How to write the perfect outreach email

Email marketing has long been one of the most popular and effective tools for reaching new leads and customers. However, only around 8.5% of outreach emails go on to receive a response, so how do you give your email the best chance to be successful?

This article will tell you how to write an outreach email and covers some of the main things to think about. It will help you think about who you are writing to, how you position your offering, and how to gain your reader’s trust.

Know your audience

As with any marketing activity, the most important thing to understand is your audience. Knowing your audience, their likes and dislikes, and what they are looking for from your business is the foundation upon which you can build the perfect sales pitch.

Understanding your audience will help you communicate in a tone of voice and style that really resonates with them. This is essential for creating an email that encourages engagement from the right people. For example, an older business owner is likely to have different values and priorities to those of a teenage student, so if the message doesn’t align with this it will quickly be seen as spam and deleted.

Is it relevant?

Before you send a cold outreach email, ask yourself if what you are offering is relevant to your contacts. If you offer different products or services, it is unlikely that just one will appeal to your whole database. This is where segmenting comes in to play.

Segmenting your audience – or grouping them into categories – helps you to be much more specific and relevant with your messages. As with the point above, dividing your audience into smaller categories means you can really tailor your marketing message to each area of your database. Not only does this make the email feel more personal, it also helps the customer to see the value that you can offer to them specifically.  In fact, Studies show that segmented email campaigns have an open rate that is 14.32% higher than non-segmented campaigns.

Your audience want to know what you can offer and how it will help them solve a problem or improve their lives. Make sure that what you are offering is the right fit for your audience.

If you are using Act! CRM, segmenting your audience into groups can be done automatically using dynamic groups. Ask us how it works by emailing info@softext.co.uk.

Get your point across

Nobody likes a sales call, and the same goes for emails. Often the people you are emailing are decision makers and business owners who are probably very busy (and very stressed!). When they do have a spare ten minutes to catch up on admin, it’s likely that deciphering a rambling email isn’t top of the list of priorities. If you’re wondering how to write an outreach email, the key is to keep it clear and concise. Start with the most important point – what are you offering and how will it help your recipient – and then include less important details towards the end.

Be clear about what you want

Once you’ve clearly conveyed your message and hooked your reader, you need to tell them what to do next. Do you want them to reply to your email, visit your website or contact you in some other way? Think of this as closing the deal on this stage of the interaction – if the recipient has read this far it’s time to give them a little push in the right direction.

A great way to make your call to actions stand out in an email is through using buttons. A brightly coloured button will grab the reader’s attention and let them know what to do next. Try it in your next email campaign with Act! Growth Suite.

Use personalisation when you write an outreach email

Emails with personalised message bodies have a 32.7% better response rate than those that don’t personalise their messages. Just as understanding your audience will help you speak directly to them, personalisation will add that extra cherry on top.

The simplest way of personalising your emails using Act! Growth Suite is by using merge tags. This will automatically* pull in information such as your contact’s name, salutation or even which products & services they have bought from you previously. (*as long as those fields have been correctly filled in on the contact record)

Focus on design

Does your email look professional or does it look like spam? People are more likely to trust you if you have taken the time to design a visually appealing email. Consider using clear, high quality images and buttons to really make your content stand out.

Subject Line

One of the most important elements when you write an outreach email is the subject line. Not only do you need to think of a subject that will entice your audience to open it, you also need to make sure it will pass the test of SPAM filters. This means avoiding the use of trigger words such as ‘free’, ‘limited offer’, or ‘sale’, and too many capital letters or exclamation marks.

For more tips on avoiding SPAM filters and improving the delivery rate of your email campaigns, take a look at our free eBook here.

Follow up your outreach email

Research indicates that sending out follow up emails after an initial outreach email can increase both open rates and response rates. Figures show that email sequences with multiple attempts and multiple contacts boost response rates by up to 160%.

Using marketing automation is a great way to replicate this in your own campaigns with ease and efficiency. Using drip campaigns in Act! Growth Suite allows you to automatically send out follow ups as little or as often as you want to.

Link to your website and social media profiles

If you are sending a ‘cold’ email to people you’ve not yet spoken to, chances are they won’t have heard of you or your business. Including a link back to your website or your social media profiles will give them a clearer picture of your business and increase their trust in you.

Adding a link to your social media profiles could also help to give your sale that extra push as 8.4 million British consumers currently shop via social media using Facebook, Instagram and snapchat as the most popular channels.

Act! Growth Suite makes it easy to write an outreach email and if you subscribe with Softext we’ll help you with tips and advice along the way. To try it for free follow this link here or contact us on 0121 323 2304.