Sales Email : A complete guide to Start and Boost email marketing campaign

In this article we will be focusing on the Sales email: marketing email strategy, examples of successful campaigns, & automation tools. Our goal is to help you to feel ready to revise or start your strategy so as to achieve much better results by the end of this article. 😎

PART 1 – What is a sale email?

In this first part of the guide, we will focus on the pillars: targeting, segmentation, tools.

Sales email – old, but not out of fashion

Email, the ancestor of the internet, will never cease to surprise us. It was in 1971 that Ray Tomlinson developed the ARPANET network (ancestor of the anternet), created the e-mail address and sent his first e-mail.

The first social media was created 26 years later and was called Six Degrees Emailing. It therefore took more than 20 years after the release of the first emailing system for emailing to perfect itself. One could think that it would go out of fashion and become an obsolete means of communication, but in fact, quite the opposite happened.=

“The number of email users worldwide is expected to approach 4.2 billion by 2021. Email marketing is having a direct impact on business revenue, measured at 20% compared to 17% the previous year worldwide.” Radicati study

I don’t know if you realize it, but generating 20% more revenue from your marketing emails is huge. And of course, you can do more. If you work in B2B tech, it could be 50% of your revenue. In any case, you control the sails of your boat. It’s up to you to decide how much energy and effort you want to allocate to lead acquisition. 🏴‍☠️

All we’re telling you here is:

• Emailing is still in vogue and a vector for success.
• An email lead finding strategy is clearly a fast and effective way to increase your revenues.
• You can very easily have an email marketing strategy that combines other acquisition channels (YouTube, LinkedIn…).

How do you create a database to send out Sales email?

Very good question. Let’s say you never had a database. It’s empty. Nada. Nothingness. How do you do it?

• Buy a database? No. ❌

Often illegal and expensive, can also be of very bad quality and you are never sure of its origin.

• Through a blog which has call-To-actions, white papers, and other ways to get emails? Yes ✅, but no. ❌

This is a very good technique. And it’s clearly a good long-term strategy. The issue is, you can’t just bet on that. It’s time consuming to do inbound marketing with a blog, and you need faster conversion channels, especially if you’re starting out. You need to get money into your wallet. 👛

• Through “Finder” (finding) tools for data, also known as “enrichment”. No ❌, but yes. ✅

You need to find a prospect’s business email address and you don’t have any base at your disposal, email finders can be very effective. But not just any tool, at any price. For example, the Lusha tool is not secure and is being bombarded by the CNIL.

Not a pretty sight. ❌

Waalaxy’s Mail Finder works with DropContact, so it complies with data protection laws. ✅

Focus on email marketing strategy

To set up a sales email strategy, you need to pick up both the sales and the very technical basics. Let’s look together to draw your strategy and how to prepare and configure your sales email before we get started. These two steps are an integral part of your prospecting strategy and cannot be ignored.

🚩 Without a well-prepared (technically sound) mailbox, your emails will go into spam.

🚩 Without good targeting and copywriting (strategy) you will be blacklisted or added as spam by your prospects.

Review your targeting!

In fact, we can’t say it enough, targeting is key. 🔑

And your targeting can vary… sometimes we’re surprised to see that some people buy our products when they don’t have the profile we originally set.

A target can change, it’s the data that speaks, not conventional wisdom. If you haven’t revised your targeting, it may be time to analyze who is buying your products and who isn’t. If, on the other hand, you’ve never really thought about making a typical persona, here’s some free material from hubspot to you design your typical customer.

It’s a 7-step tutorial that directly generates the final result.

Think inbound marketing

As a reminder:

• Inbound = offer quality content = the customer comes to you.

The main goal of inbound is to gain a future prospect, who does not know you yet or who knows little about you, and in turn turn them into a customer. Normally, via the creation of qualitative content, which offers valuable information to the prospect to facilitate their professional life and prove your mastery of the subject … Which is exactly what I am doing while writing this article. 🤠

You have several ways to get your target right in the heart 💜 :

• Publish material on social media. (Infographics, tips, tutorials).
• Organize Lives and webinars. (not to be confused with product demos).
• Create video content on YouTube. (Here is an example)
• White papers on topics you know about.
• Podcasts.
• Natural referencing on search engines.

There’s a real trend toward inbound

• Outbound = active sales prospecting = you come to the customer.

I know what you’re going to tell me: sales email is for prospecting. Yes, but that was before. Pure sales email doesn’t exist in 2021, or at least, it doesn’t work anymore. There is too much competition in the market and therefore a lot of spam. The best way to reach your prospect is to show them what you can do and how to do it. This is done by sharing:

• News from your sector and how to deal with them.
• Case studies with figures on your successes and failures.
• Tutorials, small hacks and best practices.
• Small free tools that make life easier.
• Depending on your sector of activity: examples and infographics.

How to do inbound marketing with a sales email?

It’s simple, a “Cold Emailing” is an email that you send to a prospect to whom you have never spoken to. And you’re kind of stumbling around, trying to get them to understand:

Hey I’m nice, I’ve got some interesting stuff to share, come, let’s become friends, sign up for my newsletter and all that.”

As you can see, one of the difficulties is to capture their attention and create a bond. Especially by email, the world of spam par excellence. There, you will have to use your creativity and your copywriting skills. 👩‍🎨

But that’s not the biggest challenge. 😱

In fact, the hardest part, usually, is finding a qualified database that doesn’t cost you a failed heist and prospects that are actually interested in your products. Finding it will depend on your target audience. If you are not specialized in B2B, then what follows is not for you. However, if your customers are potential targets on LinkedIn. You have an easy way to find this information while qualifying your prospects and contacting them in the process. 😎

This is a “email finder”. In fact, we are not the only ones on the market to do this, but we do it well: fully integrated with your CRM, without you having to trouble yourself with CSV files or manual searches.

To explain the difference between inbound without email finder and with email finders, I have made a small visual:

Here you need to figure out how to add contact forms or calls to action to ask prospects to provide their emails and agree to receive your messages. As a result, they must go through the “visitor” stage, i.e. read your content somewhere, go through your site, answer a questionnaire…😭

So, you’re losing a lot of contacts who, despite your great content, won’t take the step of writing their business info. 😨 Thanks to the “email finder” option directly integrated into the CRM, you can bypass this step. 😎

And you can directly remove the visitor box. Via LinkedIn, we find the email address of the prospect and you can directly contact them. Most people leave their email addresses accessible on the network.

All you have to do is to pick the ones of the people corresponding to your targets, in a totally automatic way, and add them to an emailing campaign in order to contact them, for the first time.

Think about it: finding email addresses = finding new potential customers. 💡

How do you get a qualified database?

Okay, now that you know your persona and how to get emails from prospects, how do you turn the billions of LinkedIn users into a few hundred highly qualified leads? You’re not going to send a sales email to the whole world.

No. ❌

Actually, I forbid you to.

It’s not a good idea. Not for you, not for them, not for the planet.

Besides, you will have a big fat zero as an opening rate.

And you’re going to tell us that nothing works. 😅

So, you’re going to have to find a qualified database on LinkedIn.

Don’t worry, we’ve got a comprehensive tuto that explains how and gives you secret techniques to find even more leads.

How to form your strategy?

To summarize what we’ve covered and to check if you have been paying attention:

• I suggested you check your targeting.
• We defined how to create a qualified database and find your prospects on LinkedIn.
• We talked about inbound and the best way to approach a prospect for the first time in your sales email.

Now that:

• You have a clear target,
• That you’ve been able to upload a list of prospects into your CRM.
• That you know how to approach them (if you run out of ideas, there are examples further down in the article).

We are FINALLY going to be able to talk about your b2b strategy! ✨ This one is going to allow you to communicate with your target audience either on LinkedIn, by email, or both. You’re going to be able to choose a Campaign (a sequence of automated actions).

For example: An automated connection request on LinkedIn + An automated email + A search for the prospect’s email address + An automated email sent in the process.

All this to hundreds of qualified prospects. All at the same time. All automated. We recommend using both channels in your campaigns.

PART 2 – Techniques to ensure you don’t end up in spam

Now that you know how to proceed in a strategic way, we can get to the heart of the matter: The technique. 😱

Don’t worry, I promise we’ll teach you all there is to know. Here are 4 tools and tricks that can improve your open rates by more than 50%. 🔥

Understand your sender score

The Sender Score applies to all mailings that come from the same IP address. It is the score that determines whether your IP address is trusted by email services (Gmail, Outlook…). This is more or less what we can call your “reputation”

To be brief:

If you have aggressive mailing tactics, you will have a bad reputation and your emails will automatically end up in spam.

You have 3 stages of reputation loss:

• 🟢 Your sales email is sent to your contact’s inbox, plain and simple.
• 🟠 Your mail is placed in spam.
• 🔴Your mail is blocked and the recipient will never receive it.

To understand your sender score, the first step is to check if your mail is not blacklisted. Someone can very quickly get blacklisted, so don’t be mistaken, it doesn’t only happen to others. On mxtoolbox, you can see for free if you are blacklisted somewhere.

• Click on the link.
• Find your IP here.
• Paste your IP on mxtoolbox.
• Analyze the result.

In the same way, Cisco offers a more detailed analysis of your IP for free. With Lookup Reputations, you can see details like:

• Your online reputation.
• Spam level.
• Emailing volume history.

What to do with this information? If you think you have sorted things out on your side, you can go back to the site of the blacklist of which you are a victim.

For some blacklists, you can manually request the removal of your IP after reviewing your situation. Some will refuse, but it is worth a try!

Improve the spam score

“Spam represents between 55% and 95% of total e-mail traffic worldwide. Nearly 90% of email is filtered upstream by email anti-spam tools. So they never appear to internet users (not even in the Junk folder). “

It’s too late, you’ve already spammed the world and need a fresh start? That’s okay. Everyone makes mistakes. We forgive you. As long as you never do it again!

Mail-tester is a free tool to calculate your spam score online. If your score is below 7, it means that some of your emails will go directly to spam. You will have to revisit your emails. For that, we have a series of tips, both in this article and on video tutorials that I will add in link throughout this tutorial. Keep your eyes peeled. 👀

Test the deliverability of your emails!

Clean up your emailing database so that you can send your emails more quickly

Kickbox is a very fast and inexpensive email address verification software. ($5 for 500 verifications). All you have to do is import your list and Kickbox will assign it a deliverability score (called Sendex) and then sort through your database. Their promise is a deliverability rate of at least 95% for your next campaign.

Configure your mailbox for marketing emails

In order to make sure that you have all the chances on your side to boost the deliverability of your emails, you will have to configure your mailbox. This configuration includes the elements we have talked about, it allows a better deliverability by boosting the trust of ISPs (Internet Service Providers). The tutorial includes:

• How and why you should use a “Warmer” to improve the deliverability of your emails.
• How to program your mailbox DNS? This is what all the emails you send go through. A kind of identity card.
• How to program the DKIm? This is used to identify you as the owner of the email you are using.
• How to configure DMARC? What redirects the emails that fail to send to a company email.

Maintain a table of A/B tests of mails

As you can see, testing is an essential part of your digital strategy. You absolutely must send different approaches to an identical target. Attention: Identical target = not the same people, but the same persona.

That’s totally different. 🛑

If you send the same prospects two similar messages in the same week to test which they’ll respond to, they’ll just get mad and your test will be useless. 😅

So you take a sample, usually 100 people is fine. Let’s imagine that they are managers of small companies with less than 10 people, in the service industry, in France. You find their email through Waalaxy’s email finder and you contact them via Cold Email with a standard approach. At the same time, you take the same target without duplicates (with Waalaxy you have an anti-duplicate security so you don’t need to worry about it). If you don’t have the tool, do a manual check. Here you’ll try an original approach.

You analyze both results:

• Open rate.
• Click-through rate.
• Response rate (if measurable).

You now know which type of approach best fits your target, you can increase your sample by contacting thousands of people, without getting it wrong.

Think about it: 🐠 Just 5% more open rate, out of 10,000 people contacted, that’s 500 more qualified prospects who discover you and are likely to become your customers. That’s not insignificant at all. So, take the time to test it out!

PART 3 – Construction of the sales email and examples

Mistakes not to make, best practices and email templates. Let’s roll.

Building a series of sales emails

The email sequence featuring the AIDA method is the most used. If you want to know more about this approach, click here. But in short, it will consist of 4 emails. They all have a very specific purpose. 🎯

• #1 is “A”, the prospect’s Attention. What are the subjects that interest your target? The goal is not yet to provide them with solutions but to show them that you have information or knowledge that may appeal to them. 😏
• #2 is Interest. You understand and know your prospect’s issues. You’ll even offer them the magic solution to all their problems. 🤫
• #3 is Desire. It’s there, it’s beautiful, it’s reliable, it’s affordable, the turnkey solution that will turn their life into a blooming field of flowers. 🤩
• #4 is for action. The thing that will get them to click, is the miracle call-To-Action, the link to the holy grail, the gold-plated white paper. In short, it’s in this email that you entice them to click (to buy, to make an appointment), not before.

This technique is supposed to be the best of all, but it’s also the most used and so it can easily run out of steam. Again, it’s up to you to try other techniques. 😁

Follow up a prospect by email

Ah the follow-up email, quite a subtle art between “not too much, not enough”. It is often complicated to know how to follow up with a contact without making them feel attacked. I’ll leave it to you to decide what you do, but you’ll have to tread carefully.

The introduction emailing

The best thing to do in your introduction emailing is to prepare the follow-up message. For example, you can add at the end of your email:

I’m going to publish a comprehensive article on the subject, I’m currently working on it. I’ll take this opportunity to pass you a preview of it.

Or:

In 15 days, we are organizing an event in Paris on this topic. The places are not available yet, but as soon as the link is online, I will send you a quick hello and pass it to you.

In my examples, the language is very relaxed, it will of course have to be adapted to your target. Why end your email this way?

• You avoid looking like a spammer. You act as if you were having a totally normal conversation with an individual.
• You personalize your exchanges and use terms like “a quick hello”, “preview”, which allow you to create a link with your interlocutor. Don’t lose this opportunity – it’s one of the most essential things about Cold Emailing and at the same time the most complex to achieve, because you are totally at a distance and your interlocutor doesn’t know you from Adam or Eve. 🍎
• You have a great introduction for the rest of your emails. All you have to do is pick up where you left off.

The follow-up emailing

Here’s an example of a ready-made meaningful follow-up email:

Hi there!

Remember last week I told you about an upcoming event/article?

Well, it’s ready! It was a bit of a rush, but we’re happy with the result. 😁

We’ve compiled the 7 best email templates, with stats and a super qualitative case study. Here’s the link:

20 Prospecting Templates for Sales 🔥

Feel free to tell me what you think. 😃

The win-back emailing

Soooo, it flopped. That’s okay, it happens. Maybe the subject matter wasn’t particularly relevant to your contact and they weren’t intrigued by the issue you brought up. To succeed in capturing their attention nonetheless, you can try a final email to win them back. Let’s go back to our first example:

Hi there, on Monday I sent you an email about the best prospecting templates. Feel free to tell me if I’m wrong, but I get the impression that this is not your priority right now. I understand. Actually I deal with other subjects, which I have a feeling might be of more interest for you. Here are the top 3 most read at the moment:

1. Become a LinkedIn Influencer: get 75k views per week on LinkedIn > here.
2. How to scrape thousands of email addresses very quickly > here.
3. Find clients through content creation > here.

To use our example #2 :

Hi there! I told you about our event last week and judging from your repsonse (or lack of it), I think it’s safe to say that you weren’t too keen on it. Or maybe you simply couldn’t make it? I can understand, sometimes they’re really long and we’re awkward to look at 😂

We summarized on YouTube the entire live, in a podcast: how to generate (without ads) THOUSANDS of leads with LinkedIn?

Link 👇

Again, you just need to adapt this example to your audience. If they don’t open this sales email either, we recommend letting some time pass before contacting all the prospects who didn’t respond again, for a new campaign. Remember that the more you are reported as spam, the more your deliverability will drop.

Be careful.

Clean your database regularly.

Do it for them, do it for the planet, do it for yourself.

It doesn’t matter the reason why you do it.

Just do it.

Otherwise, your email address will perish. 😬

PART 4 – How to start a sales email?

It’s time to do a little summary of our article on writing a sales email and give you some examples to copy and paste to get you started. This is the last part of our article, I’m almost sad to leave you so soon.

Building an email: Dont’s

The 7 content mistakes:

• Not very clean formatting.
• Copywriting way too advertising or pushy.
• The language of the text.
• No questions.
• No story or context.
• Spam words.
• (Lack of) signature.

The 3 tool-related mistakes:

• Using the wrong tool.
• No personalization or poor personalization.
• The wrong template that depersonalizes the communication.

How to make a successful sales email?

• Be understandable: from the first few lines of your sales email, we need to know who you are and what you do.
• Define a unique and original subject: no word spam.
• Convince the prospect with a known or an original method, which you have tested and which works for your sector.
• Personalize the content in relation to your target.
• Give your prospect added value in your e-mail. No aggressive sales emails, only good advice to understand the market…thanks to your tool 😉
• Think relevance, not abundance. Don’t write to your prospect every day and don’t write to say nothing. If you have nothing to give, then skip it, send your content late if necessary, but ensure that when you do send it, it’s quality.
• Proceed with thoughtful follow-ups using our emailing system and the steps are shown above in part 3.
• Analyze the emails sent and track your results.

Re-learn how to introduce yourself

Please don’t be too boring. 😴 They’re are too many “Marketing Manager”, “Communications Expert” and whatnot. 🚂

You on the other hand are:

• “Fascinated by the evolution of Tech’s market in the healthcare field”.
• “Constantly looking for new tools to automate boring processes”

Write what is it that drives you and makes you have solutions to provide?

What should I name my sales email? The subject Line!

The subject line, I can’t stress enough, should not contain word spam. What works a lot in the French Tech industry are short and not very optimized titles. The trend has totally reversed. 😱

Why? Because the vanguards of the movement have it all figured out.

There is so much spam in users’ mailboxes, that the best way to avoid ending up in the trash is to write as if you were a friend. I’ve highlighted some concrete examples that I found in my mailbox.

Of course, you must always adapt to your target. But Scalezia’s (Benoit’s) open rates are impressive and so their email subject line and titles are worth a look, and why not try them out and perform a test on your target. 😜

Objects that don’t work

• Too much writing. (30 character maximum).
• Being too vague. (What are you talking about?)
• Using useless and not very impactful words.
• Using misleading sales words “earn 10 times more by reading this”.
• Putting every word in capital letters. IT’S A PAIN IN THE ASS TO READ.
• Aggressive headlines “You must read this or you’ll regret it”. Don’t laugh, I’ve received this before. I didn’t click on it. I’ve never regretted it. 😅

Convince your interlocutor

To convince your interlocutor, you can use the AIDA method.

Personalize the content in relation to the persona

You are not going to tell your grandfather to empty the cache from his browser when it bugs.

You’re going to tell him to click on the little button in the upper left corner and follow your instructions, right? So what is your target’s vocabulary? Do you have to make some things less complicated?

Decomplexing is the story of my life. As a writer for Waalaxy, I had to learn to explain the topics I’m writing about to the average person. Otherwise it won’t be easy for Grandma to understand. 😂

Okay, so you need to adapt to your target and speak their language, all the time. 😉

Give value to your email

Prioritize the words: “tips”, “advice” “study” “research” for your emails. The purpose of this is to bring quality to the interlocutor. Your emails should offer solutions, tools, alternatives to problems that your interlocutors encounter. If you don’t know what the problem is, you must absolutely think about it. Your copywriting will revolve around your solution.

Analyze sent e-mails

On most tools, you have an integrated dashboard that allows you to analyze your results. What you need to take into account are the open rates, the click rates and the downloads or purchases related to your campaigns. I won’t tell you what is a good rate or a bad rate. That’s totally counterproductive. ❌

Make sure you follow all the best practices, and then analyze your results, then perform tests to increase your results. What you can do though, is go and see what the best in your industry have implemented as a strategy. 💡

You can also install custom tracking links on your emails. Here’s an easy tutorial on how to do this. 🤗

Sales email template example

I warn you, we’re going for original and quirky because it works in our line of business. I’ll leave all the fun of making your own little tweaks up to you.

How to promote a new product or a new feature?

FAQ of the article

What are the 3 fundamental differences between cold emailing and marketing emails?

• #1 Objective. The objective of Cold Emailing is to start a relationship. The goal is to create a connection with the prospect. The goal of email marketing is to get the prospect to buy.
• #2 The interlocutor. A marketing email is sent to a contact who has already registered, either via a newsletter or a lead magnet for example. The objective of a Cold Email is to initiate a relationship with a contact that you have never contacted before.
• #3 Copywriting. Cold Emailing is almost like an email to a friend. It is more flexible in terms of writing. Email marketing is much less so. The catchphrases are worked out a bit like an advertising poster or a sales page.

How to send an email marketing?

With a tool that allows you to send emails. On the market, there are several effective and safe tools, like Waalaxy for Cold email or sending blue to send Newsletters.

How to optimize your email marketing campaigns?

• Increase your reputation score (sender score) to be considered a reliable source of emails.
• Prepare your email address with a mail warmer.
• By taking care of your databases in order to avoid being considered as a spammer (it is in your interest to categorize your prospects).
• By writing a catchy subject line.
• By adapting the message to your audience.
• By creating your own email templates to ensure that they are personalized.
• Optimizing the frequency of your mailings through A/B testing
• Check your unsubscribe requests to see if your emails are too aggressive or too recurrent
• By sending quality content: focus on interesting content and not directly promotional (even if you can still sell deals).
• By using a complete emailing tool that eases your work and has a complete sales dashboard.
• Create a report to optimize the next emailing campaigns (opening rate, click, download, payment, other depending on your activity).

What are the advantages of email marketing in a digital strategy?

• The price is very reasonable.
• No need for technical knowledge.
• Basic knowledge to make your emails successful.
• A good way to boost your brand image.
• Perfect to get to know your prospects and analyze their reactions.
• Personalized communication through targeting.
• Easy to automate campaigns.
• A technology in constant evolution.

Here you are, ready to acquire new customers, write your first sales email and launch your campaign. We can’t wait to read you. 😁