Crafting the perfect sales email isn’t an easy task. You’ve got to consider your requirements as a business, and the product or service you’re selling. You have to get into the mind of the recipient. You need to write compelling, engaging copy. All of this is an involved process, but it is made far more effective when the following sales email best practices are adhered to.

In this article, we will share:

  • What Is The Structure Of The Perfect Sales Email?
  • The 13 Essential Sales Email Best Practices

What Is The Structure Of The Perfect Sales Email?

There’s an argument that there is no such thing as the perfect structure for a sales email. After all, each email should be individualized and specialized to the business writing it, based on their own products, tailored specifically to the recipient. That said, there is definitely a structure that we can hang our own content to deliver the best sales outreach we can:

  • Subject Line: Subject lines are an absolute necessity for all sales emails. They should be clear, concise, engaging, and striking. They are your opportunity to grab the recipient’s attention before they move on to the next email.

  • Opening Line: Your subject line has caught their attention, and they’re interested enough to click. What comes next (following the greeting) is your opening line. Once again, you have the length of that sentence to get them engaged and willing to spend their valuable time reading more.

  • The Body: The bulk of the remainder of the email. This is where you get into detail. This is where you sell the dream. The best practices listed below will all contribute to the body text. As with everything, this should be clear and concise. Avoid a wall of text at all costs.

  • Call To Action: Your recipient has made it all the way to the end of your email, which means they are genuinely engaged. What should they do next? You can guide them with your call to action.

These four key elements should be present in every sales email. The majority of the time, you’ll include all of them naturally. The next stage is to not just include them but to master their use so that your emails are working as an extension of your sales team themselves.

The 13 Essential Sales Email Best Practices

The structure is a great starting point. Now it’s time to get into more detail. What follows is a list of the most essential best practices to help you write sales emails that get responses. You should take time to build these into your daily process. They should be part of your sales mantra. Once you’ve mastered these, you’ll quickly find that conversions will rapidly come your way.

Avoid Sounding Like A Salesperson

People don’t like to be sold to, it feels like someone is just after you for your money, and that’s an unpleasant feeling. That means talking like a salesperson and coming across as a salesperson isn’t going to do you any favors. Instead, you want to take on the persona of an advisor. Your role is to share useful, valuable insights and information that could help someone make their own, informed decision.

Remember that customers today are inundated with promotional emails, and if yours sounds like a typical sales pitch, it will be ignored or even deleted. Instead, emphasize how your product or service can solve their problems or meet their needs to provide value to your customers.

Always Offer Value

If you’re looking to maximize your conversions, you need to offer value. People will engage with you if they feel that they’re already getting value from the email in the first place. Focus on the benefits of your product or service rather than its features. Highlight how your product can help the customer solve a problem or improve their life. Include specific examples of how your product has benefited other customers and testimonials or case studies to support your claims.

You might even consider offering a promotion or discount to the recipient as an extra incentive. This encourages them to engage while also increasing conversions.

Remember That You’re Talking To A Person

It’s uncomfortable when you’re treated as a number or a line on a spreadsheet. People want to have conversations and feel like they’re being treated as human beings rather than as sales statistics.

Make your sales email more personal by addressing the recipient by name and using a conversational tone. The use of overly formal or generic language can make your email appear impersonal and distant. Instead, use friendly and engaging language that demonstrates you've researched the recipient's interests and needs.

If They’re Uninterested, Move On

Recognizing when a prospect is uninterested and moving on is one of the keys to maximizing conversions. Sending emails to people who have expressed no interest in your product or service can harm your reputation and waste valuable time and resources.

Keep track of who has and has not responded to your emails. If you have not received a response after several attempts, move on. Instead, concentrate your efforts on prospects who have expressed interest or have a higher likelihood of converting.

Leverage The Preview

After the subject line comes the preview. This small snippet of text is a small preview of the email’s content, but this doesn’t have to be pulled through automatically. You might not want the opening and first line of your email to be in the preview. Instead, you can set this manually. This gives you complete customization over what your recipient first sees.

Easy To Use CTAs = Easy Conversions

Your CTA is your opportunity to turn an engaged recipient and reader into an engaged prospect. Think carefully about what you’d like the person reading the email to do next. Do you want them to book a meeting with you? Maybe you’d like them to read a particular blog article related to their needs. Perhaps you’d be keen for them to view a demo of your product. Whatever it is, be sure to be clear and concise with your request. Make it a single click so that they can complete your request with minimal effort.

Personalization

Personalization is key to cultivating a real relationship with your recipients. The main issue is that personalization at scale is difficult. If you’re sending hundreds or even thousands of emails a day, you can’t get incredibly personal. You can, however, include small personalized elements (such as their name, company name, etc.) that at least give the illusion that you’re communicating with them directly.

The best personalization will require some manual intervention. You could include a personal reference to when you last met them, or ask if they attended a mutual event. You might even make a reference to something that they posted on social media. This style of personalization is far more effective but requires considerably more effort.

You could also include opportunities for the recipient to interact and engage with you. Encourage them to respond to the email with feedback, questions, or comments. Links to your social media profiles can also be included to provide another channel for direct communication.

Always Follow Up

Very few people will engage with the first cold email that they receive. That goes even more so for a cold sales email. They might require a number of follow-up emails before they even consider responding. That prospect might be reading and consuming your email, even interacting with your CTA or website, before they respond. That means you need to keep following up with them so that you stay on their radar.

Don’t Follow Up Too Much

There is, however, a limit. There comes a point where you simply begin to look desperate and potentially a bit creepy. If it begins to feel this way, remove that address from your list and move on. Refer to the point above, “If They’re Uninterested, Move On.”

Get Automated

Automation can make the world of sales emails a breeze. With the right email tool, automation is completely possible. You can automate follow-ups based on the user's activity. You can automate the path that a prospect might take in your email sequence based on their interactions. You can even automate the sending of your initial emails so that they send at precisely the right time and date.

Remember Mobile Users

If you’re going to craft beautiful-looking HTML emails, the chances are you’re going to do that on a desktop. They’ll look brilliant, and you’ll be pleased with the results. The issue is that many people forget about mobile users when developing them. This can create emails that are hard to read and, ultimately, emails that are going to be ignored and deleted. Always take the time to remember and build for mobile users.

Always Be Testing

If you’ve got multiple ideas and you’re not sure which is going to get the best response, run a quick A/B test. The test will change just one variable, such as the subject line, the CTA, or the greeting. Take your two variations and send the emails out to two different groups of people, track the results, and see which got the best response. You can then use the better-performing content going forward.

Track, Measure, Adapt

You’ll never know how well your campaign is performing unless you’re spending time tracking all of your email metrics. In fact, you should be tracking each of your sales funnel metrics across all of your different channels. By tracking metrics, you’re able to measure your success, but better yet, you’re also able to adapt your process to maximize results in the future.

Key Takeaways

These best practices, when followed, will put you and your sales team in the best possible position to capture the recipient’s attention, turn them into genuine prospects, and eventually gain conversion after conversion.

  • There is a structure you can use, but personalizing your own structure will lead to the best results.
  • Always track your campaigns in order to measure success.
  • Using a quality email tool will maximize your campaign's effectiveness.

If you’d like to harness incredible automation, powerful account warmup, unlimited accounts, and customizable email sequencing, you’ll definitely want to make use of Instantly’s free trial.