Sales and marketing emails are fundamentally different. Therefore, understanding the difference between sales and marketing emails is critical if you don’t want to misuse your email efforts and hurt your organization’s reputation.
Moreover, as a B2B sales or marketing professional, you don’t want your subscribers to move your emails to their trash folder and have your email efforts go in vain. To increase the likeliness of your email subscribers opening your emails and taking the required action, you need to clearly distinguish between sales and marketing emails.
The Purpose of Sales and Marketing Emails
The goals of sales and marketing emails are strikingly different. In the case of marketing, the goal is to drive prospects toward sales and get a conversation started. Prospects need to know some key information ahead of time to make an informed decision while purchasing a product/service.
On the other hand, sales emails are meant to drive prospects to take action. The ultimate goal of a sales email is to get prospects to raise a query or book a meeting. Every sales email should have “something to give” and “something to get” in return.
“Something to give” is typically a valuable resource or information you provide about your business or products/services. “Something to get” is what you’re urging the prospect to do. Remember, you can have multiple “things to give” in a sales email but you should only have one “thing to get.”
If you ask prospects to give multiple things or take multiple actions, they may get overwhelmed.
In simple words, marketing emails are used to engage with prospects and build a rapport with them, before asking them to act through a sales email. Sales and marketing emails work together to increase conversions. While the sales teams reach prospects with valuable information and encourage prospects to act with sales emails, marketing teams keep them engaged and help them in building trust through testimonials and case studies.
How Sales and Marketing Emails Should Be Constructed
A sales email campaign needs to have multiple touchpoints (between 7 and 10) that include phone calls, emails, and meetings. Here’s what a sample sales email campaign looks like:
- Day 1: Sales email
- Day 2: Phone call
- Day 3: Sales email
- Day 4: Phone Call
- Day 5: No action
- Day 6: Sales email
- Day 7: Sales email
Know that a sales email campaign at this aggressive pace isn't ideal for every business and that you may need a different schedule. Either way, we recommend including the following in your sales emails:
- A quick and specific introduction
- An explanation of why you are reaching out
- Something to give and get (as mentioned in the previous section)
Other things you should do to create sales emails that generate responses include:
- Write impactful subject lines
- Write strong opening lines
- Focus on a strong end
- Add your email signature
Ensure you keep your messages concise and clear. Include only relevant information that your prospects need to know to make a decision.
A marketing email can be drafted in different styles. These include:
- Welcome emails
- Content-based emails (information about your business, facts about your industry, and so on)
- Event emails
- Webinar emails
- Product- or service-based emails
- User-generated-content-based emails
Here are some quick tips for marketing emails:
- Set a goal for each email
- Know your audience
- Write a compelling subject line
- Personalize the emails
- Avoid cluttering the emails
- Balance text and visuals to enhance the overall appeal
- Create a sense of urgency
Tools You Can Use To Help Your Email Efforts
Apart from the purpose and structure of sales and marketing emails, the tools used for each are also different.
Sales tools should comprise the following features:
- They should be easy to navigate and use
- They should comprise impactful, ready-to-use templates
- They should provide you with tools, such as email tracking
- They should allow integrations with other useful tools
On the other hand, marketing tools should comprise the following features:
- They should help you send out targeted emails
- They should allow email list segmentation
- They should provide you with A/B testing or split testing to determine what’s working and what’s not working
- They should enable you to create impactful personalized emails
We've developed thousands of successful email campaigns—for B2B and B2C clients—since the day we opened our doors in 2003. If your sales or marketing emails aren't generating the responses you want, we can help. Please schedule a meeting with us to learn more.
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