How to Craft an Effective Sales Email Template

When you’re prospecting for ideal leads, taking the right approach to crafting an effective sales email template starts with getting to know your recipients.

You might be using automated and detached sales templates that change a few words— but nobody wants to receive a cold and impersonal email. So, how do you get someone to not only read your email but take action from it? You get to know your prospects and leverage Crunchbase to enrich your outreach with a personalized approach.

 

Why you should use a sales email template

Using email templates that are tailored to your Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) optimizes your time and allows you to increase your outreach cadence. By integrating custom insights about your prospect into your outreach, you can use a sales email template to build your pipeline and set yourself apart from the competition.

That being said, to ensure that you’re creating an effective sales email template with the best chance of success, you need to get to know your prospects and leverage data that is tailored specifically to your contacts.

 

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The good news is that effort and research don’t have to be daunting. There are a variety of strategies and techniques that make crafting an email template simple, especially when you leverage the right platform. When you follow sales email best practices, you can elevate your interest in your business.

Ready to jump ahead? Here’s everything you need to know about how to craft a personalized and effective sales email template:

 

Write an engaging subject line

Effective sales emails need an engaging subject line. Research shows that 33 percent of email recipients open an email based on the subject line. Your ability to drive sales through email and connect with prospects is based on whether or not your emails are opened in the first place.

 
Reasons for opening an email bar chart
Source
 

Consider the tips below to compose an attention-grabbing subject line for your sales introduction email that your prospects can’t ignore:

  • Keep it brief: Keep your subject line short to ensure it doesn’t get cut off. According to Statista, in Q1 2021, mobile devices generated 54.8 percent of global website traffic. Based on Leadium’s research, subject lines with four words or less have the best open rates. 
  • Avoid the filters: Modern spam filters are sophisticated, so be sure to follow spam guidelines to prevent your email from ending up in the junk folder.  
  • Be personal: Tailor your subject line to the recipient by thinking about how your product or service can benefit them. Crunchbase can help you understand your prospect’s needs with automatic alerts on company activity, , which allow you to stay relevant in today’s fast-changing circumstances..

Try some of the subject lines below to make sure you’re crafting sales emails that work: 

  • Does [​​prospect’s company] use [benefits you can provide]?
  • Helping [​​prospect’s role]s in [​​prospect’s industry]
  • Ways to optimize [​​prospect’s role]’s workflow
  • Ideas for combating [​​prospect’s pain points]
  • Helpful tips for [​​prospect’s company]’s [​​prospect’s pain points]
 

Tailor your pitch

Once your recipient has opened your email, the next challenge you face is keeping them engaged.

Try tailoring your email by citing recent news and activity related to your prospect’s company, adding  relevant statistics or highlighting their competitors’ recent actions. Point to specific examples to improve the response rate of your emails. Make it a conversation they want to join. 

This type of information can be found easily within Crunchbase. When using our platform, you are able to leverage funding data, changes in company leadership positions, mergers and acquisitions, layoffs reported, news, industry trends, and more. Remember, the best sales emails are tailored to your prospects.

 

“Crunchbase Pro is a tool we can use to scale our lead generation process. To grow from 100 to 1,000 customers, we have to segment our prospect base, find similar companies and new niche markets to tackle. We couldn’t do this without Crunchbase Pro,” 

— Nicolas M., Growth Manager, Spendesk
 

Crunchbase Pro customers can also access the engagement suite — a feature that allows customers to send pre-built custom emails with templates tailored to their prospects directly from Crunchbase. With the engagement suite, you can:

  • Send intelligent emails: Leverage intelligent email templates tailored specifically to your contacts.
  • Customize your outreach: Insert dynamic variables and snippets powered by Crunchbase data to customize your message to your contact.
  • Push contacts as leads: Push contacts as leads from Crunchbase to Salesforce in one click.
Crunchbase contact search with push to Salesforce, Outreach, or send email feature popup

In addition to the pre-populated templates included in Crunchbase’s engagement suite, here are a few additional email templates you can leverage to help organize your prospect’s company news or relative industry information:

Competitive sales email template:

I hope you’re doing well! I work in [targeted industry] and I noticed that [recipient’s company name] recently [company action].

[Your company] has been working with a lot of similar companies, such as [add similar companies], to [a quick description of the benefits you can provide].

Funding sales email template:

Did you know that the [targeted industry] industry raised [custom snippets about prospect’s company/industry]? With no sign of stopping, [your industry] is well-suited to be the next funded company in this industry.

Would love to connect to see how we can help make that a reality with our [insert a quick description of the benefits you can provide].

How does that sound?

 

Include a clear call to action and next steps

Now it’s time to wrap up your email and craft a sales closer that has an easily executed call to action (CTA).

A CTA is a statement designed to encourage your leads and prospects to respond to your sales pitch. It may seem obvious that you should end your email to leads by letting them know what the next steps are, but there is often an assumption that a CTA could be pushy and annoy prospects; that isn’t true. 

By leaving out a CTA, you’re potentially losing out on deals. Adding a CTA ensures you’re creating a sense of urgency and directing prospects to the next step in your sales funnel. It is good practice to create multiple call-to-actions to better understand how your customers are going to interact with your sales email. Be sure to create a variety of CTAs to ensure that CTA serves as the final push for your prospects.

Depending on your product or service, here are some personalized calls to action that you can use to wrap up your sales email:

  • Ask the recipient to reply if they’re interested in talking more about your product or service. 
  • See if the recipient is interested in a demo of your product or service. 
  • Schedule an introductory phone call with the recipient. 

Use the template below to wrap up the email to ensure you’re ending your it with a clear CTA:

Sales email CTA template requesting next steps:

Did you know that [lead’s job title] in the [lead’s industry] are looking for ways to [a quick description of the benefits you can provide]?

Given your role at your current company — I wanted to reach out and see [restate the value you would provide]. Let me know if I can schedule a phone call to talk about next steps.

Sales email CTA template highlighting your value proposition:

[Lead’s job function] teams in [lead’s industry] often experience difficulties in keeping on top of the latest trends in this industry as things move so quickly and thus end up missing out on key opportunities.

[Insert a quick description of the benefits you can provide]

Are you free this week to discuss how you can [restate the value you would provide]?

 

Find the right decision-makers with Crunchbase

Finding qualified leads doesn’t have to be time-consuming or frustrating. With the addition of contact data, you can now leverage Crunchbase to:

  • Find verified contact information: Navigate to the ‘People’ tab on Crunchbase company profiles to find a list of contacts at each company. 
  • See the number of available contacts: View the number of contacts available on company profiles or within search. 
  • Identify decision-makers: Use filters like job title, level, department, and name to find company decision-makers most relevant to you.

Here’s a quick walkthrough of how you can find and bolster your cold emailing efforts with Crunchbase:

Sales teams can also leverage Crunchbase Enterprise to find and engage with decision-makers, all in one platform. Plus, Crunchbase Enterprise customers have access to as many contacts as they need to boost their outreach. After all, even if you know how to write a sales email, you also need to ensure it reaches the right person.

To learn more about how to use Crunchbase to find qualified leads and connect with decision-makers, visit the Crunchbase Blog or check out the resources below:

  • Originally published December 16, 2021, updated March 20, 2023