't provide value.
Therefore, it is better to favor an approach centered on the prospect and their problems. This tells him that he is not one contact among others in a mass email. You know its context, you understand it. And so, it might be worth reading to the end.
Once you have set the scene with the catchphrase, the prospect understands that you are aware of their problems. He identifies you as a worthy interlocutor and is ready to continue the conversation.
Now is the time to submit your offer. Here again, subtlety is key. It's not about presenting all the features or even all the benefits of your offer. It’s about saying: “ We’ve identified a problem that’s holding you back. Well, we have the solution .”
You can show that you are an expert in your field, for example, by sharing content on the subject.
The purpose of the commercial email is often to obtain an appointment. Either way, you want to get an answer. The best thing is to ask. The structure of the message is as follows:
This third step is the call-to-action. You want to encourage the prospect to take a step in your direction, to take an action. For example, if it is a question of obtaining a sales meeting, your call-to-action could take this form: “ Will you be available Tuesday at 11 a.m. to discuss the new layout of your workspace for a few minutes ? ".
Finally, the email signature provides the recipient with the necessary contact information to continue the conversation. But, in addition to this practical side, you can also use it to push content or an event that you are organizing.
Decision-makers have little time to devote to prospecting emails. So now is not the time to embark on major developments. If you say too much, you'll pull the rug out from under your feet for a future meeting. And, worse still, you are more likely to tire of your interlocutor.
Remember that the objective of your message is not to sell but to initiate the conversation which will ultimately lead to sales. The nuance is important. To arouse curiosity and desire, you do not have to reveal everything, just what is strictly necessary.
Construct your contact emails in 4 to 5 sentences based on the model: hook – introduction to the offer – call-to-action. Between each phase, pass a line to make your message more airy and more readable. But also to allow the reader to take a break between each step.
Furthermore, favor a natural presentation in terms of design. Your email should look like a classic, warm message. By opting for a sought-after template and multiplying the images, you are already in a bidding war. The risk is that the prospect will see you arriving with your big sales shoes and will not want to go any further.
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One of the secrets to success for top salespeople is perseverance. For many reasons, it often happens that the first email goes unanswered.
This doesn't necessarily mean it was bad or lacked relevance. Maybe the recipient put it aside and forgot to come back to it. Maybe he didn't arrive at the right time. Or maybe you didn't emphasize the right hooks.
In all cases, unless the interlocutor has expressly refused your proposal, you can try your luck again. You can even go up to 7 or 8 raises.
A bit like the reminder at the end of concerts, you will benefit from organizing your follow-up process. To do this, it is necessary to prepare email sequences and automate them according to specific criteria.
For example, you are not going to send the same follow-up message to a prospect who opened the message and clicked on a link as to a prospect who did not even open it. Thanks to your tracking tools, you can see how the recipient interacted with your first message. This way, you can adapt your first reminder and send it within 24 to 48 hours.
The first reminder email can be used to:
In any case, the creation of emailing sequences implies that you have not unpacked all your sales arguments from the first email. You need to be able to add value to each new message you send.
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The first message in the sequence, the contact email, is particularly sensitive. Even though it won't necessarily generate immediate engagement, it often happens that the recipient reads it and forms an opinion about you.
This message can therefore strongly determine the opening of the other messages in the sequence and its outcome. You should pay particular attention to your hook to make the prospect want to continue reading. When it comes to commercial emails, you have to write each sentence to make your contact want to read the next one.
In the catchphrase, you can, for example, rely on the recommendation of a mutual contact:
Hello Antoine,
Jean-Pierre Durand recommended that I contact you. We work together on Dupont Mobilier's content strategy
He told me about your difficulties in generating qualified traffic to your site. This is precisely one of the problems that our offer addresses.
Will you be available next Tuesday at 11 a.m. to chat for a few minutes on this subject?
If you do not have a common contact, you can rely on company news
Hello Antoine,
I have just read the article in Courrier Franc-Comtois on Antoine & Co's international expansion project.
However, I noticed that your website is exclusively in French. Do you plan to release it in English? This is precisely one of the problems that our offer addresses.
Will you be available on Wednesday at 3 p.m. to chat for a few minutes on this subject?
For the first follow-up email, you can start with a reminder shot. The idea of this first message is simply to repeat the terms of the commercial contact message.
RE: Content strategy Antoine & Co
Hello Antoine
I wanted to make sure you received my email from last week. As a reminder, I suggest you discuss the English language version of the content on your website.
Will you be available tomorrow at 10 a.m. to chat for a few minutes on this subject?
Or can I contact one of your colleagues on your behalf to discuss this issue?
THANKS.
Good day.
To provide additional value to your contact, you can include in your follow-up a link to relevant content related to their problem. For example :
RE: Content strategy Antoine & Co
Hello Antoine
I wanted to know if you were able to read my message from last week. As a reminder, I suggest you discuss the English language version of the content on your website.
I recently published this article on the benefits of having a multilingual website.
Will you be available next Monday at 2 p.m. to discuss this subject?
Prospecting by email requires perseverance. It is common for a salesperson to only be able to engage a prospect after the 6th or 7th message.
Obviously, carrying out these multiple reminders manually would be extremely tedious and time-consuming. This is why it is desirable to turn to a solution that allows you to create automated sequences.
With Magileads, you can easily create prospecting email workflows to send messages adapted to your contact and their level of maturity. For example, it will only take a few clicks to follow up with a prospect based on an action taken following your previous message.
Thanks to its lead scoring functionality, Magileads also allows you to carefully evaluate a prospect's purchasing intention. So, you can decide, send a personalized proposal or plan a sales call if you see that the prospect is sufficiently mature.
Upon support, your email tracking data is automatically integrated into the Magileads CRM. At the time of the call, you know exactly how the prospect interacted with your messages, which messages they opened, whether they clicked on links or took any other action.
This behavioral data allows the salesperson to adapt his speech and boost performance.
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