It’s no secret that many agonize over the email copy and then hastily slap a written subject line right before clicking the ‘send’ button. It doesn’t matter how much research and time you put into the body text if the email subject lines aren’t captivating or insightful.
As a salesperson, you’re reaching out to a prospect because a) you’re responding to their demonstrated interest or b) you have a solid reason to believe you can help them. But how do you get the lead to engage and come to this realization?
It all begins and ends with personalization. The best inside sales email subject lines are creative, interest-provoking, and informative without giving too much away. Instead of reinventing the wheel with your messages, use these six helpful subject lines that have been tried, tested and verified to work for you and your sales team.
1. Contacting you at [Referral’s] suggestion
This works because the closer the prospect is to the referrer, the better it can be to help close a sale. Salespeople who get referred to new prospects borrow trust from the referral source, meaning that instead of coming in cold, the relationship between the rep and lead becomes warmer.
2. Do NOT open this email
Some consider this to be a classic example of reverse psychology. And guess what? It works! If you’ve ever spent any amount of time around a teenager, telling them not to do something tends to prompt that very behavior.
3. 10x [lead’s company’s] traction in 10 minutes
Inside sales is a numbers game after all, so using numbers in email subject lines will pique curiosity. A subject line like this could result in a significant number of new customers – it’s hard to argue with results like that.
4. Permission to close your file?
If the sing-along song from that ‘Allstate’ commercial is playing in your head, you’re not alone – breaking up IS hard to do. And this pseudo breakup email subject line puts the onus on the prospect to move forward.
5. You are not alone
Unbelievably, this generic email subject line template carries a lot of personalization. Your leads are the experts in their organization while salespeople enjoy a broader vantage point that spans buyers and customers. Thus, this subject line provides a good opening to an email containing a testimonial from an organization like the prospect you’re interacting with.
6. [Name], we can help you with [goal]
This is extremely effective because we all feel special when someone refers to us by name – we call this the phenomenon of implicit egotism, which states that our name-based preferences extend to the cities we live in and the occupations we pursue.
Fun fact: personalized subject lines are 2% more likely to be opened.
The one thing all these email subject lines have in common is 30 or fewer characters. The reason? Per Adestra, when you have a short, quick subject line, open rates become above average. Believe it or not, email is 40 times more effective at acquiring customers than Facebook or Twitter, per McKinsey.
Ultimately, taking control of your inside sales process is done when you have an impactful queue-based lead management system. When a CRM is flexible, you are creating an intuitive solution for managing your prospects and sales pipeline.
A powerful marketing software within your CRM can help you stay at the forefront of customers, and prospects in between calls by integrating emails to educate, qualify leads and build your brand. Consequently, email templates provide options to meet all your selling needs such as pre-defined attachments, auto-response emails from incoming web leads and sending individual emails using pre-defined templates created by management.
Email marketing is a small, yet critical, piece to the inside sales strategy puzzle. Make sure you are set up to blow your sales goals out of the water for 2017 with an effective strategy. Read our ebook, “Checklist for an Effective Inside Sales Strategy,” and learn what makes the top sales teams so successful.
