How to Tell Someone They’re Doing it All Wrong Gracefully: 5 Ways to Personalize Prospect Emails

Picture this: it’s a shiny Monday morning. You jump into your inbox with nothing but hope and excitement for another kickass week!  Then IT happens. You get THAT email that’s pretty much a blanket bcc that you know probably 100 other people received at the very same moment.

Nothing drives me more insane then getting blasted with sales rep emails that read something like this:

Hello Jackie,

Hope you are doing well! Let me know If you would like to build a new business relationship with us for (service offering here).

Looking forward to starting a long-term business with you.

This was an actual email I received and let me tell you, it went unanswered. (Because it was terrible and absolutely deserved to be ignored.)

On the flip side, I’m a sales professional too and I hate when my emails go unanswered. Instead of sending poorly-written, generic garbage like the email above, I’ve taken up a practice to connect directly with my prospects in my email communications, engage with them on a higher level and earn a higher response rate for the effort. Taking just a few minutes to do some research about who you are talking to can make a world of a conversion difference.

Without further ado, here are my top 5 tips to get your emails opened and responded to!

Top 5 Tips To Personalize Your Prospect Emails:

1.      Research the Company– Use both internal and external channels for your research. It goes without saying that you should be checking out their website and social presences, but don’t overlook your internal channels. Hopefully your org is using a CRM (if not, we need to talk ASAP) so you should take the time to review past history to avoid making basic level mistakes like emailing a current client as a prospect – not a good look! Tools like HubSpot’s CRM can even track what pages on your site leads have visited. So use your tools to be as educated as you can about your prospect, before contacting them.
2.      Research the PERSON – You can always fall back on your buyers personas for a great starting point, but that is never going to paint a full picture of who you are trying to connect with.  Stalk (I mean look), at their LinkedIn profile. Can you find any commonalities or detect anything about them personally? Keep that information top of mind when drafting an email to them to connect on a more authentic level.
3.      Don’t Be Stiff– as you can probably tell from my writing, I am a REAL PERSON.  I make mistakes and expect other people to make them to. And that is ok!  Be true to you and your organizations brand (read more about how having an epic brand plan can score you major points) for a truly authentic process.
4.      Offer a Benefit– Unless you live under a rock, you know that providing educational content throughout your buyer’s journey is key. And the good sales teams are doing that in their first communication. Hopefully you have a library of content: blogs, whitepapers, ebooks on what you are doing and why it’s so awesome! Why wouldn’t you want to share that with your prospect? Get them buying into what you offer and viewing you as a super resource. When it’s time to make a buying decision, you’ll be miles ahead of the competition.
5.      Help– Ultimately, it’s all about helping a buyer along their journey to a purchase. From my first interactions with prospects, it’s all about how I can fix their problem, make them a rockstar to their boss and get an item checked off their to do list! If you are genuinely working to help them, all communication you have with them will be a part of your success. Even if they don’t end up doing business with you, you can go to bed at night knowing you did something good that day. And I don’t know about you, but I prefer to rest my head on a pillow of helping, rather than annoying, people.

6.    BONUS TIP– Personalization tokens. If you are using HubSpot, run, do not walk, over to your templates and create a few of these with the personalizations that are already there. Then, all you need to do is drop in some personal information tidbits you uncover through the above research you already did to get those emails rocking. Need help with this?

Now back to the fun part– how do you tell them they are doing it wrong? As kindly as possible!  

If I have no interest in speaking with a salesperson, I might send a link on how to better connect with a prospect. Maybe share my favorite sales blog that could provide some lessons on how taking an extra 5 minutes and personalizing emails can up your open and response rates (like this blog right here). But in the end, not everyone is going to GET it.  And that is ok. It leaves more space in the market for you and me to be super successful rock stars in our offices!

If you are reading this because no one is opening your emails, don’t fret. You can turn your conversion rates around quickly by taking a few quick steps with each new email you send!