You’ve likely heard that email templates are a great way to increase productivity. While that’s true, they’re beneficial for more than just saving a few minutes. When used effectively, email templates can boost your bottom line and create sales and marketing alignment.
If you use a CRM such as HubSpot, then you benefit from easily accessible email template features. Even if you don’t, you can still provide your sales team with shared templates via Google Docs, Dropbox or another shared drive.
We’re sharing five email templates to help increase sales while improving communication between sales and marketing. Just keep in mind that templates should just be a starting point to your email communications – the most effective sales emails include personalization. In every example shared below, you’ll see spaces for your team to add in relevant information for their contacts.
The Value Proposition Template
It’s imperative that your sales team is sharing a consistent, accurate value proposition for your products or services, especially if you are constantly launching new and updated products. In fact, 52% of sales professionals say that they are asked to introduce new products quarterly, causing product information overload. This leads to sales inefficiencies and misaligned value propositions.
By creating accessible templates for your sales team that speak to the value proposition of your company as well as individual products, sales will always sell with a consistent message.
For example, a basic value proposition email for Simple Machines Marketing might look like this:
The Marketing Materials Template
Using marketing materials effectively can help take a lead through their buyer’s journey. But if sales teams don’t utilize these tools effectively, the marketing team’s efforts can go to waste.
Creating email templates that include marketing attachments and links to relevant blogs help improve lead nurturing while ensuring these marketing materials are put to good use.
For example, if you’re a manufacturing company with powder coating services, you might create a template for powder coating leads. Then, when someone visits your powder coating services page, their sales contact could easily personalize a template that’s already full of links to relevant case studies, blogs or videos.
In this instance, your template might resemble this:
The Sales Offer Template
Do you have a promotional offer running for a limited time? An email template is an easy way to empower your sales team to share it with their leads.
By creating the template, you control the messaging around the timeframe for the offer, promotion description, redemption information and more while still enabling your team to add their own personal message to help close the sale.
To accomplish this, your template should include multiple customization points, while still clearly listing the promotional offer. For example:
The Streamlined Quote Follow-Up
Email templates aren’t just helpful leading up to quote or demo requests. They’re important for follow-ups, too.
Closing a deal is a fine-tuned process that requires consistent outreach sprinkled with strategic messaging. A template allows you to do that while using your company’s unique formula for closing deals.
For example, if you have one line that closes 9 out of 10 deals after a demo, make a template with this copy so that the whole team has access to the messaging. Sure, some team members might opt for their own closing line, but this can be extremely effective for increasing your overall close rate, especially with newer sales team members who are just learning the ropes.
This template might read like:
The Sales and Marketing Alignment Template
Sales and marketing alignment is crucial for business success. In fact, according to CSO Insights, 95% of world-class sales leaders are aligned with marketing and data shared by Super Office suggests that this alignment can contribute to 32% higher revenue, 36% more customer retention and 38% higher win rates.
While full sales and marketing alignment requires multiple touchpoints, one quick way to begin this line of communication is through an email template. Have your marketing team create a template that includes key questions that help inform their marketing decisions, such as a place for customer feedback.
Depending on your team’s sales volume, this can be sent from the sales team to your marketing department biweekly or monthly to help improve communication.
A starting point for this template might look like:
Bonus Template: The Streamlined Crisis Messaging Template
In addition to the email templates listed above, a key messaging template may need to be created in times of crisis such as COVID-19. During times like this, your company may be facing many unforeseen disruptions in areas like staffing, lead times or product availability.
Communication regarding these disruptions is extremely important and the wrong message to customers can be detrimental. To ensure sensitive information is properly shared, consider building email templates for your sales team to use in their lead and customer communications.
A template about a team member change may look something like this:
An email template related to supply chain issues might look something more like this:
During a pandemic, there’s more to consider than just email updates. For more information on how to handle marketing during a pandemic, check out our blog.
Start Using Your Email Templates
Email templates can be extremely valuable tools for sales and marketing teams, but oftentimes they aren’t implemented because people aren’t sure how to get started or they worry that the template will be ineffective.
Luckily, email templates can be updated and refined over time as you see what’s working and what isn’t. The most important thing is to just start and to have your team get comfortable using them.
If you’re not sure which email templates to begin with or you need help setting them up, we can help.
