Every day around the world billions of emails are being sent – quite literally. In 2015, research by The Racadati Group found that around 2015 Billion emails are being sent globally each and every day.
Amongst all of these emails that are shooting all around the place are millions and millions of sales emails. And as I said in my last post, I bet the majority of them are pretty bad – which means that the chances of a decision maker not only reading your email, but then taking the time to reply to it and agree to a meeting is slim.
Unless what’s in your email is pretty darn compelling.
What to include in a great sales email
The way you structure a sales email and the content you include in it is critical. But before you even start thinking about that, there’s an element that is even more critical to get right.
And that’s your intent.
Most sales emails are so bad because the purpose or intent of the email is to try and make a sale – if not as a result of the email, then at least as a result of the meeting that follows. And when you have this intent at the back of your mind when you write your sales emails, there is no hiding it from the recipient.
What they’ll see are words from you like:
– ‘we have…’ or ‘we are…’
– ‘how we can help you…’
– ‘working together…’
– ‘our product…’
Words that make the reader feel like you’re going to try to push a sale. That you only want to meet with them because you want them to buy something and there’s something in it for you. And that is very unlikely to compel someone to want to meet with you. Because while most people love to buy, we all know that most people hate being sold to.
What your intent should be
To make your sales emails great, your intent should not be to try to sell something – now or as a result of the meeting you want.
Your only intent is to get a meeting.
So if I approach my sales emails with my only intent being to get a meeting, that immediately changes the way I will approach the email and the content I include. Because if that is my intent, I have to come up with a meeting around a topic that the other person will really want to meet me about. And in most cases that will have nothing to do with what I do or what I am trying to sell.
But how do you come up with this topic?
In the second video in my free video training series, I’ll introduce you to a tool you can use to help you identify what that topic might be. We call it the Focus-5, and it’s a great way of helping you get inside the other person’s head to work out what is going on in their world that you could pitch them a meeting about.
What are some of the topics that you have recently come up with that have helped you get a meeting with a decision maker? Join in the conversation about this post over on LinkedIn here.