Prememoria: Reach is a sales enablement tool for hyper personalizing outbound emails at scale in order to save time while obtaining higher response rates.
Last week we looked at how we approached the 2nd and 3rd stages of our first email sequence as well as how we attempted to improve them. The biggest change we made was trying to add more value at each touch point. This week’s post will look at the next iteration of our email sequence and how we improved results even further.
If you recall, we arrived at a ~10% response rate using the following sequence:
Email Subject: Make sales personal at {{company}}
Hey {{First Name}},
{{Reach Message}} (written by Reach)
As the SDR Manager at {{Company}} I’m sure you’ve seen how prospects are increasingly ignoring generic sales messages. Reach is the tool that doubles the response rate of your outbound through automated hyper-personalization.
Can I send you some examples of personalized icebreakers generated by Reach?
{{sender signature}}
The results were by most team’s standards very good. For many reasons (most notably that the future of our venture depends on it), we still believed we could do better. Here’s what we thought we could improve:
- Remove the (written by Reach) text → It’s unclear if on some psychological level knowing that the personalization was automated would excite or bother people. In some general sense people are excited about it, but when seeing it personally in action it might keep people’s guards up.
- Make it shorter → There isn’t a lot here to cut but we felt that we could get rid of the first 6 words of the body. Essentially remove “As the SDR Manager at {{Company}}”.
- Make it more readable → Even though the email isn’t suffering from a large block of text, breaking things up further would improve readability.
Here’s the modified email:
Hey {{First Name}},
{{Reach Message}}
I’m sure you’ve seen how prospects are increasingly ignoring generic sales messages.
Our tool doubles the response rate of your outbound through automated hyper-personalization.
Can I send you some examples of personalized icebreakers generated by Reach?
{{sender signature}}
The resulting email is a more direct, concise and readable version of what we previously had.
Another thing we wanted to improve was the Email Subject. “Make sales personal at {{company}}” was performing quite well but we thought we could apply some best practices to it. It is believed that a good email subject line should be readable, personalized and relevant to the reader. Personalization is only indirectly relevant to the personas we are reaching out to. It’s more of a means to an end. Our target audience cares more about the top of funnel engagement.
To that end, we changed the subject to: Are SDRs getting responses at {{company}}?
The goal is to pique the interest of the recipient by letting them know you understand something they spend a lot of time thinking/worrying about.
The modifications we made to the email and subject line resulted in a ~16% response rate (!). Next week we will look at how we started getting smarter about data analytics so that we could leverage other sales channels and internal “rules” to boost the responses even further.
