One asks, “How can we stand out versus the competition in our initial email prospecting outreach?”
Speaker 1:
Email, well, there are plenty of horrible emails going out and most people see those emails and go delete, delete, delete, delete, delete, delete. So if you want any chance of not being part of the delete brigade, you have to make it personal. You have to make it obvious in that very first paragraph that you’re real, and not just some name in Pakistan or India, sending out a million emails and seeing if one person might respond.
So keep it short. Don’t list all of your capabilities. Share an example of how you’ve helped the company like theirs with the kinds of problems they might have. And make sure you provide complete contact information instead of just a name, making it obvious that it would be spam in that case.
Speaker 2:
One, make it short. Two, make it all about them. Three, don’t ask for anything, which is like, “Whoa. That’s all I do is those three things,” and that’s why nobody responds to your email.
If you make it about them, giving them something, it’s going to be intangible or just a flattering statement or a notification that you notice something and leave it at that, all of a sudden, there’s a curiosity. There this human to human connection being made that you can build off of, because then, you’ll either get, you’re going to get an open. You may get a thank you reply. And you’ve got a dialogue started. This is how you would basically introduce yourself at a meeting.
You’d say, “Hey, hi, I’m Brian, or hi, I’m Will.” And all of a sudden you’ve got a dialogue started, instead of, okay this is the three things I do, this is what my customers get from me. And that doesn’t really matter, tell me what you’re facing today. And they’re like delete, or I have 15 minutes on Thursday. You’re like ah.
Speaker 3:
Yeah, so we’ve actually had a lot of deals that we’ve won, simply because people just believe that we care. Which we do, we do care. But I mean you think about it from a perspective, if you do personalization, you dial it up to 11. Don’t just go and personalise something that’s showing like, “Oh, hey, I know about your company. I saw you wrote this blog post.” Don’t just do stuff like that. Put your own personality into your personalization, and that’s something no other competitor can recreate. There isn’t another person that’s like you. So put yourself into your emails.
If you think something’s funny, and you think that your prospects going to like that, bring that thing up in your cold email or your cold call. If you think that there’s something that you know very well, or you have a special talent that you can do, figure out a way to throw that stuff into your cold outreach. And if you do these things, it actually will make it so that they’re not just thinking, “Man, I want to work with this person, because they’re value [inaudible] up with the need I have.” No, what you’ll do is you’ll create need and ultimately make them want to be associated with you because you seem like an interesting person.
Everyone out there needs to be interesting. I need you to show[inaudible] that you’re interesting. That’s something your competition can’t do.
Speaker 4:
So I think the best way to stand out with email is to not use email. I’m a big fan of writing to people. And if I really want to stand out, I’ll write a letter to somebody. Now that might be a bit out there, but this is all about learning out here techniques. So the postage stamp, the written address is massively underutilised, and I would encourage you to write more letters. People will definitely read them. And I’m not talking about mail shots, I’m talking about typed letters. Now I know it takes a bit more work, but see what happens.
I’ve met some amazing people by doing that. Use a typewriter. They’ll keep the letter.
Speaker 5:
What you’ve got to do is when everybody’s yinging, you’ve got to yang. And somebody asked me this question the other day. First of all, keep it short. This is not the time to send out your 60,000 word novel. So many times we send out this prospect, no, keep it short. And the key things are, keep in mind this: one swipe. You want your prospecting email to be viewable one swipe. In other words, if somebody looks at it on a smartphone, because that’s how people are looking at things. They want to be able to read the whole thing one swipe.
But what does that mean? I’ve first got to get their attention. So it’s the subject line and maybe the first 150 characters of what you write. Because that’s all they’re going to see in their preview. And from that, they’re going to determine whether or not to delete or read. And that’s not the time to go sit there, “Hi, my name is Mark Hunter, I’d like to intro-.” That’s a sales … delete. Because here’s the other fatal issue that people make when they send out emails. They write the prospect an email sitting at their computer. Oh, it looks good. It looks good. But it’s viewed on a smart phone.
Do this little trick. You put together a prospect email, send it to yourself. Look at it on your smartphone. If you can’t view it in one swipe, it’s too long.
