Email Marketing: Are You Talking Yourself Out of Sales?

I once knew a salesperson who didn’t know when to shut up.

Don’t get me wrong – he was a lovely chap and was universally liked by everyone who met him. He was enthusiastic, punctual and handled his client list with utmost professionalism. His only real fault was that he kept on talking long after the prospect was ready to sign the contract and become a customer.

Occasionally, he would talk so much that he would start planting seeds of doubt in his prospects’ minds, and a dead cert for a sale would become a dead loss.

If he didn’t talk himself out of business, he certainly delayed the process and therefore was a long way from efficient, so he struggled to meet his targets.

Knowing When to Shut Up

One of the best pieces of sales advice I have ever been given is this: When meeting a prospect, ask  first if he or she is ready to buy now or if he or she would like more information about the prospect or service you are offering.

If you are selling to someone like me who researches every single purchase before engaging with a salesperson (and actually hates being sold to), chances are that you are really going to shorten your sales cycle and hopefully hit your targets before the end of the month or quarter.

Get-to-the-Point Email Marketing

Many email marketers find themselves with a similar problem. Their marketing copy just doesn’t get to the point, and they find that even if their campaigns are opened and consumed, they don’t drive the kind of sales they were hoping for.

The solution to this problem is to keep your messages short and to the point and include multiple calls to action in your email campaigns, offering your recipients the opportunity to “learn more” or “buy now” no matter how far into your email they read.

Your first call to action should be placed near the top of your campaign, with another at the bottom of your marketing copy (even with relatively short messages). If you employ long copy, you should ensure you place regular calls to action throughout this copy.

This is increasingly important in the mobile environment, where scrolling backward and forward through copy looking for the button or link that lets you take the next step can be a major pain.

As sales and marketing professionals, we need to focus on asking for the business. Your subscribers know that you are in the business of selling (why else would you be sending them an email marketing campaign?), so you need to make it as easy as possible for them to buy.

Have you ever talked yourself out of a sale? Share your comments below.

This post first appeared on the iContact Email Marketing Blog.