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Sales Email Mistakes to Avoid at All Costs

A poorly written sales email can ruin your chances to close a major deal. Here are some of the most common sales email mistakes you can easily avoid:

Having a weak subject line

A subject line is your customer’s first look at your sales email. This means that whatever you place in your subject line is what should persuade them to open your email. If it’s weak, generic, or boring, they won’t open your email.
However, if it’s relevant and engaging, sparking curiosity in them, it should work like a charm for your email open rates. However, don’t be a trickster either – never use methods like creating a subject line that mimics something a friend would say, sounding like a clickbait, and so on.

The first element of your email that anybody sees is the subject line, so you’ll need to make sure that you’re perfecting the art of writing them. You’ll want to make sure that your subject lines stand out from the rest in your prospect’s inbox and fits perfectly into the inbox window.

Some email subject line tips, thanks to Constant Contact:

  • Keep it short
  • Remove spammy-sounding words (“free,” “buy now,” “100%,” etc.)
  • Ask open-ended questions

Not having a call to action

A call to action is an important element of your email sales letter. This is what your email is leading up to – that one link that will lead your clients straight to the product or the service you are trying to sell. However, if you don’t have it, don’t think your clients will search for a way to purchase because they most likely won’t. They will think about it for a while but then your product will get lost somewhere in the trash bin just like your email.

Include a CTA so that your customers can get to your product quickly.

At the end of each email, and sometimes in the middle, you’ll have your call to action leading an interested customer onto the next step of their purchasing journey. If you haven’t implemented a clear call to action, they’re not going to be sure what they are supposed to do next and won’t bother to hunt it out.

Making Spelling Mistakes

When you are done writing an email, you should go back to the most important information in your email and make sure that it’s accurate. If not, fix it. Of course, most people are unable to catch this first time they re-read their email, so you should take the time to read your email with focus and attention several times before you send it. For example, if you misspell the person’s name, it can come off as very rude and they won’t respond to your email.

Spelling mistakes, typos, poor grammar and misplaced punctuation are huge mistakes to make when writing business email. Your customers will be instantly put off .

Make sure that you check your content to ensure it’s the highest quality possible and not at all damaging to your business’s credibility and reputation.

Check all these types of common mistakes while writing your email:

  • Misspelling your prospect’s name or company
  • Misspelling your own company’s name
  • Mistyping your phone number

Failure to Include Benefits

We see a lot of emails that tout product features or services. While this may be interesting to the seller, it doesn’t tell the prospective buyer what benefit they’ll get out of it.

Don’t confuse features with benefits! Product features, specifications, and details are good information when a prospect is comparing products…but chances are, your buyer isn’t quite there yet. Benefits solve a buyer problem and give them a reason to buy by.

To translate features into benefits, ask “So what?” For example:

Feature: A new compliance software tool can automate document signing.

Benefit: Legal and procurement teams can save time and ensure each contract has signatures from all parties.

Features are really important but even more important are the benefits your product has to offer. This means that you should list the features but then take the time to say what benefits those features will bring.

For example, having a 20mp camera on your phone is a great thing but that doesn’t mean anything unless you state that your reader will be able to capture their memories and live events with clarity.

Grammatical Errors

Let’s imagine that you’re reading through an email you received from a company and you quickly realize that it’s full of mistakes, such as typos, spelling errors, misplaced punctuation, bad English, etc. Are you then going to jump on their call to action to make a purchase or find out more? Probably not.

Poorly written emails are a sure-fire way to damage the reputation and credibility of your business, so check your email content to ensure it’s perfect and error-free.

Grammar and spelling mistakes are a huge issue in sales emails. They can make your readers think that you are a scam or that your product is just like your copy – full of errors. This is why you should use some of these tools:

Not formatting your content

Formatting your email content is crucial, especially since so many people nowadays only skim the content in order to get information. So, use plenty of bullet points, subtitles, and so on.

Have you ever gotten an email where a single section is much smaller than the others or appears in a different font? If so, you know how distracting it is. This weird issue is caused by copying and pasting without removing the formatting.

To make sure this doesn’t happen with your emails, highlight any sections you’ve pasted and click the “Remove formatting” button in your email browser.

In a real conversation, you can use body language, voice tone, and gestures to accentuate important points. But it’s harder to convey tone in emails, so if your email is longer than a paragraph and it contains information your prospect absolutely must read, bold, or italicize it to make sure it catches their eye.

One caveat: Don’t go too crazy. An email where every other word is bolded or underlined is jarring to read and looks unprofessional.

Being vague about your offer

When writing about your offer, you should do it with clarity. Your readers shouldn’t have to go back several times to realize what you are trying to sell them – in fact, they most likely won’t go back. So, use simple words and make sure that there is no complex jargon.

Vagueness isn’t just irritating, it’s inefficient. Your recipient has to work harder to understand what you’re saying — and sometimes even ask for more information. Do your best to be specific. Rather than saying,
“Are you interested in getting my thoughts on your strategy?”, ask,
“Do you want to spend 15 minutes reviewing your 2020 lead gen plans?”

Incorrect Information

When you are done writing an email, you should go back to the most important information in your email and make sure that it’s accurate. If not, fix it. Of course, most people are unable to catch this the first time they re-read their email, so you should take the time to read your email with focus and attention several times before you send it. For example, if you misspell the person’s name, it can come off as very rude and they won’t respond to your email.

You’re bound to check the contact information of your recipient to ensure that your emails reach the right people, but how often do you check your own contact information? 

Have you misspelled your email address, phone number, or website? If so, it becomes basically impossible for your potential client to get in touch and you’ll have lost a sale. After all, who has time to research and track down a business who can’t be bothered to use the right contact details in the first place.

Some of the mistakes to check are:

  • Adding Broken Links
  • Getting the dates wrong
  • Mistyping your contact information

Lack of Readability

Hand in hand with the mistake above, it’s vital that you check and re-check the readability of your emails before sending them. This means checking through to make sure the grammar of your writing is perfect, ensuring that your reader has the best experience.

You can check the grammar effectively using professional grammar checking tools, such as Grammarix. If your reader is having a hard time processing your email, it will simply end up in the trash folder.

Use Paragraphs
Consider how this article is written out. Now imagine if it was one big block of text, what would you do? The chances are that you’d feel overwhelmed and probably wouldn’t even bother to read it and the same can be said for your emails.

Don’t be afraid to use to ‘enter’ button to create paragraphs, breaking your content up into short, easily digestible sections.

Avoid using long sentences
Consider how you read your emails. Do you sit and dedicate time to read through each and every message in your inbox, or do you simply browse and pick out the bits that are important to you?

Having long sentences and big blocks of text are going to put people off reading, therefore minimizing your chances of securing a sale.

Avoid using All Caps
Writing an email by using solely ALL CAPS can instantly chase away potential customers. In writing, all caps are used for emphasis. However, when the entire email content or subject line is written in all caps, it can be interpreted as rude.

Simply put, all caps remind people of shouting. So, sending an email in all caps will make people feel like your yelling at them. Not what you were going for, right?

Use all caps only if you want to emphasize a certain word or phrase within the content.

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