Optimizing Email for Better Sales Closes
The elements that most often impact the success of email sales are the following:
• coordination between marketing and sales in the lead generation and sales conversion and close processes;
• email spam blockers that prevent email from getting to consumers;
• poorly developed messaging and email content;
• lack of tracking and follow-up; and
• failure to take full advantage of sales automation and optimization tools.
“Organizationally, the first thing companies should do is decide who owns sales lead generation,” Dickie says. “Both sales and marketing have their own work to do, which is why lead generation often gets left behind.”
When leads aren’t developed and followed up on in a timely fashion, opportunities are lost.
“It was shown in a study that Harvard conducted that if you reached out to someone within one hour of your initial engagement with that person, there was a six times greater chance that you would engage that person in a sale,” Brink says. “Sales automation tools for lead generation and follow-up can improve results for companies when they don’t necessarily have to rely on humans to do all of the lead follow-ups and tracking.”
However, even with sales automation tools, there must be an internal decision about who is going to be responsible for sales lead generation and follow-up.
“There can be a dispute between marketing and sales if a campaign isn’t successful,” Brink says. “Marketing might say that sales failed to follow up in a timely way on leads, and sales might say the leads that marketing provided weren’t that good. Who is at fault? The only way you’ll understand root causes is if you’ve tracked the entire sales engagement process with consumers so you can see where the process fell apart.”
AVOIDING THE SPAM FOLDER
Many consumers and businesses also have spam blockers that are intended to screen out cold-call sales email—and most of them do exactly that.
“Having effective content in your subject line that can escape being classified as spam is the key here,” Brink advises. “If you don’t have a strong subject line for your email that can overcome these spam blockers, your message is not going to get to your audience.”
Brink also advises keeping email messages short and sweet. “The shorter the email, the better,” he says. “If you include more than three links in your email, you have a much higher likelihood of getting blocked out by a spam filter, and if you use HTML, there is also a greater likelihood of being blocked. Keep your email messages short, sweet, and intriguing.”
But overcoming the spam blockers is just a small part of an overall email content strategy that all email marketers and sales reps should have if they want to improve sales reach and close rates.
The real key is having excellent content (including subject line development) that is purposed to each consumer so that it can captivate consumer interest, persuade these individuals to read on, and hopefully get them to consummate a sale.
“All marketers are competing for attention,” says Vern Oakley, CEO of Tribe, which personalizes email messages to consumers and others with video. “It’s the rarest of commodities. So when you come up with something that’s fresh, novel, and personal, it really makes an impact. We’re always thinking about how to make a human connection. It seems paradoxical that we’re using technology to get more human, but that is actually the case.”
Tribe personalizes video and then emails the videos to recipients, sending out thousands or even millions of these videos at a time.
“Personalized video has an average 87 percent increased click-through rate versus traditional email,” Oakley states. “And viewing rates are [up] 73 percent versus generic video, with the majority of viewers watching the video until the end. We’re helping faceless companies become more human to their audiences, which helps to pull their audiences in and build longer-term brand loyalty”
One major box store used Tribe’s technology in a recent credit card campaign. It sent out 686,182 emails, which had a 50 percent open rate and a 45 percent click-to-open rate. Additionally, 74.7 percent of recipients watched the personalized videos that were sent to them through to the end.
Oakley believes that the moment is right for personalized video for a few reasons. “One is that the technology for rendering individual videos has finally become efficient,” he says. “Two is that there’s a default now that every company we work with is collecting huge amounts of data. And three is that email marketing is becoming less effective from overuse. So the marketing problem we’re solving is declining engagement in terms of email marketing. Personalization shows exponentially more effective open and click rates.”