Forty percent of salespeople think prospecting is the hardest part of their job according to Hubspot. Back in the day, cold calls were the primary way to contact new leads. Over the last several years we have seen a dramatic increase in email marketing, which has proven to be a primary lead driver for many sales teams.  Prospecting emails can come from a salesperson emailing their prospects or working with marketing to set up a more substantial lead nurturing program.  Either way, you need to have a good prospecting email if you want to attract new opportunities.   A few key components of a good prospecting email include:

1.     Question: Ask a good question that engages the prospect’s needs.  This doubles response rates.

2.     Open rate:  Aim for a 25% open rate, but for first-timers, don’t be surprised if you are around 10%.  Lead gen services and technology leverage learnings from every campaign to drive opens up to 50%.  Regardless of your open rate, your response rate will be around 2% of opens meaning the more opens, the more responses you will see.

3.     Be Succinct: The days of sending long-form content in an email are over.  Boomerang Data shows emails with one or two lines have the best reply rate.   

4.     K.I.S.S.: Keep it simple, stupid.  Keep your emails at a 3rd-grade reading level. According to Hubspot, emails written at a 3rd-grade level performed 36% better with open rates than emails written at a college level and 17% better than emails written at a high school level.

5.     Audience: Fast Company did their email test and found age matters.  Different generations have different views on privacy, along with using a casual voice versus professional voice in emails. But whatever you do, do not take a neutral stance.  Be either opportunistic or pessimistic, that gained 15% increase.

6.     No Nos: Do not misspell names, get the salutation wrong, send a link or an attachment, babble on about your product, use unclear language, or have grammatical or spelling errors.  Another lesser known “no no,” using bold print

7.     DO: Provide a clear call to action, keep the text under a paragraph, boost their mission, including a recent article or press release about the company or person.