Introduction
As a sales representative, your job is to maintain a functioning relationship with your leads or prospects. Your email response rate determines the degree of success of your cold email outreach campaign. Without responses, your cold email campaign will come to a standstill. It’s easy to calculate the email response rate by calculating the percentage of people who responded to the emails sent.
A good response rate will garner 10-15 percent of email replies. However, if your response rate falls below 10 percent, a simple nudge by sending prospects a gentle email reminder should do the trick. A follow-up email will remind your leads to act on your email and help increase your email response rate.
Ensure that your emails are pleasant to read, even if you are following up with your prospect for the fifth time. The tonality, grammar and etiquette used while crafting your emails will go a long way. Even if your prospects decide not to take up your proposal, you never know if they may come back later simply because of your attitude and writing style.
Tips for improving email response
The average person checks their business email 5-15 times per day, according to research done by the University of British Columbia. A person will glance over their email and decide within the first fifteen seconds whether they should reply.
A personalized email urging a lead to make a response can go a long way to getting a response email back from your leads. A professional yet personalized email will maintain a strong relationship with your leads and prospects.
SDRs can use these tips and draft a reply-worthy response email. The points below will cover the best approaches to writing “reminder emails” and ways to increase your email response rate.
1. Be Clear on the Tone
While crafting your reminder email, make sure to use a friendly and familiar tone. Your job as an SDR is to create and maintain a long-lasting relationship with your clients. Avoid burning bridges by following these few simple steps:
- Maintain familiarity, but not at the expense of sounding too informal. You want your clients to feel like they can email you with any queries they have.
- Don’t be too intimidating – Avoid using complicated words and hard-to-understand sentences in your reminder email. The average reader of your reminder email will, at most, take a glance at it. Your job as an SDR is to make the email as easy to digest as possible.
- Proper spacing in the email – Use proper paragraph spacing in the email. Remind your client to respond to the email near the end of the body of the email. This makes sure that the reply request is fresh in their mind. The more confusing you make your directions, the harder it gets for your client to associate your emails with a positive sentiment.
Following these few simple steps can drastically increase your email response rate. The goal is to associate your emails with positivity!
2. Keep the Email as Simple as Possible
Your reminder email should be short, crisp, and concise. You are reminding your prospect to respond, which means that your email should have a simple personalized greeting with an easy-to-read message seeking a response. Personalized greetings can grab the reader’s attention and stop them from dismissing your email as junk.
In the above example, the sender addresses the recipient by name and acknowledges that the recipient might have been busy.
If you are finding it hard to automate the sending of reply reminder emails to your leads or prospects with personalized greetings, then SmartReach.io should solve your problem. SmartReach.io can personalize your emails with the prospect’s first name, company, or any other info using an unlimited number of merge tags.
3. Create an Action Hook in your Email.
While sending an email reminder, make sure to compose an action-driven email. Adding a call-to-action will make it easier for your prospect to reply. An email reminder with a call-to-action button is a powerful tool for invoking responses. However, you should also know how to craft a specific Call To Action that relates to a specific lead or prospect.
In the above example – “Please feel free to reply to this email” gives a feeling that you’re approachable for any and all queries and nudges them to ask a query. In this way, the sender makes the recipient aware that the team is trying its best to resolve the issue and that the sender can be reached for further assistance. Creating a Call To Action-driven email also makes the prospect or lead feel valued and assures them that they are receiving quality services.
4. Be Polite and Hit your Main Points
Using a friendly and polite tone signifies that you genuinely care about a response from them. The last thing you need is your email to be sent to SPAM. An unprofessionally drafted email can do that exact thing. So make sure to sound friendly and polite in your email!
Secondly, you should remember to state the pointers of the email clearly. Make sure to have the following in your reminder email:
- Friendly greeting
- Clearly stated purpose
- Descriptions and CTA to invoke a response.
- Time and date of specific events to be highlighted.
5. Use Metrics and Statistics to Increase your Email Response Rate.
When crafting a reply reminder email, you cannot predict the recipients’ mood or behavior. Using recipient activity trackers can help optimize the life of your reply reminder emails.
Using a tracker, you can:
- See who is opening your email.
- How often is your email being opened?
- Whether or not your readers are clicking on reply links.
Using the information gathered, you can take appropriate action. For example, if your recipient isn’t responding to your email even after opening it, they might be unavailable or busy. You can reschedule the sending of your reminder email to when they are most active. SmartReach.io provides detailed reporting and helps you make better campaign-setting decisions that would increase email response rates.
6. Personalise Emails to Help Create Familiarity
SDRs should concentrate on making their emails feel familiar. Using the potential customer’s first name and taking the time to mention the recipient’s interests or any other information can create a sense of familiarity in your prospect’s mind. Automating this process can take time and effort. But SDRs don’t have to worry about making this process work. SmartReach.io can make the process easy and greatly improve a campaign’s metrics.
7. Send Reminders from The Same Email Thread
When sending you are follow-up email reminder, ensure you send your follow-up email to your prospects as a ‘forward’ to your previous email. In this way, if your prospects haven’t read your previous email, they will have some context.
Similarly, when you are following up with hundreds of prospects a day by replying to the same email thread, you can simply refer to the context of your last email to craft your follow-up message.
SmartReach’s Content Setting helps sales representatives add the previously sent email to the prospect at the bottom of the follow-up email. This feature is useful when the previous email accidentally gets deleted or your subject line differs from the one you sent.
The ‘Content Setting’ in your email marketing campaigns in SmartReach, helps you craft follow-up emails to help your prospects easily understand the context of your previous email.
Bottom Line
With the tips and tricks mentioned above, increasing email replies from prospects shouldn’t be difficult. But remember, be polite and not pushy or rude. Your prospects are probably busy and have not asked you a favor. Remember that you’re sending a cold email to a prospect that has not heard of your product.
If you email a business leader or anyone at a CXO level, chances are these decision-makers receive tons of emails in a day. Even if they want to reply to your email, they might simply not get the opportunity. Hence, make sure you empathize with them, be polite and use proper grammar, tone and vocabulary. Your prospects will find it compelling to send email replies to well-crafted, politely written emails.
Trends regarding email response rates change frequently. The best way to keep up with the changes in this ever-evolving landscape is to go by trial and error. Following the above-mentioned tips should help you increase your lead or prospect’s email response rate. However, it is important to remember that following the basic email reply reminder writing etiquette should be kept in mind while drafting these reminder emails.
Frequently Asked Questions
1. What is the normal email response rate for a cold-emailing campaign?
An excellent cold emailing campaign will have a 5-10 percent response rate. Most of all, responses will be made on the first day. By the end of the first week, almost all responses will have been received.
2. What factors compel a lead or prospect to reply?
Three critical factors go into compelling a lead to make a reply.
- Crisp & clear communication
- Hyper personalized content
- Visually compelling call-to-action buttons.
3. What tools are available to track my email campaign?
SmartReach.io has built-in features that specialize in giving a campaign the best delivery and reply rates. SmartReach tracks your campaigns’ open, click, reply, bounce, and unsubscribe rates. These metrics will help SDRs track the efficacy of the tips and tricks mentioned above!
4. What is the best time to send a reminder email?
When you send a reminder email is just as important as what you send in the reminder email. Here are the most suitable times to send your reminder email to have the highest email response rate!
- From 8 to 8:30 am, ensure that your email sits at the top of the primary inbox.
- The second most suitable time to send an email is in the late afternoon. This is when most people are winding down for the day and are checking their inboxes leisurely. This is usually around the 6-8 pm time slot.
- SmartReach provides a “Best Time to Send” report. This will help you make the right decision on sending time for your campaign.
