About Writing Sales Emails
What makes a good sales email?
A good sales email is short, specific, and asks for one small thing. The reader owes you nothing, has received several similar messages today, and is deciding within a couple of seconds whether this one is different.
Specificity is what makes it different. A message showing you understand their situation outperforms any amount of flattery, and it is the one thing volume senders cannot fake at scale.
The ask should be proportionate to the relationship. A first message asking for a thirty minute call is asking a stranger for thirty minutes; asking whether it is worth sending more detail is a question someone might actually answer.
The noise floor has risen sharply, since generated outreach is cheap and abundant and recipients filter harder as a result. That has made genuinely specific, obviously human messages more effective than they used to be, not less.
What to include in a sales email
- A subject line that is plain rather than clever, and honest about the contents.
- A first line about them, not about you.
- One specific observation showing you looked at their business.
- The value stated concretely, ideally with a number.
- One small, clear ask.
- A signature that makes it obvious who you are and how to check.
Common mistakes
- Opening with your company history, which nobody has asked for.
- Template personalisation so shallow it advertises itself as a template.
- Manufactured urgency and false familiarity, both of which read instantly.
- Length. Almost every sales email improves by being cut in half.
- Asking for a meeting before establishing there is anything to meet about.
Where an AI sales email generator helps, and where it does not
It is useful for structure and for getting past the blank page, and it is good at producing variations of a line you are already happy with.
It cannot do the research, and the research is the message. Without a specific observation about the recipient, an AI sales email generator produces a competent template, which is precisely what everyone has learned to ignore.
Sending generated outreach at volume also risks your domain reputation, which is a slower and more expensive problem than a low reply rate.
Using the AI sales email generator
Describe the topic of your sales email and the tool drafts one. Including who the recipient is and what you have noticed about them produces something considerably more usable.
Then cut it hard, replace the generic value claim with a specific one, and add the observation only you could make. If you cannot make one, the problem is the prospect list rather than the email.
Where to go next
Outreach only works if it arrives. Confirm your
SPF and
DMARC records are in place, and draft longer correspondence with the
AI letter generator.