Your company’s ability to retain and attract new clients will directly correlate to your business’s success. Whether your top KPIs consist of increased brand awareness, exceeding your ROI, or expanding your operations, your potential to grow your audience will play a pivotal role in attaining these gains. Fortunately, reaching new prospects can easily be done via email—a channel that is both accessible and great for engagement.
Whether you’re exploring innovative ways to expand your reach to new users or you’re simply looking for a few tips to brush up on existing email prospect campaigns, this article will cover everything you need to know about creating emails that will convert recipients into clients.
What are prospecting emails?
As the name indicates, prospect emails refer to a form of outreach to a potential customer—or prospect—with the intent of informing them about your business’s products or services. Sometimes referred to as a ‘cold email,’ this form of communication may be the recipient’s first level of engagement with your company.
While general brand awareness, ads, and marketing campaigns can help you organically attract new clients, reaching out directly to targeted users will encourage quick interest and curiosity in your business. Since statistics show that people check their email an average of 15 times per day1, sending a targeted message directly to a person’s inbox can be a seamless yet powerful way to engage with them.
Why data validation is the key to prospecting email success
Whether you’re creating a prospecting email or kickstarting any sort of email marketing campaign, your first priority will be ensuring a clean email list. While your team will work hard to curate the right messaging and material, their success will be contingent upon reaching the right recipients—which is where data validation comes into play.
Email validation helps boost deliverability and open rates by ensuring the validity of an email before you hit send. Not only does this save your business time and money on reaching out aimlessly without direction, but it can play a substantial role in increasing your conversions, too.
Benefits of prospecting emails
Acquiring new customers is foundational for business growth, making prospecting emails a pivotal component of your marketing plan. Regardless of what service or product your business sells, there are countless prospective customers you have yet to reach. Fortunately, prospecting emails can help you expand your audience with ease.
Several additional benefits of this form of email outreach include:
- Low cost
- Personalization
- Expanded reach
- Convenient communication
The 5 most valuable prospecting email tips
Prospecting emails are a cost-efficient and easy way to expand your brand awareness and inform new users about the services or products your business offers. Before you begin this email marketing campaign, however, you’ll want to keep a few tips in mind to ensure your success.
Here’s a look at 5 email tips your organization should follow to increase the value of the emails and messaging you’ll be sending out:
- Ensure a clean email list
While your email template may look and sound great, it has to reach the right audience to generate any degree of success. That’s why possessing accurate email lists is crucial for any company engaging in email marketing campaigns.
With the help of a trusted email verification tool, you can start with a clean email list that enhances your email marketing performance with ease. Experian’s email validation software ensures your email data is valid and complete—giving your business the peace of mind necessary to know your communication efforts are successful.
- Create buyer personas
A buyer persona is composed of the characteristics and traits of a specified customer. This includes details such as your user’s:
- Age
- Location
- Background
- Hobbies
- Interests
- Occupation
Before you curate your prospective emails, it’s crucial to define your buyer persona to lead a more effective marketing campaign. The more you understand the behaviors and traits of your audience, the more likely you are to influence these users to engage with your products or services.
- Personalize your outreach
With buyer personas in mind, your team now knows how to segment your audience. Now, you can create messaging that is personalized, much more likely to capture your audiences’ attention, and ultimately lead to greater conversions.
If your business isn’t leveraging personalized messaging in outreach, your prospecting emails will be a great place to start. Businesses link personalization in their campaigns to an astonishing 82% increase in open rates and a 75% higher click-through rate2. Since you want your email recipients to read the message that lands in their inbox and click through to your site to learn more, it’s important to keep in mind that personalization is important for successful conversions.
- Choose the right time
When is your audience most like to check their inbox? Establishing the right time to schedule your emails will factor heavily into whether those messages will successfully reach your intended audience—or remain unread.
Explore when your users are most likely to check their phones or laptops to increase your open rates and responsivity. Spend some time determining the best time and days of the week to launch your email campaign to maximize engagement.
- Have a clear call to action
Including a direct call to action and having a clear path for recipients to follow in your email is a necessary component in generating sales. Whether your prospecting email highlights a sale, a free trial, or is sent with the intent for users to explore your site, leverage actionable verbiage with a clear CTA to maximize click-through rates and drive conversions.
Prospecting email examples and templates
Not sure where to start? Take a look at a few of our prospecting email templates below to help generate some inspiration:
1. Product/software announcement
Hi [Prospect Name],
Have you checked out [insert company name’s] latest tool? We recently released [insert product/software name], which can help your business quickly and readily screen clients’ credit so that you can extend offers of credit on the spot.
If you have a quick 10 minutes, I’d love to show you how it works live! If you’re interested, feel free to respond to this email with your earliest availability to see our demo in action.
Best,
[Employee name]
2. Providing assistance/solving the client’s problem
Hey [Prospect Name],
I know this is a busy time of year for [insert industry title], so I’ll keep this brief. At [insert company name] we help businesses just like yours exceed their marketing goals with a very hands-off approach. Our industry experts can help lead your teams’ marketing initiatives, website development work, and paid campaigns.
We services businesses across all industries, including [insert client names]. Do you have a quick 15 minutes for a call? I’d love to help [insert company name] exceed its KPIs this year!
Thanks,
[Employee name]
Enhance your prospecting emails for increased sales
Your business may have already built a hefty clientele, but that doesn’t mean it should stop reaching out to new prospects. Business growth and marketing to new customers go together, which means your company should be one step ahead of growing its existing audience via prospect emails.
At Experian, we can help ensure that your email list is clean and accurate. Before you kickstart your next email campaign, our team of experts can provide you with the information you need to improve your existing and future data. Reach out to our team to learn how to get started today!
Sources:
1https://hbr.org/2019/01/how-to-spend-way-less-time-on-email-every-day
2https://uplandsoftware.com/adestra/resources/blog/important-personalize-communications/
