“So there are three areas that we look at. One is Open Rate, two is Reply Rate and three is Conversion Rate. ” – Jason Bay in today’s Tip 227
How do you troubleshoot your cold emails?
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Blissful Prospecting
137: Writing Cold Emails Using the REPLY Method – Jason Bay
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Transcript
Scott Ingram: You’re listening to the Daily Sales Tips podcast and I’m your host, Scott Ingram. Today Jason Bay from Blissful Prospecting is back with his weekly idea to help us improve our prospecting efforts. Here he is:
Jason Bay: We get asked a lot of questions. You know about cold email and specifically, people want us to troubleshoot their pulling emails. So what I wanted to do is walk you through a framework that we look at to determine what this person that’s sending out the emails needs help with. So there are three areas that we look at. One is Open Rate, two is Reply Rate and three is Conversion Rate. So what I’m going to start with first is open rates. So there’s some I guess a controversy around like, “Hey, should you actually measure the open rate or not? Because if you are using open rate tracking you can decrease your open rate and that sort of thing. And there’s some controversy around how accurate it is.” I mean the bottom line is of when you’re first starting a campaign and you’re reaching out to a specific persona or ICP, you definitely want to measure the open rate because if your open rate is not between 30 and 50% if it’s lower, that’s a huge red flag. You’re getting less at-bats and ideally, you really want to be 50 plus percent. I would AB test until you get 60 to 70% on your open rate. So if you’re not in that range of 30 to 50% here’s where you can start. One, the most obvious one is the Subject Line. And in terms of subject lines, there’s a couple of quick tips here. Do you want to keep it between four to six words? Ideally, you want to use the person’s first name if you can in the subject line. So that may be like, you know, “Hey Jason was researching your company and like we use that one a lot, really like that one. And you might also put the company name in there.” So if you could put some personalization in there, that’s a really good thing to AB test. And another thing that we were doing after looking at a SalesLoft study is one word, subject lines. So if you could categorize and explain sort of what you do in one word, that’s a really great thing to do too. So like when we email people, you might use the prospecting or we might say outbound or we might just do sales pipeline. So those are stick out because people don’t tend to use one-word subject lines. So, and I think sales pipeline is actually two words. So one or two words, subject lines. The other most overlooked part of this as the intro line. So just remember when people are looking at emails on phone or on desktop, it does preview the first couple sentences of the email for them. So if you can personalize those first couple sentences, that’s a really, really good way to make sure that they actually look at the email and they, and they open it. So make sure it doesn’t look like a marketing email. Say something like, “Hey, you know, maybe a researching something on their website or you saw something on LinkedIn or whatever it might be like, make sure to personalize it.” So if your emails are getting opened and for whatever reason, you either are not getting replies or you’re not converting into appointments. There’s a couple of things that you can look at. So the reply rate, and really you want to be between 5 and 10% ideally again you’re 10% plus. But if for whatever reason people are opening but not replying, it usually falls into one of three categories. And this is based on the REPLY Method that we came up with, which is linked in the show notes for you to check out if you want to listen to the full episode on that. But the R stands for Results. So that’s the first thing I look at is, are you focusing on share on results that you created for companies like theirs? So are you sharing social proof. Are you telling them about the companies you work with and very similar to them that are experiencing similar challenges or utilizing case studies. And again, the case studies had to be relevant. They have to be for a very similar type of company. When you do this, you show specialization. So you don’t want to be this generic company that works with industry agnostic is what I hear a lot of salespeople say that their solution is, but that’s not the thing that the prospect wants to hear, they want to hear that you specialize. The other part that you can look at too is the empathy piece. And this is where you want to talk about the challenges. So a lot of outreach I see missing any sort of challenge that the prospect might be experiencing. So if you’re helping people build their sales pipeline, like lack of sales pipelines, a challenge, right? Low response rates to their cold emails is challenged to call out a challenge that they’re having. And then lastly, and what you want to look at as the L on REPLY is for Laser focus. So do you have a clear call to action? So you might need to actually look at what the call to action is. And I mean first off, do you have one, Right? And second off is in the form of a question and third mess around with how specific it is. So do everything from, does this sound interesting or “hey, do you want to chat further about this” to “hey, are you available this upcoming Thursday after 2:00 PM Pacific time to chat about this for 30 minutes?” That’s how specific you can be. So just kinda mess around with those. Ideally the emails between three to five sentences, 120 words or less. So that’s what I’m looking at. If the reply rates are low, if the conversion rates low, it’s oftentimes very, very similar. It’s a call to action, you know, being often needing to be tested. And the other thing that you can do too is called the prospect. So let’s say people are responding and you’re not converting them to appointments because people were saying not interested or they want more information on whatever it is. If you can be around when people respond to that and call them immediately, he actually might get some really good feedback that you could build into the emails. So when you’re troubleshooting, again, look at open rate, make sure it’s between 30 and 50%. Next, check your replying rate. It needs to be at least 5 to 10% and then your conversion or into appointments once. It needs to be at least 3 to 6% of the total emails that you’re sending. So hopefully that helps you out.
Scott Ingram: As Jason mentioned you’ll find links to more resources including the tip on his REPLY method in the show notes at DailySales.Tips/227. Jasons own emails are also really good, so do yourself a favor and join his mailing list as well.
Then come on by tomorrow for another great sales tip from David Weiss. Thanks for listening!