Why Hot Leads Ghost Your Emails

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Good Morning! On this day, 94 years ago, the stock market crashed and became known as Black Tuesday, kicking off the great depression. So, if you get ghosted or hung up on today, just remember… it could always be worse. Like, a lot worse. Happy selling out there friends. 😄 

• An email with a 90% response rate ✍️ 

• A simple hack to schedule the meeting 📆 

• 10 common cold call mistakes 👀 

• Sales jobs, job market & a meme 😂

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The Formula for a 90% Response Rate

Every salesperson has been there…

You found a prospect who’s interested. Got them on a call. Emailed back and forth.

And then… crickets. 

They ghost you. Never to be heard from again. 

It feels awful because you thought you were on your way to a deal, and now it’s turned into radio silence. 

So now you’ve got 3 options:

1. Give up and move on. 

2. Keep emailing into the abyss. 

3. Ask your manager or a company leader to email them for you. 

If you’ve never tried, option #3, we highly recommend it. 

During her 9 years as the CEO of Textio, Kieran Snyder wrote over 1,100 of those re-engagement emails for her sales team and then analyzed them. She found which email formats got left on read, and which ones got over a 90% reponse rate.

And lucky for us, she published her analysis.

Here’s what she found: 

Nobody cares about you...(or your company)

Emails that include a long-winded intro about who you are and why you're reaching out fall flat.

These intro’s usually look something like this:

“I hope this email finds you well. I am the VP of sales here at ACME Corp, serving our Eastern US region, and I am excited to connect with you…We’re excited for the opportunity…”

Kieran found that emails with these self-serving intros led to a 16% response rate… which is terrible considering the recipient is someone who was recently interested in their product.

Use the subject line as the intro…

Kiern experimented with using the subject line as the place for her intro… and it worked beautifully.

When Kieren used the subject line as her intro, it led to a 94% open rate compared to subject lines that included generic lines like ‘check in’ or ‘update’.

❌ : Checking in | Acme Corp
✅ : your Acme corp launch date | Hi from VP of Acme

People can see right through the typical follow up subject lines that every other sales team is using. Standout by putting your intentions directly in the subject line.

Keep it short…

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that no one wants to read a long email.

The analysis showed:

Emails under 100 words: 48% reply rate.
Emails with 100-200 words: 26% reply rate
Emails with over 200 words: 21% response rate.

Shorter = better, when it comes to re-engagement and follow-up emails.

The 90% response formula…

Now, here’s the real secret.

Out of the 1,100 emails that Kieren sent and analyzed, 278 of them received a 90% response rate, and they all had 3 things in common. They were brief, direct, and vulnerable.

• Brief: No long-winded intros. Gets straight to the point.

• Direct: Addresses the elephant in the room – they ghosted you.

• Vulnerable: Ask for feedback, even if it's negative.

The best performing email usually looked something like this:

So next time you’re stuck on a deal, try asking your manager to send the prospect an email…. but tell them to say something like this.