How to Write a Sales Email in 7 Steps

Sales emails allow you to send information intended to generate leads or move a lead through the pipeline. The best-written sales emails also address common objections that might come up in in-person conversations. In this article, we explain how to write a sales email, give you effective and persuasive sales email examples, and provide software recommendations to help you through the process.

1. Determine Your Sales Email Objective

In order to craft a compelling sales email, you must have a clear purpose for sending it in terms of a measurable objective. This provides a quantifiable system for what qualifies a “win” and impacts your email’s subject line, value proposition, and call to action. Some examples of sales email objectives include:

• Gauging interest: Make a brief introduction to provide basic information about your business and solutions and measure success with opens, clicks, or positive responses.
• Setting appointments: Persuade the lead to agree to a sales presentation or product demo and measure success by the number of appointments set.
• Qualify a lead: See if a lead is a good fit for your products or services and is interested in learning more. Success can be measured by marketing qualified leads (MQL) or sales qualified leads (SQL) generated.
• Send pricing: Make introductions to see if a lead is interested in getting pricing for your products or services and measure success by the number of pricing quotes or business proposals requested.

Pipedrive email template designer (Source: Pipedrive)

2. Research Email Recipients for Sales Emails

As part of your overall sales plan, you may have an audience in mind for the types of leads and prospects you want to target. Just as you would with cold calling, you should conduct research on the individual contacts you plan on sending your email message to in order to assess things like relevance, decision-making authority, and budget capacity.

This part is particularly important for making sure a recipient is the correct person to reach out to and to personalize opening lines for higher open and response rates. The website of the company the recipient works for and their LinkedIn profile are good sources of information for this step. As you do your research, ask yourself these questions about the recipient that will be useful in the next steps of how to write a sales email:

• Is the contact person the decision-maker for what you’re trying to sell or can they redirect you to the correct person?
• Does the contact have any recently published content you can reference in your messages, such as an article, podcast, panel discussion, or webinar?
• Is there any recent news story that includes the contact or something the contact might be interested in hearing about?
• Do you have any connection with the client, such as the same alma mater, former occupation or employer, mutual friend or colleague, or interest in the same sports teams?

3. Create Engaging Sales Email Subject Lines

The subject line is a critical component of whether or not your sales email will be opened by the recipient. It’s also used as an indicator for whether the message is considered spam in the eyes of the email system, so it needs to be constructed with care. There are two major elements of an engaging subject line:

1. It mentions something personal, familiar, or relevant to the recipient
2. It uses standout words you may not ordinarily see in an email message

For instance, let’s say you are attempting to schedule a product demonstration with an information technology (IT) security manager. You want to showcase your software, which gives users single-page system visibility for all devices, sessions, and workstations on a corporate network (something useful to a security manager). Your subject line could be something like:

Subject: Officially Declaring [Company name]’s Network Visible to [Recipient’s name]

This example uses something personal and relevant to the recipient three times (company name, network visibility, and recipient name) while also stating “Officially Declaring,” a unique series of words that stand out to the reader.

Another route to explore with subject lines is expressing urgency. Urgent subject lines work best for promotional sales and limited-time offers (LTOs). For example, if your human resources (HR) consulting business is offering free consultations on organizational culture for the next month to set appointments, your subject could be something like:

Subject: We Don’t Want [Recipient’s name] to Miss Out on a Free Culture Consultation

There’s also the idea of using questions in subject lines, in which the answer leads the recipient of your sales email to become interested in the rest of the message. Using the same HR consulting example, the subject could be:

Subject: Is [Recipient’s name] Looking to Improve [Company name]’s Culture But Don’t Know Where to Start?

4. Personalize the Opening Line & Introduce Yourself

Now that you’ve constructed an engaging subject line to pique the interest of the recipient, you need a standout opening line to keep the momentum going. The opening line should be personalized based on the research you did in step two. If you found anything worth citing, add it to the first few sentences to show the contact you took the time and effort.

Here are a few excellent ways to start your sales email message along with examples:

• Cite a mutual connection: Hi [Recipient’s name]! I saw that we share a mutual connection to [person you share it with] through [links such as LinkedIn, friendship, or same organization], so I wanted to reach out personally.
• Compliment the recipient on recent work: Hi [Recipient’s name]! I saw your recent [content such as an article, webinar, interview, podcast, and so forth] on [content topic/subject] and found it impressive—nice work!
• Highlight a recent event: Hi [Recipient’s name], As you may have seen in the news lately, businesses in the [industry] like yours could be seeing a lot of changes in [function that will be seeing changes]. That said, I wanted to make a personal introduction about what we do.
• Touch on a mutual interest: Hi [Recipients’ name]! I couldn’t help but notice we are both [university/college] alumni. Small world, but I always look to connect with fellow [university/college mascot].
• Address a mutual membership: Hi [Recipient’s name]! I see you are a fellow member of [mutual organization], so I wanted to make a personal introduction.

Following the opening line, introduce yourself. Offer a brief description of who you work with, what you do in terms of the value you offer (see below), and how you do it.

5. Pitch Your Value Proposition

Next, provide information on how you can help the recipient. This part of the email answers the question “why,” as in, why should the recipient fulfill your objective? Ideally, your value proposition will be unique in that few, if any, competitors can match it and it’s representative of a likely pain point.

For example, a sales email’s value proposition could look like this:

Sometimes it is useful to supplement this section of the message with an obvious question:

In this example, it’s assumed that at some point the recipient will want to scale their business either through more services, clients, or both. Regardless, it’s tough for any recipient to think in their head “No, I don’t want to scale my business.”

6. Initiate a Call to Action

The call to action (CTA) is where you request the recipient fulfill one or more of your objectives. When writing this section of your sales email, make it as easy and obvious as possible for the contact to take the desired action. Assuming you wanted the recipient of the sales email to schedule a presentation to see how your software works, you could say:

This CTA makes clear that the next step is a product demonstration and simply replying to the email message will get the recipient to that step. An even more assertive option is to guide the contact to use a scheduling button to set a call.

End your sales email with a signature section that includes your name, job title, contact information, company name, and a logo to show you’re legitimate. It’s also a good idea to add a button in your signature that links to your booking software so recipients can instantly make an appointment. Platforms like Calendly make it easy to set up your schedule preferences and available openings, and then link the system through a web link or in a button.

Email Signature Example with Scheduling Button

Calendly Scheduling Portal. (Source: HubSpot)

7. Analyze & Improve Your Sales Emails

Like many aspects of sales management, trial and error are needed to achieve the most persuasive and effective sales emails. Track the performance of your email messages to what’s working well and what needs improvement. If you’re using email campaign tools that track open rates and click-through rates, that in itself will tell you a story.

For instance, if your open rates are high but no one is clicking to schedule an appointment or responding to your message, this tells you your subject line is solid but the messaging needs work. Alternatively, if opens are low but your click-through to open rate is high, your messaging is great, but you need to rewrite your subject line so that more will people open and read the email to get to your call to action.

Software like HubSpot lets you deploy and track email marketing campaigns, particularly for automated ones. On the system’s dashboard or through reporting features, you can view deliverability, open and click rates, as well as view data about potential spam messages.

HubSpot email performance tracking (Source: HubSpot)

Sales Email Statistics

Industry reports provide robust data on sales emails, their effectiveness, and what makes certain ones more effective than others.

Here are some notable statistics you may find helpful:

• 28% of users check email on iPhones, followed by 26% using Gmail, 9% via Outlook or iPad, 8% on Apple Mail, and 7% via Yahoo
• The average email open rate across all industries is 22.86%
• 3.71% is the average click-through rate across all industries
• 57% of small businesses plan to increase spending on email marketing initiatives
• At 37.18%, faith-based organizations see the highest average open rates of any other industry
• 69% of email recipients who report emails as spam do so after reading the subject line
• 64% of recipients decide to open an email based on the subject line

Bottom Line

To be persuasive, the art of knowing how to write a sales email starts with understanding your objective and researching your recipients. Creating effective sales emails is a never-ending process of analysis and redesigning messaging. Utilizing the process, examples, and software tools outlined above can streamline the process of writing sales emails without compromising quality to help you engage leads and close more deals.