3 Outreach Email Examples and Tons of Tips for Inspiration: The Ultimate Guide on How to Make Your Outreach Work

Email outreach is one of the best sales and marketing tools you can even think of: it’s cheap, exciting, and effective. A couple of emails may help you get high-quality leads and close more deals with low costs. However, crafting an effective outreach email might be a challenge. Signum.ai’s team offers you a chance to accept it together, and walk through the key steps of creating an outreach email that will really work. And then, you’ll have a look at high quality outreach letter examples to play with. 

An Honest Intro: Why Don’t Your Outreach Emails Work?

Are you an entrepreneur, a sales rep, or a marketer? Do you want to learn how to write an outreach email and master the art of creating high-converting letters that attract numerous high-quality leads? Nice! This article is for you.

First of all, let’s step into the shoes of your recipients: leads you want to get via email outreach (and can’t, really, because of… some reason). Grab your phone and check your inbox. How many emails have you received for the last couple of days? 10? 15? 20? We bet that the number is even bigger. Much, much bigger.

Today, our inboxes are filled with hundreds of emails: newsletters we’ve signed up for, business letters from our colleagues and partners, email from friends, spam email, and… cold outreach email.

The latter usually pale in importance compared to the other important emails. They mainly annoy us. Here is what a person thinks when they see even one more email from a stranger:

“My inbox is already overflowing! Why should I waste my time reading those useless, trivial emails from people who just wanna sell me something I don’t need!? *Pressing ‘Redirect to spam’*”

Would you think and do the same? Bet you would.

This is a typical example of how your prospects lose an amazing business opportunity or a product or service worth purchasing. And an example of how you lose your leads.

Let’s be honest: these are senders’ mistakes, not recipients’ ones. While you know your outreach emails are as important as other emails (if not more), you frequently don’t give your prospects any real chance to read them.

Here are some possible reasons why your open and reply rates are low:

• You send your emails at the wrong time – your leads aren’t interested in your offer.

• The subject lines are horrific: you don’t make people want to even open your email.

• The emails are typical, boring, and not personalized. “Is this email for me or for everyone? I’ll let someone else read it and save my time” Your leads don’t feel special, and this is why, if opened, your letters go to the spam folder in a few seconds later.

• Your emails don’t express your will to talk to a person and get into the conversation around their needs and the way you can help to satisfy them.

• Your emails are filled with bad wordings, typos, and mistakes – if you don’t care, why should your recipient?

See? It’s difficult to make emails special and effective, but you have to do your best to attract leads and help them instead of just filling in their inbox with one more email.

How to Make Your Outreach Emails Work?

Now, you clearly understand how important it is for your outreach email to stand out.

There is a formula for strong outreach emails. It’s pretty simple and contains three components:

Personalization + relevancy + creativity

As you may see, only the third component is about working on the text of an email itself. And in order to make emails personalized and relevant, you have to do some preliminary research work.

This is what most entrepreneurs, sales reps, and marketers forget about: your email outreach doesn’t exclusively depend on the text itself. You should prepare the ground before taking on an email. 

Let’s go through the main preliminary steps that one should take to make emails personalized and relevant for a recipient.

3 Steps to Do Before Crafting Outreach Emails

The key thing is to define who you’ll be selling to, why you’ll be selling it, and, last but not least, when to make the sale. And here is HOW. 😉

1. Define your buyer persona

Choosing a recipient is an important step for both personalization and relevancy. You have to know who your buyer persona is and who you’ll be sending emails to, right? You also have to make sure these people need you at all and figure out how you can help them with your offer.

This is why you need to work on your ideal customer profile (ICP) or profiles. By 1) describing ICPs in detail, 2) finding leads fitting these ICPs, 3) segmenting them, and 4) collecting info on them, you’ll be able to learn more about your potential customers’ needs and aims. As a consequence, you’ll make your offer relevant and personalized.

2. If it’s B2B, find decision makers

If you’re dealing with B2B markets, your ICP will be a certain company. Then, there is one more step you have to take: find a decision maker – a particular person responsible for making decisions on your product. And that very person you’ll be reaching out to. Try to find out who that person is (what role do they take) and get to know them better by investigating social media accounts.

It helps to personalize emails and prepare for a constructive dialog. You’re kinda doing homework by researching your leads’ interests and recent achievement, if you wish. And when you understand them, you will have the perfect reason to initiate a conversation.

3. Collect buyer intent data

It doesn’t matter how perfect your email is if you send it when your leads don’t need you at all. Thus, you have to identify the best moment to reach out, i.e., at the time it’s truly relevant –– that’s when your leads are most likely to agree to a conversation.

You can’t pinpoint this moment of intention by guessing, can you? Thus, you should investigate the market by using specific tools. First, monitor your website and social media statistics: someone may be interested in your products or services right now – give them a hand. Second, you can use the tools to monitor internet users’ activities on other resources.

Fortunately, there are many tools that help you collect real-time data. Signum.AI uses AI to find important info from specific sources, helping businesses connect with potential customers in B2B by spotting key signals and triggers. New funding raised, a new product launched, a vacancy published, or a post commented – any such moves may signal this is a brilliant moment to reach out. It’s also essential that you’re provided with the initial sources this info was detected in, such as the particular social media or job board. It’s pivotal for making your emails even more personalized.

All done? Cool! Now, it’s time to focus on the text of your emails themselves.

Tips for Writing an Excellent Outreach Email

Here are some essential advice for creating outstanding emails:

• Don’t start to sell from the very beginning. You don’t want to turn your outreach email into spam, do you? Your aim is to make a person interested, not to sell straight away. Believe us, you won’t make it happen until you go through a few stages: no leads will go down your sales pipeline with lightning speed the first minute. The process is naturally smoother.

•Tailor your emails to your leads’ needs. They should be about them and how your product may help to solve their needs, not about how great your emails are.

• Make sure you meet three criteria of successful outreach emails. It should contain: 1) a few words about you or your company; 2) the value for the lead; 3) a comprehensive call to action (CTA).

• Don’t get too formal but don’t be too friendly as well. Be polite and open-minded. However, mind the recipients’ age and other specific criteria. The way you write, greet a person, etc. depends on multiple criteria.

• Once again, personalize. Without exception. Make sure you mention the name of the client and company if you can. Insert unique pieces of text relevant to this recipient only.

• Use visuals. For example, add your photo or a selfie of a team. It’s better to communicate with a person rather than inanimate text, isn’t it? It can significantly impact the level of trust.

An extra tip: automate your email outreach! This is the way to save more time and focus on creating rather than doing manual work. It’s also the way to plan everything in advance and not to forget about sending an email. Moreover, automation doesn’t contradict personalization, thanks to variables — unique pieces of text, names, titles, and others that change automatically depending on an email.

Here is a complete guide on email outreach automation, if you’re interested. And now, let’s find out how to make each part of an email brilliant.

A Closer Look to the Components of An Outreach Email and More Tips

Subject

It all begins with a subject line. This is literally the key part of your email: by looking at it, the recipient may either get interested and open it or decide to delete it immediately. Follow these tips to prevent the latter:

• Personalize the subject. It attracts attention a lot and says “Heyy, I’m a personal email addressed to you only” Imagine, you’re John Williams, a Professor at Cambridge. You open your inbox, and one email subject says, “A question to Professor Williams from a Cambridge graduate”. We bet you’ll open the email.

• Don’t make it vague or irrelevant (that’s how your email can appear in a spam folder). Stay straightforward and clear: the subject should correspond to the email content.

• Don’t make a subject too long: there is a character limit, so the subject can be cut. Keep it around 30-40 characters (with spaces), and don’t exceed 50 characters.

• Play with your subject. For example, make it a question or use “…” Just don’t be trivial: you have to intrigue a recipient and make them open the email.

Example 1:

NO: Best tools for best marketers: special offer! Hurry up to get one!!!

YES: Question on the MarTech stack you use at {{CompanyName}}

Example 2:

NO: Happy 2021! We’ve got a great gift for you and your employees!

YES: An idea of how to make 2021 successful for {{CompanyName}}.

Body

Yay! Your email is open. Now, you need to capture the recipient’s attention, make them understand your message, and do a certain action (reply, book a demo, purchase, etc.).

Remember, you shouldn’t sell your product or services straight away. Instead, you should tell the customer why he or she may be interested in the product or services (i.e. how their problem can be solved) and ask whether they are actually interested.

1. Greeting

Here is one rule to follow, and you already know which one. Personalize! Be it “Hello”, “Good afternoon!”, or “Hi”, it doesn’t matter if you don’t refer to the person by their name, signaling “This is not a mass newsletter. This is an email for you exclusively.”

NO: Hello!

YES: Hey, Jack!

2. Body

Now, the adventure begins. The main part of a relevant and effective letter starts with the reason you picked to reach out.

Say, you’re contacting the CEO of a small startup called DoDoDo. They’ve just raised new funding, and you know they’re planning to expand to a new market. Their marketers will probably need advanced software to keep up with the volume of work and free employees from routine tasks.

1.Here is how you can start an email:

“Congrats on the new funding raised! That’s impressive, considering the pandemic and stuff.”

2. Obviously, you should not just leave the reason: connect it to your key message:

“I’ve heard you’re planning to expand into European markets, and was wondering whether the MarTech stack you use is powerful enough to manage omnichannel ABM campaigns.”

3. Now, introduce yourself. If you wish, you can do it before, but we suggest you start with the key thing to get the attention, and then turn to yourself.

“By the way, my name is Jerry. I’m the CEO of Brilliant Marketing.”

4. It’s time to tell the recipient about your company. What “Brilliant Marketing” does (and what may attract your lead).

“We provide marketing automation tools to startups and small businesses to let them boost their marketers’ productivity and maximize ROI.”

5. After you devoted a few paragraphs to your company and the way your product or services can help a recipient, put a call to action in place.

“Let me know if you’re interested in finding out more about our tools and how they can boost DoDoDo’s marketers’ performance.”

This is a structure you can follow in your emails. It does work, but the content depends on you.

Remember that the length of your email should be around 4-5 small paragraphs. Don’t make it a tiny note: you won’t have enough room to explain what your message is. Don’t make it an essay either: no one will read to the very end. Stay relevant and make the structure clear.

3. Signature

The way you end an email affects the general impression. Provide links to your social media accounts and website. First, it signals that you’re a real person and aren’t trying to hide anything. They can check your accounts any time they want to, which affects the level of trust. Second, it’s just useful in case a recipient prefers to communicate via some other mechanism. You give them a choice; that’s nice of you.

NO:

With love,
Kitty the cat

YES:

Best wishes,
Artem Gladkikh,
CEO & Founder of Signum.ai

LinkedIn + link
Telegram + link

Now that you have the idea of how to change email signature and create an attractive outreach email, have a look at 3 examples you can use as templates.

3 Outreach Email Examples for You to Play With

Example #1

The complete email we’ve discussed above.

Trigger: New funding raised.

Example #2

Trigger: A vacancy posted.

Example #3

Trigger: participation in the conference.

Wrapping It Up

Composing outreach emails is not a 5-minute deal. You have to ensure relevancy, personalization, and creativity. Before taking on writing the text itself, you have to research the market, define your buyer persona, and identify a reason to reach out to the lead. Then, fill in your cold email with the “warm” info you collected, and tailor your text to the needs of the recipient in a creative way.

In a word, follow our tips! 🙂

Good luck!

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