It’s 2010! Can you finally learn how to personalize an email?
*Inspired by my daily work and Chris Brogan’s email subscription.
Sometimes all of us get email/twitter/SN pitches from companies that would like us to buy their services or product. Do you ever feel an urge to reply to them? Do they sound appealing and human? No. In 99 cases out of 100 they don’t and you press “Delete” or flag these messages as spam.
It feels that people are stuck in the beginning of 00s’ and have no clue about personalization. With great tools like social search, people search and info available on social networks marketers and sales still fail to compose a custom introductory paragraph for their emails.
Here are several tips to grasp your reader’s attention:
- That’s right, we still have names, and this is by far the most pleasant word to any human. Receiving an email, which starts with my correctly spelled first and/or last name, makes me read the first paragraph.
- Here you can start pitching about your product, how great it is, and how valuable it must be for your reader. How can you know? Do you know anything about the person you are sending this email? Take 5 mins to do a quick research on a person and the company they are working for. You have pipl.com, 123people.com, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn – they’ve got to be somewhere on the Internet! Now you can sprinkle a personal touch into the first paragraph and raise interest in the upcoming offer (still no words about your product).
- Be human – write like a human. Leave corporate-styled emails for your financial department – they enjoy these type of correspondence!
- Now, you’ve got your 5 seconds to talk about your project, so be quick and don’t offer to read an essay in 2000 words, or, even worse, one of your company’s press-releases. Be informative, brief and stick to the point. Provide a link for further information and ways a person can contact you.
Seems to be simple, but people are lazy and still think that massive email campaigns with plain similar text will be successful. You know they won’t. Time to learn new tricks and write emails like a pro. Try it today or tomorrow and see the results yourself.