Although almost 90% of business professionals point to email as their preferred communication method, research shows that only 9% of sales emails are ever opened. So how do your leads and prospects decide which emails to open and which emails to ignore?
There's a lot of emphasis on email cadence software when it comes to boosting sales, but some more significant considerations should be driving that decision. Without fully understanding the technology and research behind email cadence software, you're unlikely to maximize the efficiency of email in uncovering leads, nurturing opportunities, and closing deals.
The reason is simple: email cadences commonly sent through a sales engagement platform will be less effective when objectives in strategy are unclear.
Learn why the pacing of your sales communications is so important and yet so challenging in a highly competitive omnichannel sales environment. Then, consider how a dynamic multi-channel sales engagement solution (with email cadence capabilities) remedies these common pain points, enabling sales professionals to maximize their ROI.
Why email cadence matters
Before we dive into how to use email cadence software, let's recap what "email cadence" is and how it impacts your sales cycle.
What is email cadence?
The term "email cadence" refers to the "order, timing, and frequency" of your email communications, according to Indeed. Essentially, email cadence is the process of uncovering the ideal frequency at which your buyers are most likely to engage with your emails.
The most effective sales email campaigns align with the target audience's routines, patterns, needs, and interests. Therefore, organizations must deliver these messages at precisely the right time to maximize their effectiveness.
Sales teams that send out emails in the wrong order, too frequently, or at a suboptimal time of day may be unintentionally straining potentially fruitful relationships. Recent research demonstrates several illuminating findings of how email recipients assign value to the contents of their email inbox.
The first thing to know about email cadences is that having perfect timing is crucial. Just shy of one-quarter of emails (23%) are opened within an hour of delivery. Email interest has been found to peak between 10 am to 12 pm and between 5 and 6 pm. However, like any benchmark, you'll want to test to see what works best for your business and its target customers. Speed to lead matters, too; if you wait more than five minutes when responding to a lead, your lead qualification drops by roughly 90%.
Along with timing, it's necessary to offer quality, well-thought-out content. Nearly 50% of email recipients will open an email because of what the subject line says. Additionally, personalized emails get almost 22% more click-throughs and about six times as many transactions.
How email cadence impacts the sales cycle
When considering the impact of your email cadence on your close rate, think about the percentages. By being diligent with your timing, thinking about your content, and strategic about your overall goals, those success rates begin to tally up as your carefully crafted email cadence draws in a larger number of leads.
The time and energy you put into planning out your approach boosts your chances of success and condenses the duration of your sales cycle, helping you to close deals faster. But the trade-off here is that if you were to manage these moving parts manually, it would be overwhelming to keep track of those various necessary elements of your email cadence. That's where email cadence software comes in and transforms this otherwise impossible juggling act into a seamless and sustainable process.
Tips for getting the most out of your email cadence software
To ensure that you get the most out of our solution, consider these seven tips for using email cadence software. When deploying your chosen technology, we recommend that you:
1. Leverage cross-platform versatility
One of the most significant benefits of email cadence software is cross-platform versatility and coordination. When you can seamlessly create and manage multi-channel, multi-step outreach campaigns, you are empowered to coordinate your email cadence strategies with other communication mediums such as:
- Phone calls
- LinkedIn (InMails and connection requests)
- SMS
By facilitating the integration of various features and tools with a sales engagement platform, you can execute multi-pronged strategies from where you're already working, such as Microsoft Outlook 365 or Gmail and Google Calendar.
2. Customize attributes and fields
Understanding your target audience's behaviors and engagement patterns is only half the battle. You must use that information through your email cadence to derive any benefit from it. Email cadence software makes it easier to do this by enabling users to modify attributes and fields to develop more customized campaigns.
Sales professionals can quickly and efficiently sort leads into more specialized groups and better target them with carefully tailored communications designed to lead them more effectively through your sales funnel.
Such customization capabilities pave the way for more personalized campaigns, which foster stronger, more natural relationships while yielding measurable results.
3. Use automated actions
With email cadence software, you can quickly implement custom rules and leverage automated actions to reduce time spent tracking emails, entering contact information into your CRM, or scheduling meetings and modifying workflows. For example, you can set up guidelines to automatically remove someone from a cadence if they take a specific action or fail to respond positively.
This software becomes a vital part of maximizing conversions through email and other digital channels by making it easier to stick with cadences—particularly routines that depend on careful coordination and timing week after week.
4. Take advantage of time-saving templates
Quality email cadence software should also contain well-researched templates built from current best practices in user experience and content crafting. These templates can be built out by the marketing or sales department to ensure they are using company-approved messaging. By utilizing these templates, teams spend less creative energy coming up with catchy subject lines and more time nurturing leads and closing deals.
After taking the time to create more specialized templates for a target audience, sales teams can repeatedly return to those templates in the future, allowing buyers to breeze through future sales funnels far more efficiently. It also makes it easy for new sales reps to hit the ground running.
5. Recycle high-value content
In addition, consider recycling your high-value content by incorporating it into your email templates. In utilizing this approach, you will not have to search through your content database or attempt to recreate high-performing materials.
Instead, users can select the template that includes the desired content, update any campaign information, and efficiently execute the cadence using their preferred medium. Often, a sales engagement platform will include integrations with sales enablement providers like Seismic and Highspot to make it easy to access marketing-approved sales content.
6. Conduct A/B testing
A/B testing is a meaningful way to refine your email content and identify the ideal messaging for your target audience. That is why email cadence software ideally contains built-in A/B testing tools.
These tools allow users to test multiple template variations simultaneously, allowing sales professionals to select the optimal messaging framework for their target audience. Once you find a winning template, you can use the learnings to further refine existing templates. There is no one-size-fits-all approach to messaging, so it's always good to test what works with each new audience or segment.
7. Monitor engagement
To refine the journey through your sales funnel, you must have detailed analytics and flow performance for email cadences—including your A/B tests—incorporated into the software you select. The right sales engagement platform will include robust reporting alongside message cadence and other productivity tools like automatic activity tracking, online scheduling, and a sales dialer.
Performance reporting allows you to determine which content works and which approaches need to be cycled out of your rotation or improved upon. You can also use reporting to understand engagement levels with every opportunity, which helps ensure that important ones don't fall through the cracks in terms of engagement.
These tips will help you maximize the return on your investment in using cadences with sales engagement solutions, such as Groove's award-winning sales engagement platform.
Interested in learning how Groove can help you improve your sales email cadence game? Request a demo today!