Ken Krogue

A few months ago, I talked a little bit about the question, “Is leaving a voice message an effective marketing or sales strategy?”

The answer is a definite yes—it’s very effective, especially when it’s combined with other modes of contact, email, calling, faxing.

I wanted to follow-up with another small set of tips for creating good B2B marketing and sales emails.

1. The day of the “awesome marketing email” is pretty well gone. Remember those days when the Internet was still new, and you’d get a pretty email with pictures, and colors, and swirls? At the time it was cool. Now we’ve been trained to tune them out, because we know that it’s “corporate.” Unless it’s from an email list that we actively subscribe to, we generally ignore the corporate stuff.
2. The day of the simple, targeted email is here. Keep it short, keep it simple, stupid. If you’re going to template-ize your emails, make them look like they just came from your desk, like it’s something you whipped up in three minutes. “Hey this is Dave, just following up on some info you requested. Feel free to call me, or shoot me an email back.” Done. The End. Believe it or not, we’ve even found that strategically placing a small typo in the body of the email gives the impression that it was a “personal” email, not a junket, and can increase response rates.
3. If you’re using a sales or lead management CRM (if you’re not, you should be), strategically include some small bit of information from their file. Most systems will merge data fields from the CRM directly into the body of the email. “Hey, I see you came across us at our booth at (insert XYZ Trade Show from the CRM data here).”
4. Remember, the goal of an email is not to sell your product on the spot. The goal is to get the decision-maker to respond.

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