Email strategy to help boost sales and engagement

Some sales people often don’t follow up on their introductions and pitches. This is a serious mistake! Whether you have sent a first email, or are actually continuing on from face-to-face contact, following up sales prospects by executing a well thought out email strategy is proven to increase conversion.

Research has uncovered an awful lot of stats about email marketing. Many sources of information make claims based on a single piece of investigative work. However, such a narrow view often leads to misleading conclusions.

Determining best practice for follow up sales emails needs to result from looking at the outputs from multiple research initiatives. It is important to identify factors that are shown to consistently influence uplifts in conversion rates.

Email best practices sales professionals use to increase conversion

4 cornerstones of creating emails that boost conversion are below. These are takeaways established over two decades resulting from numerous research initiatives. As such, they represent of best practice for sales follow up emails.

  • Include personalisation – Personalising email content with practices such as putting the recipient’s first name in the subject line may uplift open rates by almost 30%. Source: MarketingSherpa LLC.
  • Provide something valuable – Including something that has business value for your prospect can help to increase conversion. That might be facts backed up by statistical data, or a relevant tip. It could also be a case study of customer success in your prospect’s industry, or some other relevant content such as a White Paper or a blog. Source: HubSpot.
  • Make an offer – While your first email may have been cold and introduced your company and products/services, follow up emails need to build on as well as reinforce the first message. Include an offer, something that seeks to increase the engagement level and provides a platform to build the relationship. Typical offers might be to hook up for a voice or video call, or a webinar. Source: Liinea.
  • Multiple email persistence – In the way that TV advertisers keep repeating the same commercials, email recipients need to see your messages more than once. There are many reasons for this. They may simply not ‘get it’ the first time. Or maybe they were distracted dealing with a delivery, a phone call or WFH and caught up arguing with teenagers or feeding children/dog/cat! Research shows the first follow up email attracts a 40% increase in the reply rate compared to the initial campaign. Longer campaigns build on this, but the findings from various research initiatives are less clear. Following up with more than 4-5 emails is likely to have a negative impact. Source: Woodpecker.co & Liinea.

Easier sales follow up from Office 365 with SharePortals CRM

Betasoft SharePortals CRM lets you create best practice sales conversion email templates and re-use them in just a few clicks. Switching to SharePortals puts CRM right there in Office 365. This lets sales teams quickly send follow up emails to support increases in sales conversion, reducing costs and saving time.

Just visit our pricing page to see how SharePortals compares with the cost of your existing CRM.