According to Statista, 330–375 billion emails are expected to be sent and received daily between now and 2025. Getting your B2B emails read amidst all this noise is a monumental challenge.
Earning your prospects’ attention is harder than ever. Here are five tips for writing BDR outreach emails that cut through the clutter.
1. Be Direct
Your prospect wants to know:
- Who are you?
- What do you want?
- What can you do for them?
Answer these questions in as few sentences as you can.
Treat your prospects’ time as sacred. Get to the point.
One way to keep your email concise is to:
- use
- bullet
- points
- wherever
- you
- can
Obviously, don’t be as ridiculous as the example above, but make your key points as easily understandable as possible.
Quick Tips
- State the problem or pain point your prospect is going through. You could say, “What if we could save you 5+ hours per week that you are currently spending on writing welcome emails?”
- State your solution. Talk about what your service or product does rather than what it is. For example, “Our ABC AI tool uses machine learning to write perfectly personalized welcome emails for all your new customers…”
- Call to action. What exactly do you want the prospect to do? Reply to your email? Subscribe to your newsletter? Try your software? Watch a demo? Pick one.
2. Keep It Personal
Instead of sending cookie-cutter BDR outreach emails, take time to research your prospects, their company, and the challenges they face. After all, companies achieve 50% more success by personalizing their emails.
In fact, just using the prospect’s name in the subject line increases open rates by 26%.
Relationships are forged between people, not companies, so small details like names can make or break your email outreach.
Quick Tips
Other great ways to personalize your emails:
- Find a mutual connection. Do you have a mutual friend, or did you attend the same conference? Have you read the same book or have the same hobbies?
- Keep things conversational. Make sure you read your email out loud so it sounds like something you would say to your prospect over lunch or at a bar.
- Touch on a real pain point. Your prospect doesn’t inherently care about you or your service. They care about their problems. Can you help solve them?
- Do your research. Get the recipient’s job title right. Talk about their org structure, industry trends, recent company news, and anything else that lets them know you’re ready to treat them like a valued customer, and not like Acct #187-3682.
- Provide social Proof. Endorsements. Awards. Testimonials. You know your company is awesome, but your prospect may not know you yet.
3. Offer Something of Value
Offer something of value in all your BDR outreach emails, and then mention it in the subject line wherever possible. This gets them to open your email and read it with an expectation.
Remember that your initial email outreach isn’t about instant conversion; it’s to get a conversation going. The value you offer can be:
- An interesting insight.
- A free audit.
- A case study.
- Become a trend-watcher. When something is likely to impact your prospect’s career or business, recommend a course of action. For example: “GPT-3 is transforming what’s possible with AI-generated conversation. B2B revenue teams that leverage this technology are seeing dramatically improved sales results.”
4. Be Concise
Enough said.
5. Polish Your Subject Line
Your subject line is the key to achieving a high open rate. There are many ways to create a great subject line, but here are five examples:
- Urgency. Try “The ABC Industry is Shifting — You Need to Move Now!”
- Induce curiosity: “A Sneak Peek: For VIPs Only!”
- Clear value, such as, “Save 5+ Hours per Week — Here’s How”
- Personalization. Never underestimate a good name drop. “I Talked to Wendy in Sales … “
- Exclusivity. “You’re Invited!” or “For Your Eyes Only.”
Finally, check the length of your subject lines. Long subject lines will be clipped off with ellipses, which can be a disaster if you’re not careful. Zurb.com provides a simple tool you can use to preview how your subject line might appear in your readers’ inbox — and an illustration of how your messaging can go awry if you’re not paying attention to character counts.
6sense Makes It Easier to Send Great Emails
Creating great personalized emails can yield great results, but it can be hard to find the time to execute on all of these strategies. Fortunately, advances in AI have made it possible to automate personalization at scale, and use machine learning to optimize content, subject lines, send time, and more. To learn more, schedule a demo.
