What makes a good sales email campaign? Examining a real example

Sales email campaigns are essential for businesses looking to connect with potential customers, generate leads, and ultimately drive conversions.

But there's far more to it than hitting send. A successful sales email campaign requires strategic planning, compelling content, proper formatting, audience segmentation, thorough testing, and adherence to legal guidelines.

In this guide, we’ll explore the key elements and strategies needed to create effective sales email campaigns - plus some ideas from a tried and tested example in the SaaS industry!

Key elements of a good sales email campaign

A good sales email campaign needs to capture attention and drive engagement.

Here are 5 things top-performing campaigns generally have in common:

1. Target audience identification: Know who your audience is and understand their needs! Show you've done your homework instead of asking them what they're looking for.
2. Personalization: Personalized emails perform better, so tailor your messages to the specific interests and pain points of your recipients.
3. Compelling subject lines: The subject line is your first impression. Make it catchy, relevant, and intriguing to increase open rates.
4. Value proposition: Clearly articulate the benefits your product or service offers, explaining why it’s valuable to the particular recipient.
5. Clear Call to Action (CTA): Direct your recipients on what to do next, whether it's scheduling a call, signing up for a demo, or visiting your website.

Crafting compelling content

Once you have an idea of what your sales email campaign needs to include, it's time to start drafting your content.

Here are some tips for writing compelling sales email content that your prospects will want to engage with:

• Start with a personalized greeting: Address the recipient by their first name to create a sense of connection.
• Introduce yourself and your purpose: Make sure it's easy for the prospect to understand the context for your outreach. But if you're going to introduce yourself personally and explain why you’re reaching out, keep it brief and to the point!
• Highlight benefits, not features: When explaining your value proposition, focus on how your product or service can solve the recipient’s problems or improve their situation. This isn't an excuse to list your product's technical features.
• Provide social proof: Introduce testimonials, case studies, or success stories to build credibility, or offer to provide some if the prospect is interested (to encourage a reply).
• Use a clear and concise language: Be straightforward and to the point. Avoid jargon and overly complex sentences.

Audience segmentation and personalization

Segmenting your audience allows you to send more targeted and relevant messages. The danger with the "spray and pray" approach to outbound - where yousend the same generic, impersonal message to your entire audience - is that you'll alienate recipients and even risk being flagged as spam.

Here’s are 4 ways you might consider segmenting your email audiences to create more personalized email messages for different groups:

1. Demographic segmentation: Group recipients by seniority, location, industry, or other demographic factors.
2. Behavioral segmentation: Segment based on past interactions (e.g. website or page visits, or social post interactions), purchase history, or engagement level.
3. Interest-based segmentation: Tailor messages to specific interests or preferences indicated by your recipients (e.g. filter by keyword in your contact searcher)
4. Personalization tokens: Use personalization tokens to dynamically insert recipient-specific information, such as their name, company, or recent activity.

Optimization and testing strategies

The key to creating successful sales email campaigns is to never become complacent! Even when you record good results or see your conversion rates increasing, you might have room for more improvement. Strategies that work once might not always produce the same results.

Regular A/B testing is a good way to keep verifying the effectiveness of your campaigns and identifying areas for improvement. You could A/B test, subject lines, email body content, CTAs, and send times to see what works best across your specific audience segments.

It's important to have clear visibility over all your key email campaign metrics and to understand how they trend over time. Remember not to over-focus on "vanity" metrics like open rates. The goal of your email campaigns is to encourage engagement, so you should devote more effort to driving up your reply rates and click-through rates.

Example of a good sales email campaign

Want to see how the world's best SaaS companies are doing cold email?

Here's an example from one of Mixpanel’s sales email campaigns. We will discuss the pros and the cons of the email, what we think is well done and suggestions on how it could be improved.

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(This is the email sent from Mixpanel’s sales reps, you can find it here: http://goodsalesemails.com/campaigns/1bd6439bd91/?ref=blog)

Good elements of this sales email campaign:

• The email is short. People have short attention spans when it comes to emails. Short and concise emails, like this one, have higher reply rates.
• The email uses personalization. Your sales emails should make your prospects feel special. This email uses personal information like the prospect’s first name, the name of the company and other relevant information about the company.
• The email has a clear call to action. Adding a clear call-to-action at the end of emails has a huge impact on the reply rates. In this case, the intent is clear: “a 15-minute meeting this week”.
• The email has a value proposition. The value proposition in this email is short, concise and straight to the point. This makes the email easy to read, and raises the curiosity of the prospect.
• The signature. This email has a detailed signature. In order to sound human and more trustworthy, you should add a detailed signature with job title, phone number, photo and other social media links.

What could be tested:

• Introduce yourself. A short sentence, saying who you are, where you work and why you are reaching out will help you gain credibility, and can have an impact on your reply rates. This email does not have an introduction but the signature is self-explanatory. This type of shorter emails works best for very senior positions like VPs or C-level roles.
• Subject line. This subject line might not stand out in a cluttered inbox. A/B testing by adding personal information like first name, company name or even job title could improve the open rate.
• Cite relevant clients. Adding examples of relevant clients will help you gain your prospect's trust. The fact that big companies trust you to do business, will help raise their curiosity and increase your reply rates.
• Follow-up. A sales email in a busy inbox can easily slip through the cracks. That’s why the follow-up process is so important. Use every touch point to add value with additional relevant information like case studies, testimonials, etc.

We hope this helps you get some ideas on how to write a good sales emails! Check out our full collection of email campaign examples here: goodsalesemails.com!