Reports of email’s death in the B2B world have been greatly exaggerated. True, there’s a lot more of it for your leads to sift through when they’re checking their inboxes every day. There’s also a finite amount of material they can read, which means they’re skimming to find the most important messages—or those emails with the most eye-catching subject lines that are relevant to them.
Still, you may feel like your messages are falling on deaf ears (or blind eyes?) when you notice that no one has been replying to you lately. You have an awesome product/service, so why is no one biting?
To understand why, look first at how email is still important to your new business, courtesy of The Center for Sales Strategy. Emails are generally shown to elicit a stronger response rate when you use 50-125 words, send them first thing in the morning, include a question, and have a 3-4 word subject line. That means no newsletters, sales pitches, late-afternoon check-ins, or surveys.
In other words, write like how you would talk to your leads if they were standing right in front of you. You wouldn’t (I hope) rattle off a list of questions. You’d start with one—i.e., Do you have time for a conversation?—and go from there. You wouldn’t give them a speech on your product, at least before qualifying them as a prospect. And so on.
So the next time you sit back, look at the leads you need to follow up with, and start racking your brain on what to say, stop overthinking it—keep it simple, keep it cordial, and have it focus on starting a conversation.
