How to Write Winning Sales Emails

Your prospects have short attention spans and tons of unread messages in their inboxes. That means you have just three seconds to stand out with your sales emails.

How can your sales team get better open and click-through rates in their emails?

Keep reading to learn some tried-and-true methods of grabbing prospect’s attention with your subject line, persuading them to open cold sales emails, and, importantly, make them eager to respond.

If you apply this blueprint for writing amazing hooks in your subject line and follow our method for sales copy, I guarantee that you will boost your reply rate.

Types of Sales Emails

Before we jump into the basics of creating content, let’s quickly discuss email types and the sales process. Should you bombard your subscribers with daily news clips and blog post links? Or would a dedicated send with one offer better suit your sales funnel? How about a brand story email?

You can send various marketing and effective sales emails, and you’ll need to make an educated decision when choosing the ideal mail type.

Brand Story Emails

Perhaps your business has a unique story behind it? For example, you’ve been around for decades, or you’ve won an award. Use it to create an emotional response with your prospects by reiterating who you are, what you do, and how you’re able to help them.

Email Newsletters

Although usually created by marketing and not sales, email newsletters are a great way to create a foundation for your sales outreach strategy. Content can include current projects or employee profiles. These newsletters enable you to remain top of mind with your prospects.

By the way, if you are not subscribed to Vengreso’s newsletter yet, just click here. We’ll send you a weekly email with amazing content to help you prospect better and sell more.

Prospecting Emails

Prospecting emails are the most common emails a sales rep sends out. Basically, you are connecting with a potential buyer, seeking to start an online sales conversation that will eventually lead to an offline sale.

If you want to write a better sales prospecting email, I highly recommend that you listen to this interview with Shawn Finder, a former semi-pro tennis player and the founder of Autoklose (acquired by VanillaSoft), an email automation tool. We discussed the best tactics for cold emailing and tricks for making your emails convert.

Dedicated Blasts

Also known as dedicated emails or promotional emails, they contain information about one solitary offer.

Perhaps you’re hosting a webinar? These dedicated sends are often dispatched to your entire database and act as a landing page to introduce a call to action.

Video Emails

Did you know that including a video in your email can improve click rates by 65%? According to Campaign Monitor, including a video in your initial email campaign can boost click rates by 96%.

Sending personalized emails with a gif image or a video (where people can click to watch it off the web) is an effective way to stand out from the crowd. Video for sales is a powerful tool that you, as a salesperson, should learn to use.

Sponsorship Emails  

Want to reach a target audience outside of your database? You can pay to include your copy in another vendor’s newsletter or blog post and gain, this is a technique for lead generation.

How to Write Sales Emails

The perfect sales email includes a strong subject line, a strong opening line and a body copy that is relevant (personalized) and helpful (adds a value proposition) to the customer. It should close with a call to action.

The Best Email Subject Lines for Sales

The hook that lures readers in. You’ve got three seconds to entice the reader, so keep subject lines short, and avoid spammy words like ‘sale’, ‘specials’, ‘free’, and ‘tempting’. Your subject line should be personalized and relevant.

Five examples of a good email subject lines for sales:

• A question about [their goal]
• [Mutual connection] said we should get in touch
• Did you find what you were looking for?
• A [benefit] for [their company]
• 5 ideas for [a topic the prospect cares about]

Body Opening Line

The sales email is not about you or even your company. Instead, focus immediately on why you are emailing and how you can help your prospect.

Go for a personalized intro that is relevant to your prospect. For example, imagine there is a market shift in a particular field. You’d want to let your potential customer know that you’ve picked it up and expound on how it can be dealt with (along with your help).

In this case, you might say, “Are you in a position to leverage this new opportunity? Why not try and. . . [insert solution]?”

Or imagine that one of their competitors did something unexpected. This may create a pain point you can exploit. Ask them about their reaction, and offer advice on solutions that could benefit them.

You might write: “We notice that XYZ is using this new [insert product]. Are you planning to keep up with them?

Body Copy

Keep it conversational. Simple language is a powerful language, so avoid silly adjectives and industry jargon.

Don’t confuse your prospect by offering them too many things in your cold email copy. Aim for one very clear goal and write your story around it.

The body copy should be short and the same as your elevator sales pitch because who has time to read a novel?

Call To Action

There’s no point in sending your letter without a solid call to action to up your open rate. This where you pave the way to a close by inserting a question that prompts a response and improves your reply rate.

For example:

• Do you have five minutes to catch up tomorrow?
• Can you let me know how we can take this forward?
• Is [business goal] something we can explore now, or perhaps in the future?

The steps above are easily summarized in our PVC Sales Methodology . PVC stands for Personalization, Value, and Call to Action. Check out this video to learn more about the PVC method for writing sales emails (or any type of sales messaging).

Follow Up Sales Emails

Even if you create a sales email that tantalizes your prospects, you still need to follow up with them. In reality, most sales require up to five follow-up emails before a customer commits.

What you want to do is measure your prospects’ engagement. Perhaps they’ve clicked on a link, and you know that they’ve been toying with the idea of responding. Your sales software should flag this activity and allow you to tailor a well-timed email to reach out with a follow-up email.

Best Time to Send Sales Emails

Is there an ideal day when to send sales emails? Turns out there is.

Studies show that Tuesday is the best day to send emails, with 20% more ‘opens’ than average. Monday and Wednesday follow closely with an 18% higher open rate. Thursday comes in at 15%, and don’t even bother sending emails on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday.

What about the time of day? The ideal time to send is from 10 am to 12 pm, with 11 am as the sweet spot with the most ‘opens’.

We recently conducted a survey among sellers about the time of the day they do most of their prospecting and below are the results. Although the poll does not specify their prospecting channel, we can see that 65% of sellers are prospecting outside the best times to prospect according to the research. No wonder many sellers do not meet their quota!

Best Practices for Sales Emails

A/B Testing

It’s worth A/B testing your subject line with 100 cold emails to see what works. Create two subject lines (but with the same content in the body) and measure the results. Ideally, you should achieve a minimum open rate of 30%.

Customize email

Adjust the body of your email for a more personalized campaign. Perhaps you have a special connection with one of your prospects? Or maybe you read one of their LinkedIn posts?

Irregular sending frequency

Set your marketing automation software to send out emails at irregular time intervals. This prevents them from being marked as spam emails and ending up in the spam folders.

Sales Email Template

The following template follows the PVC methodology and it is personalized to a specific person. In our social selling training program, we teach sales professionals how to do some quick research of your prospects from their LinkedIn profile to personalize your messages.

The second sales email template can be used when you don’t have a lot of details about the recipient and you want to personalize to the buyer persona.

You could also read this blog post from Hunter.io for more cold sales email templates.

Interested in more sales emails templates and speeding up your workday with a writing assistant? Then install our FREE Chrome Extension, FlyMSG, a text expander tool that gives you access to a library of presaved, industry-standard sales messaging templates (FlyPlates) that you can customize and curate for your prospects’ needs.

Are you Ready to Become a Modern Sales Master?

Writing winning sales emails is a skill that sellers can develop with the right sales training program.

At Vengreso, our mission is to help sellers prospect better and sell more, whether through personalized email, social media, phone, or any other channel. That’s why we created the Modern Sales Mastery for Individuals program, with an ever growing number of on-demand sales training courses that will teach you how to book more meetings, grow your sales pipeline, and close more deals.

Curious? Then take a look at our available courses and sign up today, so you can reach the right person in no time! Just click on the image below.