How writing a noticeable emails that can move your prospects to consider you as their supplier?

submitted by Leci, Senior Administrator, Corporate Services

In your correspondences, both email and snail mail, there is an egregious sin that you simply cannot commit. Your prospects may forgive you for a lengthy letter if it is engaging and entertaining. But they will not forgive you for being boring. So, regardless of the length of your letter, if it’s boring, it will be deleted and you won’t make a dent in getting your prospect’s attention.
Your emails need to be long enough to get the job done.

When writing an email, you can follow some of the rules that govern direct marketing for other media. That means a subject line that sparks your reader’s interest, strong and engaging headlines in the body of the message and a body that moves them along in the sales process. Remember that this is sales in print. As such, there is a purpose for the email. What do you want them to do: Call? Reply? Buy something? Don’t get too ambitious with the content and try to do too much. You don’t want to conduct the entire sales process in one email. But you do want to get the prospect to move to the next step, be it a click on a link, a reply message or a phone call.

The other quick consideration is that the tone should be conversational and relevant to the audience. Naturally, the type of email that you compose to a system administrator will be different from one being sent to the director of HR, which, in turn, will be different from one that you send to the CEO of the company. You aren’t writing a paper for submission into a scientific journal, so don’t be too formal. On the flip side, you are conducting business, not sending an email to a college buddy, so keep it professional.

In addition, you must be cognizant that email has some restrictions that other media don’t have, for instance, the dreaded spam filter. So you will have to walk a fine line between using the kind of language that incites people to take action while not using the key words that kick in the spam filter.

In his book, “The Ultimate Sales Letter,” Dan Kennedy deals extensively with writing direct mail pieces for sales people. Much of what is in the book can be applied to email. It’s an easy read and you’ll want to have a copy next to your laptop the next time you write an email or compose a letter for your contacts. My suggestion is that you run down to your local bookstore and get yourself a copy.