It’s another critique from the Facebook Page this week. I’m giving some feedback on a sales email that Jai from printing.com @ London Docklands sent me. They provide printing services for individuals and business in London. I’m hoping that sharing this with you gives some useful advice on how to go about writing a sales email or letter that gets a good response rate and drives some extra sales. A good sales email usually follows the AIDA (Attention, Interest, Desire, Action) format and should aim to expertly guide the reader down a slippery slope from ‘that sounds interesting’ to ‘I’m buying that NOW!’ Let’s see how Jai did…
If you can’t read this you can view a bigger version of the sales email he sent out by clicking here
1. Subject Line
The subject line of a sales email is probably the most important part. If it looks like spam it’s likely that your email won’t even get opened. On the other hand a clever compelling subject line will boost conversion rate by a huge amount.
There are 3 common tactics for subject lines:
- Arousing curiosity – something like “What does the world’s best business card look like?” or “How to become 7x more memorable at networking events…”
- Talking directly to the recipient “Mark, I’m selling business cards for half price this month, are you interested?”
- Promise an immediate benefit “50% off business cards till the end of July”
Jai has gone for the third tactic by writing “The Greatest Offer You Will Ever See This Month!” I think he could have gone even further and told the recipient exactly what they would get from reading the email. It’s definitely attention grabbing but I wonder if some people might mistake the email for spam since it doesn’t mention what the email is about (business cards) or why they should personally read it.
2. Opening
The opening lines of a sales email or letter do the job of keeping the recipient in their seat. They should reassure them that this message is worth paying attention to and reading through to the end.
The opening line here is:
“Hope you’re well, I know its been a long time since we last spoke. Hope business is well.
I normally send automated emails but this month I thought I’d try the personal touch.”
What Jai has done here to reassure the reader is to explain that this isn’t a spam email that gets sent off to thousands of email addresses. Instead it’s a friendly catch up email that only gets sent to people he has spoken to. Personally I love this approach – if it’s done correctly it will probably get the best response rate of any tactic out there.
However, it’s a very hard one to pull off because the whole email has to fit with this ‘personal message’ approach. I think you would need something in the email body that proved that the email really was a personally written message. I’m not convinced by this one. One idea would be to separate your database into different industries and then mention that industry in each email. That at least proves that the email wasn’t sent out to every business owner you know.
You could also add their name and business name in the email body somewhere. All good email marketing software should be able to add this customisation automatically for you. You normally just have to write {name}, {businessname} etc. in the appropriate place and the software will automatically fill these in for you.
3. Offer
Your offer will make or break your sales email. It’s what will ultimately decide whether your reader decides to take action or not.
The offer is the thing I like most about this email. Buy one get one free on all business cards is a very compelling offer. Jai has also included a time constraint which says the offer is only available until the end of the month. This encourages the reader to take action now rather than putting it off for a week and probably forgetting all about it. Well done! There’s nothing else I can suggest here.
4. Call to Action
This is the part of the email that tells the reader exactly what action to take next. It’s time to start being direct and firmly pushing your lead towards the sale. The call to action needs to be completely unambiguous and self explanatory.
The call to action that’s used here is:
“Call me or email me asap so we can get you this offer. It’s only on until the end of the month.”
This is a firm and direct call to action. The phone number is included in the email signature. I think it could have been added here as well just to make it that little bit easier. The less you make your reader work the better.
One common technique for sales letters and emails is to follow up with a phone call. This is proven to increase conversion rate dramatically since it gives prospects who are on the fence a much needed nudge and it also gives you a perfect excuse to call people up. I often end sales letters with the line:
“I’ll phone you in the next couple of days to discuss the idea further. I look forward to speaking with you then”
5. Language and Layout
Good use of language and an appealing layout isn’t the thing that will make make a sales email work. But it is something that people will notice if you do badly.
This email is only in the draft stage and would be proofread before being sent out. We’re business owners not English teachers so don’t waste too much time on trying to write beautiful prose. But in the final version grammar and spelling would be very important so Jai would make sure any little grammatical errors like capitalizing the ‘I’s were spotted and corrected. You would also want to ensure that a sales letter with the phrase ‘every businessman’ only got sent to the male contacts in your database.
There’s some debate over whether to use bold in your email to emphasise the offer and call to action. It’s so easy to A/B test with these kind of email campaigns you could just try it with and without and then track which one performs better.
Final Word
Jai has done a lot of things right in this email. His tone is conversational and he even throws in a joke or two which is exactly how you write engaging copy that connects with people. His offer, the most important part of any marketing campaign, is fantastic as well. I do think with this kind of thing that it’s important to do something really creative and different though.
I’d suggest having a team brainstorming meeting and trying to come up with a really new and creative concept that would make this email stand out from all the spam clogging up everyone’s inboxes. A really compelling, risky subject line followed by some clever off-the-wall copy might be one way to go. A highly targeted and believable personal message would be another direction. The important thing to remember is you can never really know what’s going to work until you try it out. Split up your email database, test several approaches and then refine the one that works best.
