Best Email Prospecting Tactics: Stay Persistent
August 30, 2012
The final tip in my series on the best email prospecting tactics is to stay persistent. I suppose this particular tip is probably the least tactical, but it’s also perhaps the most important. If you look at email behavior in general as is suggested in Jill Konrath’s Ultimate Guide to Email Prospecting, the majority of people typically scan through their inboxes extremely quickly, often merely glancing at the subject line, sender, and pre header before making the decision of whether to read, delete, or save each message for later.
The fact is, even if you follow the advice in this blog series, to a tee, or any other tips found elsewhere, the odds are still against you. If someone tells you otherwise they are either lying or confused. Yes, statistically, most of the prospecting emails you send will wind up in the latter two categories: “delete” or “save for later” (and we all know how often we actually read the “save for later”s).
That’s why my last tip is about persistence. You need to think of email prospecting the same way a great sales person thinks about cold calling. It requires cadence, thick skin, and you need to remember it’s not about making the sale, it’s about getting a chance to make the sale, or setup the meeting, or even simply land a response to find out whether it’s actually worth your time to continue pursuing.
Just because you don’t get a response to your first, second, or third email doesn’t mean you should stop or give up. In fact, in my experience managing and observing outbound prospecting teams in the portfolio, prospects almost always appreciate persistence, and it is only in rare cases that prospects ask you to stop trying to contact them. At one company at which I built and managed the outbound prospecting team, every time I would go to a trade show at least two or three prospects would approach me and say, “I’ve been getting all of the calls and emails from your guys, and I just haven’t had a chance to respond. I appreciate the persistence. Thanks.”
Furthermore, while I am generally a very strong proponent of picking up the phone for prospecting, in some market segments, I have actually seen emails be more effective for outbound prospecting than dials. At another portfolio company we did an analysis of their customer acquisition process and actually found a number of opportunities thanks to a very persistent sales rep who consistently emailed and called the same few accounts for about nine months before actually getting a meeting scheduled. When it did finally happen it was in response to an email, and the deal finally came in about 30 days later.
All that said, you may be wondering, how can you stay persistent with your prospecting emails without annoying your prospects? Here are a few tips:
1) Never send more than two emails to the same person in the same week.
Instead, have a set cadence that you follow that includes calls, emails, and voicemails spread out over time. There are two primary cadences that I have used.
- This will last two business weeks and includes numerous unlisted calls with no voicemail in between each touch point:
- Day 1 – Call VM, Email
- Day 3 – Call VM, Email
- Day 7 – Call VM, Email
- Day 10 – Call VM, Email
- Here is another one that I borrowed from a Marketing Sherpa case study that they saw great results with:
- Email #1 – on day 1
- Call #1 – after the email, same day
- Call #2 – two business days later
- Call #3 – three business days later
- Email #2 – four business days later
- Call #4 – two business days later
- Call #5 – three business days later
- Call #6 – four business days later
2) Keep the content fresh.
If you keep sending the same email over and over again it tells your prospects that they are just another email address on your list. If you change it up every time, however, it tells them that you are at least putting in an extra bit of effort. Use the tips in my previous posts on leveraging the prospects content and being specific to craft unique and effective emails.
3) Never send too much info in one email.
If your product address three specific pain points, and prospects always bite on at least one of them, you don’t have include all three in the any one email that you send. If you send them all in the first email you won’t have anything else to email about next time. Remember that the odds are against you, and that prospects scan their emails quickly, so try focusing on one specific pain point in each email, and send three emails to increase your odds of getting a bite.
This post concludes my series on the best email prospecting tactics. I hope you find these tips useful, and I hope they bring you great results. If you have any stories about these tips, or others that have worked for you, I would love to hear about them in the comments.