“Complexity is the reply killer that you aren’t thinking about.” – Will Allred in today’s Tip 846
How do you get a positive response?
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today’s tip comes from Will Allred and since Will is self introducing I’m just going to let him take it from here:
Will Allred: Hey there! I’m Will Allred, one of the Co-Founders and COO at Lavender. At Lavender, we help you write better emails faster. We see a lot of emails that Lavender like millions and their respective versions. So we’ve gotten pretty good at parsing out what’s good and what’s bad, and really what it takes to get a positive response.
So today I’m going to talk to you about writing complexity. Complexity is the reply killer that you aren’t thinking about. How do I know that? Because it’s the number one mistake that sellers make when writing an email. Emails that get the most positive replies are written at a 5th-grade reading level. Yeah. Over 70% of the emails that we see are written beyond a 10th-grade reading level. Let me repeat that. The emails that get the most replies are written at a 5th-grade reading level, yet over 70% of the emails we see are written beyond a 10th-grade reading level.
Are you seeing the mismatch? So let’s talk about what I’m going to cover quickly.
One, I’m going to clearly define what it means to have complex writing. I’m going to talk about why it’s killing your reply rates. I’m going to speak to how you can fix it and your emails. And lastly, I’m going to talk about applying this to your next cadence.
So first things first. What is complex writing? At Lavender, we measure complexity by reading level. Reading levels, a simple score measured by grade level. What is the minimum grade level you’d expect someone to have to be educated at, in order to understand something? So a 5th-grade reading level means it’s probably too verbose for a 3rd-grader yet it’s on point for a 5th-grader in anyone educated beyond a 5th-grade reading level, they would understand it.
So you calculate a grade level with three elements, length of sentences, the number of syllables per sentence, and the distribution of those syllables in the sentence.
So what makes your writing more complex? Big uncommon words, complicated sentence structures, and run-on sentences.
So we know what makes our writing complicated, but why is our writing so complicated? It’s simple, your ego. We want to impress. So we use flashy buzzwords instead of colloquial, AKA common language. And it’s why our complex writing fails. We’re not meeting the reader where they are. People don’t have the attention span that we think they do. You have to remember, they’re not waiting around for you to reach out. And their brain is looking to do the least amount of work possible.
So expect the first glance of your email to be a skim as they look to categorize and sort your email out, even worse for your reply rate. Your initial email open is 8x more likely to be on someone’s phone. The lovely folks at Facebook did research around attention when we do something on our phone versus the computer and the results are kind of horrifying. We have almost 40% less attention on a phone. That’s where they’re going to reach your email. So when you send them for both languages, they tune out. They miss the point and worse. They sort it in their brain is bad cold outreach, and you’re doomed to their mental spam filter.
So let’s talk about what makes your prospect’s brain happy and help you get more positive replies.
Number one. Simple common words.
Two. Short sentences. Your copy should feel choppy.
Three. Small paragraphs. If you’re going past four sentences in a paragraph it’s typically too long and it looks like a big wall of text on someone’s phone.
And lastly, keep your email to a single idea and a single request. So let’s dive deeper on that last point, keeping your email to a single point.
If you ask a prospect to do two things, you’ve just doubled the effort it takes to reply. You want to make things easy on them. So focus your email on one value prop, one goal, or one request. Each sentence, paragraph, email should all be one idea. And honestly, cadences are no different. So when you’re dripping a series of sales emails, it’s really popular to try to add different value props into your trip. You know, email by email, don’t do this. It doesn’t align with how your prospect’s brain work.
So memory favors repetition know structure, your cadence into bursts. So three to five touch points about a specific request or value prop. Then pause, then another three to five touch points about a different value prop. This keeps your value prop clear to the other individual and it doesn’t muddy what you guys do, and it keeps things simple. And that maximizes your chance of getting a reply.
Hopefully, this is a helpful tip. If you’d like more help with your emails, I encourage you to try our email system at Lavender. It’s free to start at TryLavender.com
Scott Ingram: For more about Will and Lavender, just click over to DailySales.Tips/846.
Once you’ve done that. Be sure to come back tomorrow for another great sales tip. Thanks for listening!