Business Email Writing

Knowing how many emails to send and when to follow up is very important.  Don’t look needy by flooding someone’s inbox.  Everyone hates it.  Imagine going to your inbox and seeing 3 unopened emails from the same person you don’t know.  They look desperate and annoying.  I’m sure you won’t be really interested in what they are offering.  You probably won’t even open any of the emails.  You might open one, scan it for 2 seconds, close it, and head to the water cooler.  That’s how people work.  Follow up emails are ok but make sure you give at least 2 weeks before an unanswered follow up.  Don’t blame the person for not answering your email.  Try a different title and a different kind of email.  If the same person doesn’t reply 3 times, you are wasting your time with them.  Email someone else.

You should be prompt with your replies.  Even if they took a long time to respond to you, that doesn’t mean you need to take a long time to respond to them.  Respond as quickly as possible.  It sets a very professional and serious tone.  It seems like you are serious about success and not some lazy joke.

Know what you want ultimately from sending an email.  It could and probably should be a multi step process.  A lot of people make the mistake of going for the sale right away.  This lazy impatience is a death trap.  Many people pride themselves on how fast they can whip off an email.  They don’t realize that if it didn’t work it was their fault and a TOTAL waste of time and potentially a lot of money.  A good email lead is gold.  Don’t waste it.  Think of a careful plan of attack.  If you want to sell the person something, you need to build a relationship with them.  In order to sell something via email, here are things that MUST happen.

1.  The person must OPEN your email.

2.  The person must READ your email.

3.  The person must think your email isn’t spam.

4.  The person must believe you can help THEM.

If even one of those things doesn’t happen, the sale won’t ever happen.  You need to build trust.  In order to do that, you must not resemble spam.  You must genuinely provide them some value.  These things are much easier to do if the person knows who you are.  If they don’t, the initial trust level is super low.  If you get an email from your best friend or your mom, you will open it and read it regardless of the title.  You trust them.  That trust came long before getting that email.  That is why they could write anything at all.  If you want to build trust, use a multi step approach.  Email a new prospective client an interesting inquiry.  The kind of thing that they should respond to.  See how they respond and get feel for their writing style and who they might be as a person.  This takes some guesswork, but you can get an idea.  Use that information in your next email.  Write to them something you were thinking based on what they said.  Ask for their phone number or skype because you’d like to talk about something in particular that could benefit THEM.  They will be much more likely to give that info to you after the second email.  They feel they know you in a sense.  You are not a spammer and are at least a genuine person who could possibly help them.  Then finally joke around a bit and talk about why your product could help them.  Be genuine.  Think carefully about it.  Think about how people sell to you.  You are much more likely to get a sale if you follow these steps.

1.  Try to get a response

2.  Try to help them out with something, preferably on skype or the phone.

3.  Go for the sale in an informal style acting like you just happened to think of them and realize they might want to check out your product because it could help them for reasons X,Y,Z

Build a bond and a connection with that person.  Even if they don’t want to do business with you at that time, make sure you leave a good taste in their mouth about who you are.  Make sure they will always read your emails in the future and pick up your phone calls.

Realize how important emails are.  Just because they don’t take much time doesn’t mean they aren’t something to think about seriously.  Title writing is huge.  Many people rush through writing important emails and then carry on with an 8 hour day of work.  The ironic truth is, you may be more effective spending a bit more time on that one email and putting your feet on your desk for the rest of the week.  Think about it, if you are writing an important email to someone new, and they don’t open it for some reason and you ultimately lose the sale because of that, then you are really prioritizing poorly.

The subject is hugely important because it’s the kind of thing we all read.  Everyone scans their inbox of titles and spends a couple of nanoseconds on each one deciding whether or not it is even worthy of opening.  If your title sucks, then what is in the body is absolutely meaningless.  Think long and hard about what you think the person is likely to open.  Write that title and pay attention to what works.  Think about the kinds of titles you open from strangers.  Think about the kind of titles that are obvious spam.  Pay a lot of attention to the title and keep the email body short and sweet.  I get hundreds of emails everyday in my inbox and I only open 20.  I probably respond to 4.  I’m sure that is pretty typical of most people.  Think about how you use your inbox.  You certainly don’t respond to spam.

Selling through writing professional emails is becoming a bigger and bigger part of business.  If you write emails to clients, it might make a lot of sense for you to get some professional training.

Small differences can make or break a big sale.  Most people have a general understanding of how to write an email and figure they don’t need any training.  They have sold stuff in the past through email and use it all the time in business.  They have an education.  Why would they need training?  That kind of reasoning is so common but unfortunately so flawed.  Even if you write well, you could probably improve.  The world’s greatest athletes all have coaches to get even a slight edge.  A small improvement to your writing style could make you millions of dollars.  Of course it depends on the scale of what you are doing, but an email training course could certainly be something worth considering.