You’ve Got 3 Seconds to Convince Prospects to Read Your E-Mail. Are You Succeeding?

It’s Monday morning and you’ve just arrived at your desk. You flip on your desk lamp, plop down into your chair, turn on your computer and immediately open your e-mail inbox.

Slowly, the sludge of messages that accumulated over the course of a few days away from the office begins to trickle in. There are the e-newsletters that you thought you’d have time to read when you signed up for them, the retail ads proclaiming a big sale and the internal corporate e-mails that have no real importance to your job. 

You’ve got a busy day ahead of you and there’s no time to trudge through those e-mails today, so you hastily delete all of them.

Once those messages are gone, you start filtering through the e-mails that deserve a slightly closer look, either because you recognize the person’s name or because something else piqued your interest. In a previous post, I’ve referred to this process as the “Glimpse Factor”—the very brief assessment people conduct to determine an e-mail’s relevance or value to them.

What the Glimpse Factor Looks Like

First up in your inbox is Scott Smothers, someone you met at a networking event a few weeks ago. So, you click on it—only to discover that the first line reads: “Kendra, This Thursday (21-Nov) a friend of mine will reveal how …”

Delete.

Next is an e-mail from Emily Clark. You don’t recognize the name, but you do recognize the company she works for. So, you click on it—and read this first sentence: “Kendra, My name is Emily Clark and I’d like to introduce myself and talk to you about how my company’s product might be able to help you address your biggest problems.”

Delete.

That process continues for a few minutes until you’ve finally purged your inbox of the messages that you don’t really care about. Phew. Time to move on with your day …

6 Tips for Improving Your E-Mail Content

Sounds familiar, right?

In today’s world of busier schedules and shorter attention spans, most of us have become incredibly adept at determining if we need to read an e-mail based solely on that message’s first line. In many ways, it mimics how we used to treat voicemails or direct mail. If a message failed to immediately grab our attention, we ignored it. Now, the same is true for e-mail.

So, how can you ensure that your messages stand out? Here are six simple tips that can make a big difference:

Importantly, it’s not enough to simply personalize your e-mails, either.

While adding someone’s name and some personalized detail about their business to the body of an e-mail can improve your chances of standing out, it’s important to go beyond that and embrace the eight e-mail prospecting rules I recently shared on this blog.

So, here’s a homework assignment: Compare your current open and unsubscribe rates to what they were six months ago. If your numbers have improved, congratulations—you’re doing something right. If your metrics are declining, it likely means that prospects are ignoring your outreach because it looks just like all the other junk they delete every day. That’s a fixable problem, but you have to be willing to identify it and do something about it. Start today to increase your e-mail response rates.

Kendra Lee is a top IT Seller, Prospect Attraction Expert, author of the newly released book “The Sales Magnet” and the award winning book "Selling Against the Goal" and president of KLA Group. Specializing in the IT industry, KLA Group works with companies to break in and exceed revenue objectives in the Small and Midmarket Business (SMB) segment.