7 Email Secrets to Drive Deals Forward

Mike Haylon – Director, Sales

mhaylon@yesware.com

@mhaylon | linkedin.com/in/mikehaylon

Bad sales emails

cost you money

But there’s almost no

data to support all

the assertions out

there about

“best practices”.

• You follow up (time cost)

• You forget (deal cost)

Each missed reply has costs

• 5,000 - 50,000+ emails/year

• 800 - 1,000+ hours/year in

email (plus voicemails,

setting tasks, etc.)

• Now add that up across your

entire team (or division or

company…)

Bad email costs compound

Whom

What

When

How many

Recipients

Subject line

Send time

Emails to send

What we’ll cover

“Here’s the magic template to

close 10 deals this week!”

“Just use this simple trick

and get 98% replies!”

What we won’t cover

• More than 1,000 Yesware users

(anonymized and used with permission)

• 9 rapidly growing, inside sales-focused

software companies

• Over 500,000 sales emails

• Q1 2014

Here’s the data

Include multiple recipients

(but only one in the “To” line)

EMAIL SECRET #1

Open

Rate

Reply

Rate

Send to one

and copy

another

83.7% 61.2%

Send to two

recipients70.2% 49.3%

Number of recipients

Subject line length doesn’t matter

EMAIL SECRET #2

Company A Company B

Open/reply rate by subject line length

The wrong keywords

cost you meetings

EMAIL SECRET #3

Open Rate

Re

ply

Ra

teMeeting keywords by open/reply rate

You may be sending emails

at the wrong time

EMAIL SECRET #4

Reply Same Day Rate

Reply Rate

Reply rate by send time

(Note: Send time = recipients’ time zone)

Weekdays or weekends?

If they don’t reply today, they

(probably) won’t reply at all

EMAIL SECRET #5

Days until first open/reply

You’re not following up enough

EMAIL SECRET #6

Your chance of receiving a reply

reply on THIS email is...

However, 57% of sales email

chain stopped at the first one…

Follow up emails

Testing templates can improve

reply rates >10x

EMAIL SECRET #7

Best practices:

1. Identify the top performing

templates.

2. Understand why they

worked well.

3. Share the good templates.

Re

ply

Ra

te

Templates

Open Rate

Increase call connection rate 34%

by calling when emails are opened

BONUS: CALLING SECRET

7 EMAIL SECRETS

1. Include multiple recipients (but “To” just one)

2. Subject line length doesn’t matter

3. Bad keywords cost you meetings

4. You’re sending emails at the wrong time

5. If they don’t reply today, they (probably) won’t

6. You’re not following up enough

7. Testing can improve template replies >10x

* Bonus: Increase call connection rate by 34% by

calling when you see an email open