Why Marketing Should Create Sales Email Templates
There’s a lot of content about all the sales email templates you can create in your CRM or marketing automation platforms. But what’s not discussed much is marketing’s role in creating those templates. Often it’s left to sales ops, or the reps themselves, to identify what’s needed and build them.
If you’re in marketing, there are hidden benefits to being more involved in (if not taking full ownership of) the creation of sales email templates. Not only will this strengthen your relationship with sales, it will help your marketing efforts be more effective.
An Opportunity to Listen & Learn
As a marketer creating effective sales email templates, you need to work closely with your sales reps to identify what templates are needed. There are standard ones you can start with. But if you spend some time interviewing and observing the sales team, and asking them what would be most helpful, you’ll uncover unique opportunities for new templates. You’ll also likely identify new content needs and insights about the customer or products you hadn’t previously known.
For example, you may ask a sales rep, “Is there a common misconception you hear from customers about our product or industry?” The answer to this may spark an idea for a sales email template with content to address the misconception.
Creating the template may be the output, but it’s really the process of getting there that’s so valuable.
Tangible Output with Immediate and Measurable Benefits
Sales email templates deliver a highly tangible benefit to your sales team. Often sales and marketing collaborate on bigger and more abstract work such as sales and marketing plans or lead-gen strategies.
Sales email templates can be much smaller projects with high value and immediate benefits. You can build them as-needed and have them in use in a short time period. You can also measure their usage (sends) and effectiveness (opens, clicks) and continue to optimize.
These quick-wins, delivered consistently and communicated effectively, go a long way.
Brand Messaging with Individual Personalization
Here’s one of the biggest benefits when marketing creates sales email templates: you create a touchpoint with your customer that delivers your desired brand messaging AND extremely high personalization (beyond the tokens).
Craft the copy of the email template to hit on key marketing messages while ensuring it sounds like it’s authentically coming from the rep. Where the magic lives is in providing ample opportunity for the rep to tailor the message specifically to the individual. For example, “when we last spoke, you were struggling with _____” or “hope you enjoyed your vacation to____”. Leave specific places in your copy that require the rep to edit before sending.
The combination of coherent brand messaging with individual personalization is something marketers aim to achieve. Using your sales reps as a marketing channel of sorts is a simple way to do that.
Apply All That Expensive Customer Insights Work
Sales email templates provide an opportunity to apply your investment in customer insights and persona work in a very practical way.
By creating templates specific to certain segments, customer personas, or stages of the buyer’s journey, you can create communications that are highly targeted. Or if you’re using the Jobs To Be Done framework, you can create specific sales email templates to address a common habit or anxiety.
You can then measure the effectiveness based on metrics like open and click rates, continue to refine your messaging and targeting, and build on your understanding of the customer.
Makes Use of All That Great Content
If you’re like most marketing teams, you’ve spent a lot of energy and effort creating valuable content. However, all too often, your sales team isn’t using it. Either because they aren’t aware of it or because it’s a hassle to find, weed through and figure out what’s relevant.
There are sales enablement and asset management tools out there that can help. But a simple and great place to start ensuring your valuable content is being used is through sales email templates.
By placing links or CTA buttons to your content within the email, you’re removing much of the legwork the sales rep has to do to find the right content. Clear organization and naming conventions, along with effective communication to the reps, will help them easily find what they need in a format they can easily use.
It may not be the sexiest work we get to do as marketers. But because our success is ultimately defined by how well we drive and support sales, being more involved in the creation of sales email templates will have immediate, visible and lasting benefits.