Email personalization for Sales Reps - a Quick Guide
No doubt personalizing the emails you send out to clients and prospects can get you the results you need from your email outreach strategy. It enhances open rates and demonstrates to your audience that you understand and acknowledge their needs and wants.
As a result, you get to engage prospects and drive them toward action, making email personalization imperative for a successful lead prospecting strategy for sales managers and representatives.
Epsilon’s research shows that 80 percent of customers prefer to purchase when provided with a tailored experience. As for how and where that personalization happens, half of the influencers mention individualized email messaging and email segmentation as the most practical personalization tactics.
If you are not personalizing your cold emails to prospective clients, you are losing out on business. It’s as simple as that.
Here are some practical email personalization tips and best practices you can use to up your sales prospecting game and enhance overall lead generation efforts.
Personalize By Focusing On A Mutual Connection
A big reason why cold emails go unreciprocated and are ineffective is because of the disconnect between prospective customers and the sales rep. Shared connections allow you to bridge that gap.
Anchoring your outreach around common ideas and problems is an excellent way to connect with prospects instantly and help garner their trust. This way, you are not a stranger to them, and your email doesn’t feel unknown anymore.
This practice is psychologically proven since your prospect trusts you better as they can relate to you, making them more likely to respond.
But how can you easily find a mutual connection? Email is not an engagement silo, so if you’re not already doing it, leverage social media – surfing your prospects’ profiles can help you find a shared connection to mention in your email.
Here are some mutual connections that you can incorporate in your emails.
You both know the same people
You come from the same high school or town
You both are a part of the same LinkedIn or Facebook group
You have attended the same workshops, seminars, conferences, etc.
Personalize Based On a Prospect’s Current Technology
You can take your outreach efforts to the next level by writing emails that are tailored to the technology needs of your target email segments. You could tee up ways to ask them about these directly or go digging deeper into what platform or tool they are leveraging at the moment.
Tools such as Builtwith and Datanyze can crawl an entire website’s tech stack and give you a list of all the platforms and software used by the prospective clients on their site. This should give you a complete picture of their current priorities and requirements. You can even find out if they use the tools of competitors and leverage this data to give them a better deal.
Personalizing emails around their current tech stack also helps you realize the functions and processes they possibly struggle with. So next, all you need to do is personalize your emails to them discussing those very pain points and position your offering as the solution they need.
It’s perfectly okay to get personal and mention a particular tool in your email. This can bring a sense of familiarity and alleviate any reluctance your prospects might have around trusting you.
Personalize Emails With A Compliment
Even if you are selling to a company, remember that those people in the company are still people. With this in mind, giving compliments is a surefire way to build a good relationship with prospects. Physiological studies have shown that paying a well-considered compliment can trigger a similar reaction in the recipient’s brain as does receiving money.
Reading an email that leads with offering praise may push the reader to like you, and that’s how you can get them on the path to taking an interest in your offering.
The following are some examples of how to go about being genuine with complements, and keeping within a professional context:
Seminars, blogs, etc. Have your prospects been given a seminar or published an article that you found valuable? Make sure you let them know what you liked
Winning an award. If any of your prospective clients have achieved any recognition in their field lately, you can use that in email
A lead in their domain. If any of your potential clients are leading in their field; drop an email and express your admiration
Personalize Around Prospects’ Interests
Nothing makes people happier than things that interest them, and they hold close to their hearts
But how can you precisely know what your prospects are interested in?
Leverage the power of social media platforms to gauge their interests and preferences. You browse through the social media profiles of your prospective client to help you understand and know them better.
In addition, look for frequent comments, posts, and mentions which can help you determine what your prospects are fond of. For example, it could be a movie character, a sports team, favorite places, etc.
According to SmarterHQ research, 72% of customers prefer engaging with marketing messages tailored to their specific interests. Moreover, Epsilon found that 80% of customers are more likely to buy from a brand that caters to their personalized experiences.
While it’s apparent that data-driven personalization is crucial for modern marketers, 63% of them consider it the most challenging tactic to execute. But it is the only way to make an outstanding first impression and build a decent rapport with your prospects via email. So get busy!
Hyper-Personalize Your Emails
Unlike other personalization tactics, this one cannot be executed at scale.
These emails demand maximum preparation and research to ensure that you tailor your message accurately and make it as related as possible to a particular prospect.
And this is precisely the main reason why this isn’t possible at scale. So it makes sense to leverage this with top-tier prospects with high-value offers/businesses, those that contribute an excellent percentage to your total revenue.
Spend time focusing on why you reach out to them and give a brief about their goals, company size, and the prospect’s role, the latest organizational developments, etc.
These factors are crucial to demonstrating that you know about their business requirements and understand their needs.
Moreover, address their concerns and pain points and comprehensively explain how your product can solve their existing problems. But make sure you back up and substantiate your claims with social proofs, case studies, insights, etc., to maintain your firm’s credibility.
Do not talk about your products’ features. Instead, show them the advantages that they can derive by leveraging your offerings.
You can also take your email to the next level by developing customized video snippets, pages, etc., where you can present a quick demo on the ways your company can help the prospect. Tools such as Vidyard and Loom can help you with this.
Examples Of Personalized Emails That Do It Right
While calling customers by name, speaking to their pain points, challenges, role responsibilities, objectives, and hesitations at the right place and time help you see successful results. For example, 40% of U.S. customers report buying something more expensive than they intended due to the personal element.
This necessitates incorporating personalization in your emails. So if you are not sure about how to precisely personalize your emails, here are some email examples by leading brands that nail it.
LinkedIn: Request Demo
When it comes to lead quality, research conducted by Software Advice revealed that 80% of marketers rate “live demos with sales representatives” as the most practical way to attract high-quality leads. As a result, requesting prospective clients to a personalized demonstration with a competent sales representative may make sense.
As part of LinkedIn’s social selling campaign, the company didn’t just send a personalized email invitation by addressing the recipient’s name; they also ended the email with a picture from their sales rep.
Adding a visual element to your emails is an easy and quick way to build trust. When the email is personal, concise, and based on the buyer’s behavior, it is very effective!
Similarly, you can also create a prospects’ list that has finished at least one immediate action on the site (for instance, downloaded a piece of content). However, they haven’t entered into the prospecting process yet. Craft a customized email, and invite them to a live demo session.
The Expert Institute
Email marketing is another B2B channel that could use a personal touch. In an email marketing survey, 49% of respondents revealed that they get irrelevant emails daily.
Here is an example of The Experian Institute, a B2B company that leveraged personalized lead nurturing and email marketing to boost conversions. The firm is a legal service platform that ties experts in their database with investment firms and attorneys who need support.
To maximize the performance and effectiveness, the company refined its database (a crucial step in personalized marketing) to ensure that the first names used were accurate.
The primary goal was to, of course, generate more engagement, revenue and grow the business. The recipient felt like connecting with a high-level team member and having a one-on-one conversation with them.
In addition to using first names, the Experian Institute’s content team also personalized by segmenting the email subscribers into groups based on varying engagement levels.
Those with a lesser level of engagement received free e-books and white papers with “zero marketing language.” The emails targeted at somewhat engaged groups included CTAs and blog posts links. And the “highly engaged” group got emails that directly addressed the need for Expert Institute services.
After tweaking and testing, the company reported some impressive results:
· A 200% boost in conversions
· A 60% increase in open email rates
· A 20% increase in click-through rates
Wrapping Up
By leveraging a targeted, segmented, and personalized email marketing strategy, you can make your customers and prospects feel unique and valued. In turn, they will interact and engage with your brand and content even more.
And your email personalization efforts can even get enhanced while giving you desired results if implemented to LinkedIn.
Incorporate hyper-personalization in your LinkedIn communication to captivate your lead’s attention and get them to be responsive.
Explore some of our best email personalization practices and tips to enhance your email marketing strategy and get you the response, click, open, and engagement rates that you are looking for.