Email Marketing Strategies & Best Practices with William Ballance, #209

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The B2B sales landscape has shifted from the phone to the email inbox. With the average consumer being bombarded with over 5,000 sales and marketing messages every day – knowing how to stand out in the inbox is what most sellers are struggling with.

But, the key to getting your cold outreach messages read and responded to comes down to nailing a few important email strategies.

And, those specific (and winning) email marketing strategies are exactly the topic of discussion in this episode of the Modern Selling Podcast.

My guest, William Ballance is not just the expert in everything email marketing, but his company is leading the way in how B2B sellers are crafting sales messages and engaging with prospects in new and innovative ways.

William Ballance is the CEO of Lavender.ai, a psychology-driven tool designed to help sellers write better emails faster by leveraging cutting-edge AI insights on individuals’ personalities. So, if you’ve ever wondered how to get in the inbox and stay there – this is the episode to download and listen to all the way to the end!

In our in-depth discussion we dive deep into what’s working now to draw in the distracted, post-pandemic buyer, what sales teams should be saying in their email outreach, and the “sales formula” to get a response – every time!

Be sure you download this episode and pay particular attention to what William says is really driving response rates!

How has email marketing changed since the pandemic?

The B2B selling environment today is very different than it was three years ago. I wanted to pick William’s brain and get a better understanding of what he’s seeing in the market and why it’s becoming harder to get sales meetings via email.

What he shares gave me a whole new perspective on the topic, “Many sales teams did a lot of selling by phone. But with COVID and the world immediately going online or working remotely, office numbers suddenly didn’t work. So, if you didn’t have mobile numbers, you had no choice but to shift to email. Data shows that there has been a 16% immediate increase in outbound sales emails and an 8% decline in response rates. Why? Because overnight there was immediately more noise.”

This is spot-on as researchers have found that the number of emails being sent is at an all-time high. Microsoft found that between 2021 and 2022, some 40 billion more emails have been sent. 

With this astronomical increase in what I call “digital pollution” there’s no wonder that so many sales outreach messages go unread.

Listen to the full conversation to hear what William suggests sales teams do to break through the email noise and land in front of prospects at the right time with the right messages.

Should B2B sellers send more emails to get more responses?

This is a common question we hear a lot in B2B sales circles. Does sending more email outreach messages actually equate to better response rates?

I wanted to see what William’s data shows, “Even though we’re using email more, it’s not necessarily increasing our results. Where it normally took 8 to 12 touches to get a response. It’s now taking anywhere between 12 to 16 touches to get a response by a buyer. So, we are sending more emails but with fewer results. Why not shift how we do things and send the right messages that get immediate responses?”

This sales mindset shift is exactly what we teach at Vengreso in our PVC Methodology. The goal is not to arbitrarily send emails to eventually get a response, but, instead to send messages that are hyper-personalized and designed to pull prospects in – even with the first outreach.

When B2B buyers get hundreds, if not thousands of sales messages every week, it’s easy to get lost in the flood of emails in their inbox. What modern sellers do well is they know how to draw prospects in with their subject lines, what to say in the email opener, and how to make their messages so succinct and compelling that prospects want to read them and take action.

I ask William to explain the process he teaches sales teams to take to craft winning and (highly readable) emails.

His approach involves what he calls a “one scroll” method. That is you want to include your entire outreach message in no more than one scroll so that prospects get the information they need without having to read for more than 15 seconds.

To hear other must-dos when it comes to your email marketing, listen to the entire episode and pay close attention to the “new” word count William suggests you hit with every email.

What are B2B sales emails best practices?

Depending on who you ask, this could be a loaded question. The important thing to note when crafting a sales email is to think first about who you’re sending it to.

I find that so often sales professionals send generic, copy-and-paste sales emails that lack personality or any form of personalization. This makes it easy for them to go unread because they’re like the hundreds of other emails vying for attention in your buyers’ inbox.

I wanted to see what unique strategies or best practices William uses and sees that work thanks to his innovative email AI technology.

He highly recommends that B2B sellers do the following:

1. Go with short emails. And when William says short, he means no more than 50-75 words short. In his research, he’s found that the average reading attention span is now 15-30 seconds max.
2. Don’t overcomplicate your email. Many times sellers include everything under the sun in their emails. Williams suggests making your email short and easy enough to read that a fifth grader would understand it.
3. Make your email highly relevant. Personalization is important, but make sure how you personalize your email is relevant to the reader. Mentioning that you share an alma mater or have a similar interest can miss the mark if it has nothing to do with why you are reaching out.

William shares even more tips and tricks that are moving the sales email needle in the episode. Download the full conversation to get all of his psychology-based principles and proven email strategies.

Should you include your Calendly link in your sales emails? Listen in to find out what it could really be doing to your response rate!