Writing effective sales emails is an art – Mara Roberts and Kelly Newbery from Vision6 discuss how you can get the balance right between adding value and selling via email.

So many of the emails that I see on a daily basis are either sales focused or inwardly focused and I think it is so important to build a foundational relationship before you just sell, sell, sell. I actually recommend to my clients that they use 20% sales emails and 80% value added relationship building emails.

Kelly, what is your recipe for success when it comes to selling and for building relationships via email?

I’m so glad you brought this up because I see so many emails that are just focused on me, me, me the business rather than on your customer and their concerns and their issues. Like you mentioned the best way to go about this is certainly to add value whether it is educational resources or information about a topic or blog post or those sorts of things, they are all fantastic ways to add value to your email campaigns.

One of our clients Pool Works does this really well – the Cherrybrook store actually offers a Pool School series so basically providing information about how to look after your pool correctly. That is coupled with sales emails and those sorts of things but they see really fantastic results because they know their customers want to know that information and they need to know how to look after their pools so they are certainly seeing great results there. There’s a couple of tried and tested tactics that different people use to then sell in their emails because the thing to remember is, when it comes down to it you are sending email to increase conversions and increase sales so don’t be afraid to sell, as Mara said because that is the purpose of your emails.

There are a few ways to go about this without feeling to like the pushy door to door sales person. Personally, I recommend solving a problem, so acknowledging what your customers paying for and what they are having trouble with and you can do this by telling a story rather than jumping in and offering a solution. Once you’ve told a story and you have woven a bit of narrative around what their problem or paying point might be, that’s when you can introduce the solution which is generally your product or services, that’s a really good way of building a bit of trust with your customers.

Another really good way to build trust and to build a good solid relationship is to include testimonials and case studies in your emails because this really adds to your credibility and it shows your customers that there are other people out there that are gaining value from your products and services. Another really important thing of course is to have call to action in your email, often people forget to have a call to action – if you are not telling your customers what you want them to do they are not going to know, they are not mind readers. Always include a really clear call to action. That call to action might be to read the rest of the blog press or it might be to check out your on line store but just do make sure you do have some sort of call to action.

I recommend having key messaging in your emails and to not be afraid to repeat your key messaging throughout because although we would love to think that our customers and clients read every sentence of our emails I dare say they skim through them often so it doesn’t have to have key messaging in there throughout and as long as you are not repeating the same thing over and over again and boring your customers to tears, it doesn’t hurt to have things woven throughout your emails.

That sounds great and I often see business owners as being scared to be direct about what they want customers to do and I just say if it’s a sales email be clear about that and be really blatant about your call to action. Buttons are a great thing to add to email marketing and unless people know that they need to click there to take that action, so spell it out for them what you want people to do and lead them on that funnel to your website, to that sales page and be really clear about what you want they can do.

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