Public Relations & Social Marketing Insight

According to TOPO, prospects open less than 24% of sales emails. That means three out of four emails you’ve agonized over and sent to buyers in the past month were likely not worth writing at all.

A study from Boomerang reveals the factors behind why some emails are opened, and others are sent straight to trash.

The data, based on a collection of more than 40 million emails, showed messages that expressed either moderate positivity or negativity evoked 10 to 15% more responses than completely neutral emails. But, reps should know, the research discovered too much emotion in messages resulted in similar response rates as neutral emails. “Flattery works, but excessive flattery doesn't,” Alex Moore wrote in the report.

The optimal length of an email has been much debated. But according to Boomerang’s data, emails between 50 and 125 words had the best response rates at just above 50%. Short and direct emails resonated best with prospects and earned a response.

However, the numbers revealed a fine line: Emails that were 10 words or shorter got a response just 36% of the time....

When it comes to email marketing, Chris Brogan literally owns a day of the week.

The New York Times bestselling author, keynote speaker and marketing consultant for worldwide brands including Coca Cola, IBM, Google, Disney and countless others has a Sunday email newsletter that is the stuff of digital legend.

And what's most fascinating is that Brogan's approach to email marketing isn't one many would consider emulating, let alone on the scale he does each week. Also, his views on the size of one's email list seem to go against what many consider the Holy Grail of email marketing - the bigger the list, the better the results.

Most businesses know they should be following up leads with a good email autoresponder sequence. However, many simply don't know what to write in their emails, and so they never get around to it.

Here are five approaches you can use when creating your email follow-up sequences.

These approaches will help you stay top of mind without boring or annoying your prospect with the same message every time.

Since these are frameworks, not scripts or copy-and-paste templates, you can adapt these to suit virtually any product or service in any industry....

Every Monday morning, you find yourself sitting down to send 10-15 emails to people you’d love to get responses from.

Maybe they are cold prospects, or potential joint venture partners, or press outlets you’re hoping to get coverage in.

Regardless of why you email, to ultimately get what you want the other person has to open and reply to your email, lost in the over 205 Billion emails sent per day according to Radicati Group.

Over the past 2 months, for every 100 emails I sent to influencers, A-Listers, and CEO’s, 97 were opened and 92 were replied to, using 3 nifty secrets built into this tool called Send Later for Gmail....

At one point or another, we all need inspiration to do our jobs better. It doesn't matter whether you're a marketing veteran who has navigated through years of changing technology or a newbie fresh out of college -- we all need examples of outstanding content. It helps us get through creative ruts, make the case to our boss for experimentation, and improve our own marketing.

Most of the time, inspiration is easy to find because most marketing content is publicly available. You can scour the internet or go on your favorite social network to see what your connections are talking about.

But there's one marketing channel that is really, really hard to find good examples of unless you're already in the know: email. There's nothing casual about it -- you usually need to be subscribed to an email list to find great examples of emails. And even if you're subscribed to good emails, they are often bombarding you day after day, so it's hard to notice the gems.

Because it's so difficult to find good email marketing examples, we decided to do the scouring and compiling for you. Read on to discover some great emails and get the lowdown on what makes them great -- or just keep on scrolling to get a general feel for each. However you like to be inspired is fine by us!...

Emails are so easy to send, but they’re also easy to ignore. With more than 120 messages landing in the average office worker’s inbox each day, making sure yours gets read and gets a response can be tricky. To increase your chances of getting of a reply, here are nine tricks you can try...:

These are three compelling reasons I’d advise against using LinkedIn to foster cold email introductions. What would I suggest instead?

- Find your target's business email address using the tools listed here.

- Write a value-based email introduction. Make sure it covers in no more than four two-line paragraphs why they should reply to you. 

- Send it to the prospect's business email address. 

- Revise your email to remove any self-serving language.

- Imagine I’m going to pay you $1000 for every word you remove from the email. Take out as many as you can. I owe you at least $10k right?

- Send the email.

Salespeople shouldn’t send “just checking in” emails for one very simple reason: They don’t work. Buyers feel like the rep is virtually poking them, making them reluctant to answer. Not only do “checking in” messages rarely garner responses, they can even turn prospects against their senders.

But reps still need a way to get in touch with buyers who’ve gone dark. Enter these 23 email templates.

These “just checking in” alternatives simultaneously add value to the prospect while putting the salesperson back on her radar. She’ll want to restart the sales conversation -- so it’s a win-win....

While many people agonize over their email copy and then slap a hastily written subject line on two seconds before hitting "send," sales reps know that the situation should actually be reversed.

After all, there's no point in crafting a beautiful message if buyers don't even open it. And what prompts the all-important open? The subject line.

But with only a tiny bit of real estate to work with, there's no room for mistakes. With this in mind, we took to Reddit's Sales channel to round up subject lines vouched for by real sales reps. Instead of reinventing the wheel with your messages, use these subject lines knowing that they've been tried, tested, and verified to work by reps around the world.

Interested to learn why these subject lines do the trick? We've also included the logic behind each for your knowledge....