Lessons - How to Write Amazing Emails (That Convert) | Darryl Praill, CMO at Agorapulse

Hi, it's Scott here. On these lessons episodes of my podcast, I'll be selecting my favorite lessons from various guests and episodes of Success Story. Today you're going to hear from Daryl Prale. Daryl is the CMO or Chief Marketing Officer at Agora Pulse. In 2020, he was awarded the top 10 SaaS Branding Expert Award. He's voted as a top three marketer on LinkedIn, a top 50 social seller, a top 50 sales keynote speaker, an award winning and prolific content creator. He's worked in a variety of tech leadership roles, Chief Marketing Officer, Chief Revenue Officer across various categories and industries. However, he's doubled down on tech and he's built a very strong personal brand because he knows what he's talking about. He's a great teacher and he is a prolific marketer. Today, he's going to speak about five proven email structures that can actually get your customer to do what you want them to do. It could be in sales, it could be a marketing, but ultimately the art of capturing somebody's attention via email with subject line, copy, call to action. This is one of the most valuable ways you can communicate with your customer and your audience and ultimately get them to buy your product or service. Hey there, my name is Daryl Prale. I'm the Chief Revenue Officer here at VanillaSoft. Today, I'm going to teach you five proven email structures so that you can better drive your prospect engagement. This is a conversation entirely for the sales audience. Specifically, if you're trying to drive conversations with prospects as you grow or scale your business, what are the right emails and the formats that you should consider using so that you actually have a strong response and engagement? Let's look at this. As a whole, there's multiple ways you can engage with the prospects. We know this. One is the telephone, another would be social media, social selling as an example. Another would be SMS, all right, text messages. Another might be direct mail, but of course the most popular one of all is email. And that's where you or your reps, if you have some, will spend the vast majority of their time. But problem is this. Most sales reps, whether you're an account executive, you're an account manager, you're a sales development rep, whatever your position might be, a business development rep, have had absolutely zero training in any kind of writing structure. It's not their strength. They're great on the phone, they'll tell you. They're the ones to go to for negotiation. But if you don't get the prospect into the top of the funnel, then there's no deal to be had. So the email as the most popular, it's the most consumed method of communication and prospecting is critical to get right. So now, let's think about all of the mistakes you've seen as the recipient of those emails. You can recognize a template from a mile away because there's been zero personalization. It could be his dress to Susie. It could be dressed to Billy Bob. It doesn't matter because their name is never in it. And there's nothing related or relevant to them. Doesn't matter about their position. They're so visible and easy to identify that most recipients delete them immediately, though, ever opening them. That's because it comes down to your subject line. So we're going to go into what you need to know. Five simple techniques you can use to physically have better success. These are frameworks that you could follow to make sure you're getting the results you want, which are going to be much, much better than anything you're doing now. I guarantee you that further, I would strongly encourage that you test yourself on these and see which frameworks works best for you in your marketplace, which framework works best for your particular idea of customer profile you're targeting or persona you're targeting. So for example, vanilla software, I work, you know, we would be sales sales platform, sales engagement platform. And we would target ahead of sales or ahead of marketing or ahead of operations typically. And the message I send on each of those personas, those three personas are vastly different because they have different pain points, different issues. So when you go to personalize, it's got to speak to them. That's the given. Too many people don't do that. Everything you do is you do one and done. You might send one or two emails and if they don't respond, then that's it. You're done. Statistically, you need to do between nine and 12 outreach attempts. That's phone and email and social is multiple, but at which most of that is email before they'll ever get a response. So you can use different formats here of email frameworks across that cadence, that sequence, that touches to see what works best for you. Keep it interesting, keep it fresh. All right. So let's talk about some of the basic things here. I'm going to share five structures. They're not mine. They're from various people and we'll share them all with you. And we're going to tell you a couple of the best practices. So for example, let's look at subject line. On your subject line, you want your subject line to be anywhere between two and four words. You can go one, you can go five, but that's it. But two to four, according to our research, has the absolute biggest conversion ratio. That's the first thing you need to understand. The next thing is your email needs to be brief, concise, personalized, skimmable. Sam McKenna of Sam Sales uses an expression show me you know me. And so your emails need to just do exactly that. So instead of going for the mass email, you know, the mass blasts of emails, which often is breaking the law, by the way, because there's no privacy or buy-in. You get zero results and zero conversion ratios. Instead, you're better off to send fewer emails about hyper personalized them. All right. So let's go through the formats. This is where I teach you today. Remember, it is literally five proven emails structures or frameworks that will help you drive your engagement. The first one is the format called TTTT. And this is brought to you by fellow named Josh Braun. He created this. And TTTT is very simple. It says paragraph one is trigger. paragraph two is third party. paragraph three is teach me. paragraph four is tell me. So I'll walk you through it. I'll give you some examples. Again, this is all written to me as zero at vanilla soft to make it relatable for you to understand. You will need to map this to your business. So Darryl, notice your sales team has changed a little since you took over a zero. That's the trigger. Holy smokes. How did you notice that? We're helping growing SaaS companies like you, Gong, and lead IQ to regain control of sales performance. That's that third party credibility. wondered if you ever want more visibility into each reps activity and making sure they hit the right leads first. That's that teach me moment. Do I do you want that? interested in learning some more? That's the tell me. Four paragraphs. One sentence each. That's the email TTTT starts with a trigger. Then you go to third party credibility. Then you offer to teach them and then you tell them. Try that out. All right. That's number one. Next one is the ADA. You would know this from lots of places because it goes back to forever. What is it in the classic? Always be selling. The next thing that you talk about ABC. The next line you would always hear them say would be ADA. So ADA stands for attention, interest, desire, and action. So line one is attention, line two is interest, line three is desire, line four is action. Here's an example. Darryl, notice you're hiring five new sales reps. Okay, you've got my attention. How do you know that? wondered if you wanted to hear a new tactic we're using to train them to beat call reluctance. Okay, you've got my interest because that's a real pain. Nobody likes making tons of calls, but it's clearly important to a healthy pipeline and a happy CRO because of that. Well, you're speaking to my desire. I want to be a happy CRO and I want a healthy pipeline. What it makes sense to chat for 15 minutes next week and if you're not interested, after three minutes, we can leave the call right there. Well, that's action. That's what you do next. So again, four lines, four paragraphs, spaces between each one. So it's skimmable. I can read it on my phone. You grab my attention. You get my interest. You create desire and you you cause me to act. That's aida. A-I-D-A. All right. So that's that. Next one up is PAS, P-A-S, the PAS email. PAS is very simple. It's instead of being four, it's only three as you can tell. This one is really simple. You go, what's the problem? And then you agitate a little bit. You know, annoy, agitate. Maybe A could be and now annoy your agitate. Who knows? And then finally, a solution. So let's go. Darryl, ever wondered why one sales rep books less demos compared to others? Well, that's a real problem. In our experience, it's because they're not disciplined on which leads to approach and when it's a free for all and pipeline is in freefall. Okay, that's agitating me because that's exactly what I'm going through. I don't want a freefall pipeline. If you're going through this, would it make sense to talk about how our platform ensures reps can only approach the next best lead? Oh, that could be a solution to that freefall pipeline issue and why one rep books less demos than others. See where I'm going with that? Three lines, three sentences. What's the problem? Agitate or annoy, solution, pause, P-A-S. All right, next up is the Bab, B-A-B. Another three liner. Get a love three liner. Short and sweet. Everybody likes the concise email. People will actually read them. B-A-B stands for before, after, and bridge. So let's go through that. Darryl, feel sad because your team isn't reaching enough prospects. Well, this is obviously the life before I'm going to use this person's solution, but yeah, I do kind of feel sad. We're helping sales teams like Paychex hit three times quota with bigger deal sizes too. Well, that's the after. Before they weren't reaching out enough prospects and now they're hitting three times quota before and after. Would it make sense for us to talk about how you can unlock your team's potential for new activity? We're showing CROs a new tactic that can help. That's the bridge. That's it, three lines, three lines before, after, bridge. Now, again, we're at the fourth of five at this point in time. We'll look at the fifth one shortly, but these are all variations, right? So whether you decide to use the before, after, or bridge, or a problem, agitate solution, you're certainly seeing some commonalities. Is a problem the same as a trigger? Well, I would suggest it is. So let's go to my last model. The last model is acca ACCA. And that stands for awareness, consideration, comprehension, and action. Okay. So let's just see what the acca email looks like. We're back to four lines here. Darryl, are you aware that new HubSpot data found more meetings are being booked by SDRs this quarter using code calls? That's awareness. And no, I didn't know that. And that was from HubSpot. Tell me more, right? Wondered how code calling works right now for your team. That's the consideration, you know? Are you considering how it works for your team? Truth is, code calling is about the right prospect at the right time. Otherwise, it can just be a lottery. That's the comprehension. Truth is, this the facts is the way it is. Do you want a lottery? Would it be worth us talking about a new approach to code calling my team and how they're helping top SaaS companies implement right now? That's the action. So acca awareness, consideration, comprehension, action. So there you have it. So that's five frameworks. Let's just repeat what they are. They were Josh bronze TT TT email for signs of trigger followed by a third party followed by a teach me followed by tell me. Let me go to Ada. First line is all about getting the reader's attention, then generating some interests, then creating desire, and then causing them to act. The past email for a sign is about hitting them up on a problem. Next line is where you agitate. And then the third line is where you provide a possible solution. Fourth one, life is before, life is after. Then what's the bridge? That's the BAB before, after and bridge. Fifth one is acca acca. What is you want to create awareness in line one? You want to create consideration in line two? You want to create comprehension in line three? Then you want to cause action in line four. So those by friends are simply five proven email structures to drive prospect engagement. Remember how we began life? We began life saying, I need my reps feeling the top out of the funnel. We know they're going to do. They should be doing nine to 12 touches. We know it's going to be phone. We know it's going to be social. We know it might be text. It might be direct mail. But the most popular one, the one they all hide behind is email. My reps have never been trained on how to do email and they struggle with it. So let's follow some simple best practices. Subject lines two to four words. All right. And then follow a very simple three to four line email spaced up between paragraphs. And you're not pitching and you're not talking features. You're talking to the actual recipient about their pain points. Remember back to the persona tied to the ideal customer profile. How we began this whole conversation. That's what we're talking about here. So that's what you need to do. It's all about simplifying your sales emails so that you can scale and be repeatable and always always always test AB test and measure. So you know what works best for you. If you don't know what the triggers are for your solution as an example or any you don't have any third parties or you don't have any teaching moments, then you're going to struggle with this kind of stuff. So you got to know to make this work you need you need to know your ideal customer profiles and your personas. So if you don't have those down, start there first and then segue to this. And everything you do in here completely adapts over to phone and social. So this is a brilliant framework. I hope you got value out of this. My name is Darrell Prale. I am the chief revenue officer at Vanilla South the road's best sales engagement platform. Check us out at vanillasoft.com. I hope you enjoyed today. We'll talk to you soon.