1) Make your content and offer relevant

Make your content suitable for your customer segment. The experts in your industry will react better to a more technical message with specific features. Other buyers with less industry knowledge will likely react to a more benefit-rich message.

Take the following 2 sets of content for selling a new computer.

Advanced buyer:

Ryan, we know you are looking for a new computer and want specifications that lets you run games more effectively.

We have the newest game machine with the following features that will interest you.

Processor: Intel®  CoreTM  2 Extreme Processor X7900 (9.20GHz,4M L2 Cache,800MHz FSB)
Memory: 15GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 4DIMMs
Hard Drive: 10TB (2×64GB) Solid State Drive
Video Card: NVIDIA®SLI™Dual GeForce®8700MGT with 512MB GDDR3 Memory

When you buy today: I’ll even throw in a new extra-reactive mouse designed for gamers like yourself.

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(By the way, if you knew computer specs, you’ll notice I exaggerated the details above)

Basic buyer:

Ryan, we know you are looking for a new computer. While I could go over the specifications of our new computer, I know you are more interested in reducing the time it takes to launch your programs. Our newest version significantly reduces the time it takes to load and run programs like microsoft office and outlook.

You’ll be pleased to know that it also comes with the latest version of these programs, they’re more stable which means your programs do not crash while you are working on them.

When you buy today, I’ll even throw in an extra 1 year subscription to Norton antivirus free!

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2) Get them acquinted with you

Whether your email is read depends on the relevance of your “sender name” and “subject line”. A message from Dell is more likely to be opened than one from ‘Hotstuff’ for example.

What if you have a brand name that is not as famous at Dell?

Emails will be a good way to build up your reputation to a targeted list. Open rates may be lower in the beginning but as you send relevant information with useful content (e.g. 5 ways to speed up your pc, 10 tips for avoiding viruses, … ). Then you increase the chances each of your emails are opened.

While picking a good subject line is important, building a relationship with your prospects should be the ultimate goal.

3) Be clear how you want them to respond (Call to action).

Is the goal of your email to motivate a phone call, take them to a Personal URL, reply you at your email address, download a PDF file or sign up for an event?

If your recipients are not clear what they’re supposed to do, they click the cross on the top right corner and you lose a possible customer. Make sure you send yourself a proof of the email before you send it to your list. A convincing email with broken links will not get you any response!