Top 5 Email Mistakes You Need to Avoid
I recently sent out a BAD sales email.
Bad sales emails often go under the radar because most likely they won't result in a reply or a sale.
It's a bit easier to identify ideas around what some of our "best" emails look like based on positive responses they've led to in the past. To start writing better sales emails, it's important to take a look into what doesn't work. 
5 Email Mistakes that most likely will result in a "Delete"
1. Typos and basic grammar mistakes. When sending a sales email the impression you make is key, especially within your first communication. Typos and basic grammar mistakes = loss of credibility. The focus shifts from selling to "why is this person wasting my time with an email they didn't edit." Lesson learned from the BAD email I sent. This was the response my email resulted in:
"...even if YOUR a pro."
You still rep Tout or can I call her out on this?
Not the type of reply I was looking for... scoring a meeting would have been better. Simple grammar mistakes, such as Your vs. You're can kill the value of a sales email instantly.
2. Mail merge fail. Similar to typos and grammar, the mail merge fail leads to automatic disregard of your email or just a good laugh. Here's an email one of our Tout developers Steven recieved:
Steven, Richard, As a ruby rails developer in the Bay Area, you are one of the most saught out engineers at the moment. Feels nice huh? Although with every positive, there are some negatives (you do probably get bombarded with recruiters all the time).
We are still wondering who Richard is...No one wants to read an email sent to Dave at Company A when you're name is Ryan at Company B.
3. A long and boring email. Everyone is busy. No one wants to read a 5 paragraph essay from you. Tweet size emails. Keep your emails down to 3 short paragraphs.
4. Don't let marketing write your sales emails. While marketing emails may look fancy and visually appealing, they do not come off as personalized or forge building real relationships. Simply said your lead wants to know their is an actual pulse on the other end. Use Tout templates so YOU can create your own sales templates easily that look just like any email you'd send out from Outlook and Gmail.
5. No follow up. This one technically does not result in an automatic delete. How can you delete an email that hasn't even been sent? Changes are you won't recieve a reply or close a deal after sening out just one email. Strategic follow up is key using a combination of email and phone. Well, unfortunately I can't go back and "un-send" the BAD email I sent.
3 Tips for Successful Sales Emails
- Your subject line. The subject line is like a book cover. While, we are told never to judge a book by its cover, this does not hold true for subject lines. Subjecy lines make it or break it. A good subject line will give your email that "extra-edge" when getting noticed in your leads' busy inbox.
- The intro. An email intro is key. Why should your lead care? Make your intro about them. Mention a referral, boost their ego, keep it simple...just don't jump into a detailed explanation of your company.
- Follow up. You need to follow up. Here's the catch to being successful, "Stop touching base and checking in." This is the best advice I learned from following sales influencer John Barrows. Make sure you are following up with an intent to move along the sales and have a call to action.
How to follow up from a sales email
Did my lead or prospect get my email? This is the biggest question often faced even after spending the time to write an awesome sales email.
- Use ToutApp's Live Feed to see when your email is opened, clicked or when your lead is on slide 5 of your sales deck. Now you can spend you time following up with the most engaged people with a timed call or email.
- We oftentimes forget about the leads or contacts we email and never respond. Maybe a lead you're scheduling a meeting with. Emails get lost, pushed aside, and forgotten just like snail mail. Most likely these people may be interested, opening your email multiple times, clickng on the links in your email to learn more and never take the next steps to reply.
- Use Tout templates. Make it easy for yourself to follow up by creating templates.
Sales emails are tough - let's face it. Spend time selling, not wasting time wondering if Richard and Steven read your email.
ToutApp Sales Job of the Week: Account Representative at Dyn
Here at ToutApp, we’re all about helping salespeople and sales managers get better at selling. So, in addition to our book and our sales school content, we also feature awesome sales jobs at companies that use our platform. If you would like your company and position to be featured in the future, you can fill out this form.
This week’s awesome sales job is at Dyn.
Dyn is a worldwide Internet Infrastructure as a Service (laaS) leader, powering Managed DNS and Email Delivery for over four million enterprise clients, small businesses and home users.
Simply put, Dyn helps run websites run faster and be more reliable, while also ensuring that transactional emails the consumers want and need reach their inboxes. We make the internet a better place.
Dyn has been featured in numerous publications and recently named by Business Insider as one of the "25 Enterprise Startups to bet your career on." Founder Jeremy Hitchcock, bootstraped Dyn into the success it is today. After waiting 11 years of accepting no VC money, they recently raised a $38M Series A Round led by North Bridge.
Our thoughts on Dyn
Dyn is a fast-growing company that has focused not only on engineering excellence, but also on rock-solid customer relationships. Similar to how ToutApp does things, it's all about the customer. If the customer doesn't walk away feeling more productive, satisfied and happy then you're doing it wrong. And Dyn gets that. Every project they work on is about their clients.
They have not only an amazing product but an amazing team. Their mission: That they set forth with the expectation that each indiviual employee grabs an important seat on the bus. And you don't get that at every company.
Here is how the people at Dyn describe their team culture:
Over the past few years we've heard more and more companies talk about the importance of culture in the workplace. Management is finally realizing that when you have a happy, healthy and motivated employees, the result is a superior product and experience for the customer.
At Dyn we have a unique (geeky) culture that inspires every employee to help create, support, and share or great DNS services with our customers.
Perks at Dyn
- For stress management they have a number of toys around the office (arcade games, Nerf games, etc.) for people to use.
- Dyn has a quiet room for those who just want to get away and enjoy the free chair massages.
- If that is not enough for you, you can take advantage of Dyn's unlimited PTO when you need a break.
Details around the Account Representative Role
In this role you will have an opportunity to work with the most interesting and influential web companies on the Internet. You will be focused on developing solutions based on technology needs by implementing strategic selling strategies.
Responsibilities
- You are a customer advocate and will be responsible for incoming and outgoing sales activites.
- Help the most interesting web properties on the Internet navigate how to stay up and how to scale.
- Help the company with marketing efforts, travel to visit customers, represent us at trade shows and countless other activites.
Requirements
- 4 year college degree
- 2-5 years prior experience in sales
- Proof of legal authority to work in U.S.
- Strong technical or Internet backgroun
- Previous experience at telco or ISP
- Understanding of SaaS (subscription) model
- Some ability to travel
- Ability to work out of a home office environment
- Proven track record of exceeding sales objectives
Next Steps
If you are willing to bring hustle to an organization focused on passionate people, cool culture, great benefits and HUGE growth, Dyn is the place for you.
If you'd like your company to be featured as a Sales Job of the Week, just fill out this form for consideration. Being a ToutApp customer obviously increases your chances!
Toutapp Helps Lawgical Increase Engagement
Our featured Team of the Week entry comes from Lawgical. Every week or so, we'll profile a different user group who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.
About Lawgical
Lawgical is an online marketing company that serves select legal niches. We have a number of brands such as ServeNow, PInow, AboutBail, and the Legal Talk Network that are recognized as industry leading networks for the legal communities that they serve. Our activities range from building our networks to actively promoting the products.
How Lawgical uses ToutApp
ToutApp is an incredibly useful tool for outreach and sales productivity. We use it throughout our marketing and sales departments to create and enhance engagement with clients and leads.
An example of how we've used ToutApp is in communications with governmental agencies for marketing projects. The responsiveness of agencies and their bureaucracies can vary greatly. So being able to view whether they opened or clicked on our emails has guided our communications, especially for when and how we follow up. As a result, we've increased the number of responses to our requests and gotten much better project results.
Beyond just tracking, the ability to create and use templates within ToutApp has helped us routinize and refine certain processes to make them faster and more efficient.
ToutApp Sales Job of the Week: Inside Sales at Swipely
Here at ToutApp, we’re all about helping salespeople and sales managers get better at selling. So, in addition to our books, our sales school, we also feature awesome sales jobs at companies that use our platform. If you would like your company and position to be featured in the future, you can fill out this form.
This week’s awesome sales job of the week is at Swipley.
Swipely gives local merchants a simple way to accept payments, understand customers and grow sales. Swipely's fast paced sales team has an infectiously positive attitude and drive to win. We think big, we learn fast, and we get stuff done!
Recently named by Forbes as "One of America's Most Promising Companies" and recognized with an "Innovator of the Year" award from The Providence Business news, Swipely is the fastest growing Silicon Valley funded technology company in Rhode Island, and a great place to grow your career.
Our thoughts on Swipely
As you might've noticed with these ToutApp Sales Jobs of the week, (last week's was with Parse.ly), we don't just feature anyone. We like to filter through and find the seriously awesome sales jobs for you.
So... why Swipely? From our point of view, their product is going to be a game changer. Every business needs to start accepting credit cards -- so that's a no-brainer and Swipely makes that dead simple easy. BUT, on top of that, they bring the supreme awesomeness by tying in payments data for merchants into loyalty data -- making it dead simple easy for even the smallest little local merchants to know who their VIPs are.
Once they achieve world domination, not only will all of my local merchants no longer require me to carry any cash (which I hate doing), with their dynamo payments + relationships platform, my local merchants will also start to remember who I am and that I'm a loyal customer. It's really powerful stuff.
In addition to the product, we've had the pleasure of working with the Swipely team for quite some time since they're also ToutApp users. The people are simply awesome.
Here is how Elizabeth at Swipely describes their team culture:
Awesome team spirit! We challenge each other, are constantly learning and take the time to celebrate wins.
Details around the Inside Sales Role
We are building an "A team" of high motivated individuals to join our rapidly growing inside sales team at our Providence headquarters. As an Account Executive, you'll help transform how local merchants accept payments, understand customers and grow sales.
Responsibilities
- Manage your own leads and drive the fulls sales cycle from the introductory calls to online demonstrations to closing deals.
- Educate prospective merchant members about Swipely's platform, knowing our product inside and out (We will train you, of course).
- Make a high volume of outbound sales calls to local business owners each day (80+).
- Meet and strive to exceed individual monthly sales goals.
- Establish lasting, mutually benficial relationships with merchant members.
Requirements
- An entrepeneurial spirirt: our account executives are hard working, well organized, self-motivated and confident.
- A passion for sales, specifically technology that helps local merchants succeed.
- Strong interpersonal skills: our account executives are energetic, outgoing, strong listeners and able to balance confidence and resolve with humility and empathy.
- Able to implement feedback and learn quickly. Swipely provides training and ongoing coaching to help you win and grow.
- Comfortable using technology. Swipely uses Salesforce.com extensively.
- 1-3 years of experience selling (preferably to local businesses). Bachelor's degree preferred but not required.
Next Steps
If you are looking for a career, a company that's invested in your developement, great training and leading edge-tools and resources to win, Swipely is the place for you.
If you'd like your company to be featured as a Sales Job of the Week, just fill out this form for consideration. Being a ToutApp customer obviously increases your chances!
ToutApp Sales Job of the Week: Publisher Sales at Parse.ly
Here at ToutApp, we’re all about helping salespeople and sales managers get better at selling. So, in addition to our books, our sales school, we also feature awesome sales jobs at companies that use our platform. If you would like your company and position to be featured in the future, you can fill out this form.
This week’s awesome sales job of the week is at Parse.ly.
Parse.ly gives the best online publishers in-depth, actionable insight about their users and content through a suite of products that make up the Parse.ly Publisher Platform. Already, Parse.ly tracks over 4 billion page views a month.
According to a recent TechCrunch article, they raised an A round from ff Venture Capital and Blumberg Capital in December 2010 totaling $1.8 million.
Our thoughts on Parse.ly
We’re big believers of real-time data ourselves here at Tout, so when we took a peek into Parse.ly’s “Dash” product, simply put, we thought it was awesome. Data is abundant, but when companies like Parse.ly harness that data and present it in a meaningful way, thats when the magic happens.
When we took a peek at Parse.ly's company blog, it was evident that their team of superheroes are a group of people that aren't just in it but are people that think deeply about every aspect of their business -- and are particularly passionate about solving problems for publishers.
About the Role
Here's how Sachin Kamdar, CEO at Parse.ly would describe the sales role their are hiring for.
Parse.ly is seeking a motivated and ambitious individual that can dive in to the publisher sales process head first. This person needs to be a quick learner, incredibly organized, and able communicate exceptionally well with current and potential clients. Further, the individual needs to be excited about our technology and our ability to change the way the publishers create, manage, and promote content on their property.
As an early employee you’ll be working directly with the CEO and Director of Sales, and your voice will have an influence and effect on all aspects of product and business at Parse.ly. The connections you make through customer outreach and management will give you the ability to make a name for yourself in a high-growth area of online media.
Responsibilities
- Prospect new business deals with online publishers, marketing services agencies, and brands.
- Engage at a high frequency with clients via phone, email, and presentations – both remotely and in-person.
- Provide leadership in post-sales activities to ensure that customers’ needs and requirements are met.
- Continue to build strong customer relationships.
- Construct and distribute marketing materials associated with new and existing products.
Requirements
- 2–3 years experience in technology and online media.
- Strong understanding of digital media, online publishing, and SaaS sales processes.
- Proficient with the basics for sales (PowerPoint, KeyNote, CRM software, Excel, etc.)
- Self-sufficient, but works well with others.
- Highly organized.
Next Steps
In conclusion, if you've got 2 to 3 years of experience in technology/online media and love working with online publishers, marketing service agencies and brands ---- AND want to be an early employee at a startup that will undoubtedly be a great success:
If you'd like your company to be featured as a Sales Job of the Week, just fill out this form for consideration. Being a ToutApp customer obviously increases your chances!