We all know that very few of us actually like Cold calling, so email is the obvious other route to make “cold connections”. Email Marketing is a huge market so sometimes we experience a different “spray and Pray”. Recently, I have noticed this trend of getting the same emails from the same company which are often resent from different individuals. What I notice is that they are trying to reflect a natural conversational tone in what is effectively spam. e.g ”I know my colleague John was trying to contact you last week to arrange a meeting so i thought I would resend this so you do not miss this opportunity to……..” What is interesting is that what they are proposing is absolutely of no interest or indeed relevance to my business. These emails often talk about the needs of global businesses with a large number of locations or a large IT infrastructure, neither of which applies to me.
So what should they be doing differently?
Instead of “Cold Calling with email” they should be following the same principles of starting a conversation from cold on the phone:
1. Start the “email conversation” about the company and their business, or the individual executives, not the product or service that they wish to promote
2. Find a valid business reason or valid listening reason to put into the beginning of the email which does exactly that, so that it talks about the prospective company’s world not theirs!
3. If possible they should be getting a referral from a senior executive’s personal assistant which they can put in the subject heading, which makes their email stand out from the hundreds of others they get each day.
4. Use “social proof” as the convincer for them to take further action which says in the email, “we would like a telephone meeting/meeting in order to discuss how we have helped other companies like yours” and give specific examples/case studies if possible.
5. Keep the overall structure of the email brief, so that if the prospective client wants more detail, the link to their website or case studies should be provided. The body of the email and the language should be about them in order to get their attention.
6. When they refer to something about the prospective client and their business, they should use their exact words from the press release, video or source, as people react very emotionally when they hear or see their own language and are more likely to engage with them
I was recently at a conference where I met a telesales executive who took great pride in crafting her emails which really grabbed the attention of the decision-making executives. She said that she really took time to do her research and find out what was important to the target company’s business. Once she had found that she elegantly made the link to her company’s product and services. She said that she made her target effortlessly! This is a better way than spraying and praying people with email in the hope that something will happen.