by Will Rotondi
It’s easy to want to dazzle your prospects with your brand image and other visuals in order to get them pumped about your company. It’s not your fault if you’ve tried this in an email – it’s just your inner marketer showing.
Even Rally enjoys a good glamour shot.
While marketing is obviously important and successful in many social spaces, it’s not terribly effective when it comes to email prospecting. I say this because when you want to put a lot of graphics in your messages, they tend to give you grief in 3 ways:
They’ll get you caught by spam filters. Graphics are often reserved for email blasts, and spam filters are designed to flag these – especially if they’re coming from an unknown sender (that’d be you). The fewer graphics, the better chance you’ll be able to make it through to your prospects’ inboxes.
They’ll make you appear impersonal. Your inner marketer may take offense to this one, but hear me out. Not only do graphics-filled emails get interpreted by spam filters as coming from a blast, your prospects will also assume that they are solely based on their appearance. That impression can overshadow any sense that you were writing directly to them.
They make the email more about you than about your prospects. The very nature of prospecting is finding out who can be added to your normal sales pipeline, which means you know nothing about them, and they know nothing about you. People are often leery of those they don’t know on the Internet, and are more likely to talk with you when you provide them with some incentive. In this case, that comes in the form of sharing brief, informative, non-salesy messaging to show them you’re a real authority in your market.
