In the last four years, SalesFolk CEO Heather R Morgan has helped over 550 B2B companies improve their sales and marketing emails. They’ve done this for companies like Verifi, Brainshark, Square, and even the 140 year old Dutch revolving door company, Boon Edam. Heather is also a columnist for Inc magazine, Forbes, and has appeared on channels such as NBC as an email expert.
In other words, Heather knows how to write compelling emails.
After composing well over 10,000 cold emails, she’s built deep experience on which strategies make outbound emails resonate with their recipients. When we asked her to discuss some of the most successful strategies she uses when working with sales teams, personalization at scale took center stage.
Heather sat down with us and showed us, in tactical detail, her most effective strategies for personalizing cold emails, including how to implement personalization at scale in larger outbound email campaigns, so you can send emails that touch highly specific pain points instead of boring generic ones.
But first, we started with a terrible cold email she recently received.
The two mistakes that made this email dead on arrival
To frame the discussion, Heather showed us what happens when a sales email is mistargeted and insufficiently personalized. The example below is an email she received from Marketo, a well known marketing automation company.
Mistake #1: The email is mistargeted
“As far as I know,” Heather explained, “I don’t fit the profile of this company’s buyers.” Sending an email to Heather about a complex marketing automation system was a waste of time for both sender and recipient. Why? Heather’s company doesn’t fit the profile of one that is likely to benefit from Marketo’s software.
As a result, the email simply annoyed Heather and made her *less *likely to do business with that company in the future. “How did they ‘notice’ I was researching marketing automation?” she grumbled. “I know that they probably stole my email from a conference I recently spoke at, since I never use my real email when downloading educational marketing content.”
In order for you to be successful with sales prospecting, you first must make sure that you’re actually targeting people who are qualified to buy from you.
Mistake #2: The content isn’t personalized enough to resonate
Even if Heather was interested in marketing automation, the generic opening line doesn’t offer value. “Marketing automation is just a feature. So this email has zero benefit. It has no social proof. It gives me zero reason to keep reading and respond because there’s no value to me. Of course I know who Marketo is, but otherwise there is no credibility. This email is generic and lazy.”
“The key in your research is not just generic linking keywords,” she said, like tossing in “marketing automation” and hoping it will stick. Salespeople and email marketers need to hone in on what their buyers want, then find ways to demonstrate value to them. This advice may sound cliched (“give them what they want”), but as Heather demonstrated later in the interview, being as specific as possible by personalizing benefits and barriers is critical to higher response rates.
In other words, the Marketo email failed on two distinct levels.
First, it was targeted to the wrong person; Heather’s business has no need of their service.
Second, the email failed to get a response because it didn’t offer value - she didn’t learn anything new that could improve her business, and it didn’t hit on her pain points.
After skimming the email, Heather had no incentive to respond.
The failed strategy that led to these mistakes
When in doubt, many Sales Development Representatives take a guess about pain points or fall back on generic, almost cliched pain points from the company website; hence, the ‘researching marketing automation’ line. But Heather’s strategy hinges on a critical reality: not everyone on your list will have the same pain points. A mistargeted email that guesses incorrectly, like the one Heather received, is dead on arrival (D.O.A.).
So, in a bid to avoid D.O.A. emails, many SDRs choose to focus on product features. But if you’re just talking about the product, you’re not building trust and rapport with your prospects. You’ll quickly sound the same as your competitors, who regularly mention similar features for similar products.
If you want more tips on how to improve your cold email campaigns, Heather shares more inside this blog post.
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