Sales Email: 4 Steps to Impact

📩 Email has been a mainstay of communication since it was first created in 1971. And today, in 2024, 65% of the population says they can’t live without email (according to Mindbaz). 🫢

📌 It’s fair to say, then, that sales emails remain important and have managed to survive (especially in the face of social networks, ads, podcasts, webinars…):

• It’s definitely a fast and effective way to increase your revenue. 🤑
• You can easily combine email with other acquisition channels. ⚙️

👉🏼 So, if you’re not utilizing these channels and/or don’t know how to write a good lead email, it’s time to start! 🚨

Here is the detailed program for this article ⬇️ :

• Understanding prospect emails
• A framework to help you write.
• Setting up your mailbox and tips to avoid ending up in spam.
• Automating email campaigns with Waalaxy.

🎯 Our goal is for you to achieve better results with your email campaigns. 😎

What is Sales Email?

🔥 In the first part of this guide, we’ll focus on the essential basics you need to know before starting an email campaign:

• Recipe for successful lead emails 👨🏻‍🍳,
• Best practices for successful sales emails. ✅

What is a (Good) Sales Email?

📣 Sales emails (or lead emails) are a form of commercial communication sent to people who have shown interest in your offer. 🎁

These emails are targeted with the aim of initiating a relationship and promoting a product, service or offer. 🧐 Therefore, it should be carefully designed to grab the target’s attention, right from the start!

Here are the elements that your sales email should include to be effective 👇🏼 :

1. Subject ℹ️: Start your prospect email with a catchy, unique, original and captivating subject line (no spam words). Short, poorly optimized titles are very effective. 💡 There is so much spam in users’ mailboxes, that the best way to avoid ending up in the trash is to customize yourself to your target (of course) and write to them as if you were a friend.
2. Introduction or teaserᾩ:This should immediately grab the recipient‘ s attention and clearly present your company and/or solution. They need to know who you are and what you do in just a few words.
3. Identify the need 🔍: Briefly describe the problem or need that your product or service addresses. This helps contextualize your offering.
4. Value proposition 💎: Highlight the specific advantages and benefits of your offering. Explain how it can fulfill the prospect’s needs or solve their problems.
5. Social proof (optional) 🤝: Include customer testimonials, case studies, or key figures in your sales emails to strengthen credibility.
6. Call to action (CTA) 🕹️: Provide clear and specific directions on what you want prospects to do next (example: visit a website, schedule a demo, or reply to an email directly).
7. Personalize 🎨 content based on the information you have about the prospect (industry or specific interests), to make it more relevant and engaging.

NB – Clarity and conciseness ⭐️ : Keep the text concise and easy to read. Use short paragraphs and bulleted lists (if necessary) to make it easier to read.

➡️ You will also be provided with templates to develop and adapt to your own situation 😉 :

In short, to be effective, lead emails need to be targeted, relevant and persuasive, to encourage recipients to take the next step in the conversion or sales process. 💸

How to Create a Successful Sales Email?

Now that you know what a lead email is and what should be in it… 👇🏼 Here are our top 6 tips for getting it right. 🏆

Relearn How to Introduce Yourself

Every company wants to “facilitate business…” ❌ Instead, you should say that your company is ✅ :

• “The industry leader in lead campaign automation, offering innovative solutions to save time and generate thousands of leads.”
• “A revolution in the way companies capture and convert qualified leads through email lead campaign automation.”
• “Recognized in lead campaign automation for proven expertise in maximizing efficiency and results in digital marketing.”
• And others.

With these examples, we hope you have understood that you cannot be too boring, or use too corporate and/or “boilerplate” discourse. ☄️ You need to stand out from the crowd.

Convince Your Recipients

And what is the only way to convince your target audience through email? Text, words, and copy! ✍🏼 To do this, your content must :

• Personalized 🎨: You have to know and adapt to your interlocutor (vocabulary used, information and details sought, level of complexity and/or mastery…), to speak their language, every time. 😉
• Structured🫸🏼 🫷🏼: You can use well-known (or more original) and tested methods that are suitable for your sector.

🛟 To help you, we will provide some writing techniques and frameworks you can use (AIDA, PAS, STAR…), at the end of this article. 👽

Quality and Value-Added

Add value to your emails. 💎 Give your interlocutor what he is looking for and can’t find anywhere else.

🗣️ Use the following words to respond concretely to the problem faced by your target (absolute must) ⬇️ :

• “tips
• “advice”,
• “study”,
• “research”,
• “tools,
• “alternatives,
• “solution
• …

⚠️ Always choose quality over quantity. Don’t write to your prospects every day, and don’t write to say nothing. If you have nothing to contribute, skip it. 💁🏻‍♀️

Do not send aggressive sales emails, only support in understanding the market, thank you for your solution 😉

Knowing How to Summarize

To end your sales email, you should always ensure the following 🧐 :

• You have added a call to action. 🕹️
• You’ve provided clear contact details. 🔗
• Company details (if necessary): logo, address, contact details, etc.
• You didn’t close the discussion. ❌

Reread and test

This is a step that too often fails or is “skipped” due to lack of time. 🤦🏻‍♀️ But ALWAYS reread your email before sending, to check for: clarity, conciseness, and absence of errors.

You can also test sending your email 🧪, to :

• Choose between different subjects and formulations,
• Fix technical bugs (junk hello folders and layout errors),
• Optimize your response rate. ⚙️

🤝 Feel free to ask for help from your team members, company, relatives, experts, etc.

Analyzing Sent Emails

Make sure you follow all the best practices, then analyze your results 📊: open rates, click rates, responses/interactions, ROI, downloads or purchases linked to your campaign…

By the way, we can offer many email marketing kpis for you to look into for the success of your campaign. 👀

These indicators are available in most tools, through the integrated dashboard (as below). 👇🏼

Interpret your results: follow up at the right time (if necessary) and/or adjust your approach to continuously improve your lead campaigns. ⚙️

Mistakes Not to Make

In summary, the following are the mistakes that should not be made in prospecting and sales emails and that we most often encounter in our mailboxes ❌ :

Content	Subject	Tool
Formatting is loaded.	Overwriting (maximum 30 characters).	Using the wrong tool.
Copywriting is too advertising.	Lying words (Example: “earn 10 times more by reading this”).	No customization (or poor customization ).
Text language.	Useless or not very strong words.	Templates that depersonalize communication.
No questions/interaction.	Too vague/theoretical.	Single channel (not engaging).
No story, context or signature.	Capitalizes all words. (Very boring to read).	No variety (always the same sequence of actions).
Spam words are present.	Too aggressive (e.g. “You must read this or you will regret it”). I’ve already received this. I haven’t clicked and I never regretted it. 😅	No integration with third-party tools (e.g. CRM tools).

💥 Then, to help you even further, we will (as promised) explain how to create and compose your lead emails.

Writing a Lead Email

When it comes to writing content for sales, there are some effective frameworks for structuring text and maximizing engagement. 👩🏻‍💻

Here are a few to inspire you, along with a follow-up focus. ✨

Top 5 Writing Frameworks For Your Sales Emails

As mentioned above, these are very important and will help you 👇🏼 :

• Write while maintaining consistency between your different messages. 💬
• Get to the point to convince the recipient. 🥅
• Create automatism and save time. 🦾
• Increase your average email open rate and engagement.🔥

⚙️ They can be applied at:

• One sales email: all elements are included in one text.
• A series of emails (automated or not): Each email (4 in total) rejects a specific element/objective of the method in question.

#1. A.I.D.A Method, For Building a Series of Emails (Automatic)

This framework is the best of the bunch 🏆, but also the most used… We outline the elements that characterize the A.I.D.A method 💎 :

• “A” : Think about a topic that interests the target. 💭 The goal is not to provide a solution, but to show that you have the information/knowledge they want 😉.
• “I”: Show that you understand and know your target and their problem. You’ll even offer a magic solution to all their problems right away. 🤫
• “D”: Show how the ready-made solution you offer will change the user’s life. 🤩
• “A”: This is where you encourage her to click (to buy, book an appointment), not before. 🖱️

Here is a copy/paste example to get you started 🚀 :

You can also find variations of this method with: AIDAS, AIDCA, AIDAP…

NB: At Waalaxy, we do the original and the shifted 👽 because it works in our industry. 🤗 I leave you all happy to inspire and modify according to your business.

Discover Waalaxy 🪐

#2. Alternative To The A.I.D.A Method

Maybe you want to stand out in your prospect email communication/writing. 🤷🏻‍♀️ And, it’s not easy to do so using the most popular and recognizable methods.

Therefore, we offer some frameworks (in 3 or 4 steps), as an alternative to the A.I.D.A. model, but just as effective to convince your prospects. 😎

➡️ PAS Method:

• Problem ❌ : Identify the target problem or need.
• Aggravate 😈 : “Stir” the issue to stir emotions and show the negative impact.
• Solution 💡 : Present your product or service as a solution to the problem.

➡️ The 4U Method:

• Useful💡: Explain how your content or offer is useful to the reader.
• Urgent 🚨: Create a sense of urgency to drive immediate action.
• Unique 💎: Highlight what makes your offer unique compared to competitors (to be identified through benchmarks).
• Highly specific 🔬: Be precise and concrete in what you offer.

➡️ STAR Method:

• Situation 📍 : Describe the current situation of the customer or market.
• Task ☑️ : Identify the challenge or task.
• Action 🕹️ : Present your value proposition or action.
• Result 🎁 : Show the positive results achieved with your solution.

➡️ IDCA Method:

• Interest 👀 : Capture the reader’s interest from the start.
• Detail 👀 : Provide specific and relevant details about your offer.
• Conviction ⭐️ : Reinforce the reader’s belief by using evidence, testimonials, or case studies.
• Action 🕹️ : Encourage the final action in a clear and persuasive way.

🧪 Experiment with the frameworks to see which one works best with your writing strategy and the reactions of the recipients of your message. 👀

Want access to more sample lead messages? 🎁 We made a selection of +25 b2b email templates that rely on what works best for us.

Finally, we provide some tips for managing your sales email follow-up.

Following Up on Leads Via Email

Ah… follow-ups! 🏏 It’s often difficult to know how to follow up with a contact without feeling attacked. To do this, you have three solutions:

• An introductory email to prepare for the follow-up.
• Following up via email.
• Resending an email if the follow-up is unsuccessful. 🤷🏻‍♀️

👉🏼 If prospects didn’t open this last email either, we suggest you give it a little time before contacting those who haven’t responded through a new campaign.

Of course, if you want to avoid looking like a spammer 🗑️, you need to:

• Adjust your vocabulary and act as if you are having a normal conversation with someone,
• Customize the exchange and include expressions that create links,
• A conclusion that serves as an introduction to the rest of the email and repeats the part you left out.

💡 As a reminder, the more times you are reported as spam, the more your deliverability rate decreases. 📉 Be careful!

And most importantly, stay with us! 🫶🏼 We are soon sharing with you some techniques to secure your mailbox during your prospecting campaigns. 🔐

Preparing to Send Your Sales Email

The success of your prospecting emails also depends on the deliverability of your campaign, which should also be prepared to improve deliverability. 💥

Prepare Your Mailbox For Leads

First, you need to set up your mailbox. ⚙️

📬 This will allow you to get better deliverability and increase the confidence of ISPs (Internet Service Providers), towards your email address and your emails. 📩

You can find all the instructions in our article ☝🏼, with:

• How, and why to use “Warmer” to improve your email deliverability?
• How to do DNS programming on your mailbox? This is what all the emails you will send will pass through. It’s like an identifier.
• How to program DKIM? Which is used to identify you as the owner of the email you are using.
• How do I set up DMARC? That is, redirecting failed emails to the company email.

➡️ Then, you’ll need to prepare your prospect email sends (including through automation tools 🤖) and take other steps so they don’t end up in spam!

⚡️ We explain everything! 👇🏼

Techniques To Avoid Spamming

🗑️ To make sure your email leads don’t end up in spam, you need to look at various performance indicators. 📊

Understanding your Sender Score

⚙️ Sender Score is used to determine if your IP address is trustworthy according to email services (Gmail, Outlook…).

This applies to all emails originating from the same IP address. This is more or less what we call your “reputation”. 💎

Here’s what can happen if you have a bad reputation:

• 🟢 Your email is sent to the other person’s inbox, pure and simple.
• 🟠 Your email is put into spam.
• 🔴 Your email is blocked & the recipient will never receive it.

To know where you stand, we recommend a few tools:

• SenderScore.org, to evaluate the sender reputation of IP addresses, as well as check/improve their reputation score and optimize email delivery.
• IP Alyzer, to analyze and provide detailed information about a specific IP address (its reputation in terms of security, spam, and other relevant criteria ).

🧠 To know your score, the last step is to check if your email is not blacklisted. 🏴 It’s very quick to get blacklisted. So make no mistake, this doesn’t just happen to other people 😉.

Improve Spam Score

According to Statista, the share of spam in total email traffic is 45.2% worldwide by the end of 2022. 😳

We also know that about 90% of emails are filtered upstream by anti-spam messaging tools. 🗑️ So, those emails never show up according to internet users (not even in the Unwanted folder).

If you don’t want to be part of that, your spam rate score should be good. ✅ And to evaluate and calculate it, you can use Mail-tester (a free online tool).

⚙️ If your score is below 7, it means that some of your emails will go straight into spam. We have to analyze it and identify what is not working. 🔍

For this, we recommend the SendForensics tool, to evaluate the spam level of emails according to different criteria (text analysis, headers and technical characteristics). 👀

Testing the Deliverability of Your Email

Email deliverability is the ability of your message to be delivered to the recipient‘s inbox. 📥

As an indication, on average, in Europe, 51% of emails never reach the inbox.

• 26% go to the spam folder, where the spam folder is,
• 25% are never delivered.

And, again, to avoid being part of that and measure your deliverability, we recommend 10 email testing tools. 🧪 You can check out these tools at 👇🏼:

• If your server has enough confidence,
• Where your emails are going,
• Why emails are undeliverable (for example, some errors may be bounced emails ).

⚡️ We anticipate the following suggestions, but we also recommend the GlockApps tool to send tests to multiple addresses with different server settings. 🧪

With a simple test, the tool will give you a complete performance audit with a list of recommendations and adequate solutions to improve deliverability. ✨

A/B Testing for Your Sales Emails

Testing is essential to your digital strategy. 📲 Don’t underestimate its importance to maximize your results.

To A/B test your emails, you should send to the same target, different versions of your leads’ emails. 🎯

Be careful, “same target” does not mean “same person”, but rather “same persona”. Completely different. 🛑

⬇️ Here is the procedure:

• ⚙️ Choose a tool (e.g. Appmaildev), to test sending emails via API to simulate and analyze its behavior.
• 📬 Send different approaches to similar personas, but do not spam.
• 🔬 Use a representative sample (around 100 people), like managers of a small tertiary company in France, for example.
• ✌🏼 Make sure you don’t create duplicates, don’t send both versions to the same person.
• 👀 Compare the results of each approach to optimize by frequency, number of opens, responses, and click-through rate (if measurable) or unsubscribes (which means your emails are too aggressive).

You now know what type of approach best suits your target, and you can increase your sample with confidence.

Clean Your Database Regularly

And, yes, you should clean your database 🧽, at least once every 6 months, to prevent your leads’ emails from going to spam. 🗑️

✅ Here is a (non-exhaustive) list of things to do:

• Delete duplicates and “no answers” (you determine from when the prospect will never respond and is not interested).
• Identify soft bounce source emails and classify them.
• Delete hard bounce source emails.
• Update your contact information.
• Check compliance with GDPR regulations.
• Re-sort your existing list and keep the leads that really fit your persona.
• Prepare a targeted and sorted list of potential leads for your future campaigns.

To do all this, you can of course use several tools. ⚙️ You can use Kickbox, a software that analyzes your lists, provides a deliverability score and sorts them for you.

Unfortunately, this type of deliverability testing tool, cannot “automatically” complete all the steps mentioned above to do a good cleanup. ❌

🔥 Luckily, we know another tool that allows you to do everything very simply! This tool is Waalaxy. 👽

Moreover, we will take this opportunity to explain how Waalaxy can revolutionize your lead campaign preparation and automate the sending of thousands of sales emails. 🤩

Use Waalaxy to Send Sales Emails

Waalaxy is absolutely the tool you need to kickstart your B2B prospecting campaigns via Email (and, also, on LinkedIn)! 🚀

🤝 We explain how Waalaxy can help you:

• Putting your email strategy into practice.
• Creating a database to email leads to.
• Doing inbound marketing through email.
• Optimizing your campaigns with Waalaxy.

Let’s get started! 🔥

Email Marketing Strategy

To implement your email lead strategy ♟️, you need to go through two important and inseparable steps:

• 🚩 Configuration and technical preparation of your mailbox, so that your emails don’t end up in spam. This step has been explained earlier.
• 🚩 Having good targeting and copywriting, without which your sales emails will not be effective.

🎯 Targeting is key. 🔑 And this may vary from time to time.

Therefore, we advise you to check it regularly, to know exactly who is buying your product and who is not. And, therefore, who are the personas and leads that need to be included in your database.

On the contrary, if you never really thought about creating buyer persona types, it would be very worrying… 😱 You will find many tools that can help you.

With a well-honed strategy and perfect persona targeting, you’re ready to prospect and build your database. 🎉

Creating a Database to Email Prospects

Let’s say you’ve never had a database. 📊 Empty, nothing.

How do you do it? 💡

• Buying sales leads? No, you don’t. They’re often illegal and expensive, they can also be of very poor quality, and you’ll never know their origin.
• Logging in through a blog? No. ❌ This is an excellent technique, but in the long run. When we start, we can’t bet, you need quick results.
• Enrichment thanks to tools that find prospect data? No, but yes. ✅ If you have nothing and need to find professional email addresses to launch your campaign, this is a very effective way.

But, not through any tool and not at any price. 🚨 To retrieve and get a database of qualified leads in the field of reinforced concrete, use Waalaxy ‘ s AI Email Lead Finder. 📩

<img class=”alignnone size-full wp-image-166578″ src=”https://blog.waalaxy.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/07/Tangkap-decran-2024-07-03-a-22.09.45.png” alt=”Waalaxy’s Email Finder to create your database and automate your prospecting campaigns.” width=”3278″ height=”1702″>

🤖 This lead generation tool works with Dropcontact and thanks to AI, it’s also fully GDPR. 🔒

Thanks to it, you don’t have to email leads all over the world, to no avail. No manual searches, no CSV files and no need to worry about duplicates (totally safe). 🔥

🔍 With the “Email Finder” option integrated directly into your CRM, you can 👇🏼:

• Remove the stage where your leads are simple visitors/readers who provide their contact details to receive communications from you. 😎
• Automatically generate and obtain a database containing business email addresses of your targeted LinkedIn users (most people leave their email addresses accessible on the network). 🤩
• Clean and shape prospect lists to segment your targets. 🎯
• Add one or more lists into your lead campaign, and write your message. ✍🏼
• Then launch them to effectively convert them into qualified leads… with no spam or disappointing open rates! 🚀

⚙️ Use our detailed guide that shows you the manipulations to do a good search on LinkedIn and gives you secret techniques to find more leads. 🤫

Finally, we’ll look together what type of email prospecting model to use and how to configure your campaigns to get great results with Waalaxy. 🤯

Use Inbound Marketing For Your Sales Emails

🧊”Cold Emailing” is a simple and classic approach. These are emails you send to prospects you’ve never spoken to. 🙊

How does it work? 💎 Specifically, by offering interesting and quality content, to grab their attention and pique their interest. 👀 Not just by sending promotions.

This is called inbound marketing (customers coming to you). As opposed to outbound marketing (we go to the customer), a more traditional, direct and aggressive method. 🤬 However, it’s becoming less and less effective due to the growing competition and spam in the market. 🤷🏻‍♀️

So we use inbound, not to get leads, but in messaging 💬, to address two key challenges 🦾 :

• Capturing attention, creating links via email and demonstrating expertise.
• 🏗️ Build a database of qualified leads interested in your products (which you will contact by email thanks to the database obtained on LinkedIn, with the Waalaxy Email Finder).

Here, we have 👇🏼:

• Find a channel that suits your target (here is Email). 📩
• Find a topic and format that interests your prospects. 👀
• Play with your creativity and copywriter skills. 👨‍🎨

👽 Waalaxy also has some tips to help you write lead emails that convert, and will allow you to optimize your campaigns in no time! 🤑

Automating Your Lead Email Campaigns

🖱️ At the top of the home page, click “Create Campaign”.

🤖 Then, you have to choose from the sequence of automated actions available on Waalaxy, which will allow you to communicate with your target. 🎯

Sequence Selection

You can choose from several sequences ✅ :

• 1️⃣ “Beginner”: ideal for getting started and easy to use.
• 2️⃣ “LinkedIn”: a more complicated sequence involving several actions on LinkedIn only.
• 3️⃣ “LinkedIn + Email”: this is a sequence with several multichannel actions, on LinkedIn and via Email.

Sequence storage is used to guide your choices during the course: 👇🏼

• A difficulty level is assigned to each sequence.
• Storage by theme by «Use cases».
• And finally, an overview by theme and level.

Finally, all you have to do is 🎁 :

• Write and optimize your message. ⚙️
• Then, you have to indicate the delays and quotas between your actions (from 0 to 28 days) if there are some. 📆

Message Optimization

You are free to optimize your message, thanks to the various elements that can be included in your text:

• *️⃣ Variables (first name, last name and company).
• 📸 Images.
• 🔗 Attachments.
• 🎥 Gif.
• 🗣️ Vocal notes.

🛟 To help you in your projects:

• A checklist of elements to include and/or pay attention to in order to write your email correctly. ✍🏼
• Text preview, to check your rendering and variable functionality. 🔍
• Our editorial AI assistant: Waami, for writing the perfect message. 🤖

Then you can validate, to access the campaign summary. All you have to do is launch it. 🚀

Then 🤔 There’s nothing else you can do…! 🤩

Otherwise, manage responses and control your campaign performance from a complete sales dashboard, located in your home. 📊

ℹ️ All information will be centralized, and you can choose where and how to drive your leads! 💁🏻‍♀️

Finally, we also recommend you to create reports to optimize your next delivery. 🔗 This can be done by integrating third-party tools with Waalaxy (multiple integration modes available).

Unfortunately, this is the end of this article, I’m almost sad to leave you so soon! 💔

Conclusion – Recap of the ultimate guide on lead emails

📩 Lead emails are a strategic step to convert prospects into loyal customers. 💸

🧠 We teach you to understand it, to know what a good prospecting email is and the elements it should contain to be effective (with reusable sample structures). 🚀

Then, we give you tips to make your prospecting emails a success and some mistakes not to make. 🎁

Then, we go into detail on writing lead emails with 5 usable writing frameworks (AIDA, PAS, STAR, 4U, IDCA) and focus on email follow-up. ✍🏼

Finally, we saw that prospecting emails have evolved into a more refined and personalized approach using inbound marketing:

• Convincing, engaging, and capturing attention in an authentic way. 👀
• Build lasting relationships, based on trust, through quality content that adds a lot of value. 💎

⚙️ This is thanks to the rise of automation tools and marketing techniques. 🤖 The latter also makes it more efficient to find/contact qualified leads and send lead emails. 📩

We recommend you to use Waalaxy 👽, to: implement your strategy, create a database with Email Finder, automate sending emails for your lead campaigns. 🔥

We hope you enjoy it and that our advice is useful. 🫶🏼

Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Did you think it was over? We still have answers to our most frequently asked questions to share with you. 😇

Commercial lead model limitations

Think about it. 💭 Successful prospecting messages will be widely used. 🤷🏻‍♀️

What works best is creativity and innovation. 🎨 So, change it up often and always try something new!

In addition, we advise you to do A/B testing, which is the engine of success for your sales marketing policy.

Mail marketing VS email marketing: 3 fundamental differences

	Purpose	Interlocutor	Script writing
Cold Email	Starts a relationship, establishes a link with a prospect.	Sent to contacts who have signed up (for example, through a newsletter or lead magnet).	Almost like an email to a friend.
Email marketing	Gets a prospect to buy.	Sent to someone you’ve never contacted before.	Less flexible in terms of writing, works like an advertising poster or sales page.

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

• The rates are very reasonable. 🤑
• No technical knowledge required.
• Basic knowledge to make your emails successful.
• A great way to boost your brand image. 😇
• Perfect for getting to know your prospects and analyzing their reactions.
• Personalized communication through targeting marketing.
• Easy to automate campaigns. 🦾
• Technology that is constantly evolving.

Here you are, ready to find new customers, write your first lead email and launch your campaign. 🚀 See you soon. 👽