With more than 347 billion emails sent each day, it’s clear that email has remained a business communication staple. The trouble is most emails are ineffective. When brands send the same exact message to hundreds of contacts, this problem is only amplified. Just look at cold sales emails—a 5% reply rate would make most teams elated.
To stand out in a recipient’s inbox, teams across departments have increasingly focused on personalization. As outbound email volume has increased, so have the expectations of email recipients.
This brings us to the greatest challenge facing today’s sales executive: how to make it clear that you understand your recipient and their unique needs, which in turn increases the likelihood of driving the desired action, response, or click-through!
Thanks to the boom in generative artificial intelligence (AI) technologies, there are countless tools for businesses to accelerate their work, including powerful solutions that improve sales and marketing email reply rates.
Lavender AI Sales Email Coach Solution Overview
Lavender is an AI-powered email coach that helps sales teams write more effective emails faster. By combining communication and behavioral psychology with deep learning on email data, Lavender identifies and implements ways to improve email reply rates. Lavender integrates natively with Outreach, Salesloft, HubSpot, Gmail, and Outlook, with integrations for LinkedIn, Google Docs, and more through Lavender Anywhere.
To guide users, Lavender offers an in-inbox email writing coach, research and personalization tools, and a coaching dashboard to help reps close more deals and build meaningful relationships with their prospects. Specifically, the tool offers the ability to:
- Research Prospects: Lavender shows insights from social media channels, company job boards, technologies their company uses, and even personality data on a prospect so that reps can engage them effectively. For example, Lavender could identify a recipient as more action-oriented (a mover in Lavender). In this case, Lavender will provide personality-specific recommendations to coach a seller through the deal.
- Personalize Email Content: Lavender’s research tool doubles as a personalization tool. Lavender takes company data and suggests ways that a rep should personalize the email. For example, Lavender will show recent press releases or news articles from the recipient’s company and it will help the sender use this information to start a conversation in a natural, engaging way.
- Enable Data-Driven Team Coaching: Lavender’s email coach assigns every email with a score of 0-100 (teams should aim for a score of 90+) in the inbox, as they write it. Lavender learns about each user and their team to then adjust its scoring, recommendations, and coaching cards based on what works for each individual. The coaching dashboard provides individuals and team leaders with answers for why emails are generating replies and unique data points like how long people spend writing emails. This is great if you’re trying to detect reps that are “at-risk” and may need further coaching.
- Start an Email: Lavender’s Start my Email feature uses generative AI to draft an email using a few user-provided bullet points or research points. Start My Email can also analyze an email thread to create a proposed response. This email writing tool can be incredibly helpful for overcoming writer’s block or increasing productivity. Still, Lavender’s team recommends that a human should always be involved in reviewing emails before they are sent as it is intended to enhance communication and not take the place of a sales rep.
Lavender users can create personalized emails in 3-5 minutes, which usually takes 15 minutes or more. Across their 20k+ active users, they’re averaging 20.5% reply rates, which is more than 4x the industry average.
We’re committed to building the best email experience for sellers and helping them engage prospects with approachable and personalized messages. We think Lavender is like providing a dedicated coach to every seller on the team, helping them get up to speed faster and making them more effective and confident in their work.
William Ballance, Lavender CEO and cofounder
Though it was initially created to improve the sales process, Lavender has the power to extend beyond sales team functions. Case in point, when pandemic layoffs were profound, Lavender launched its solution by offering it for free to job seekers––something the company still does today. After all, what job seeker doesn’t want to stand out in a sea of resumes and hear back from prospective hiring managers?
Sales Email Best Practices
Optimizing a team’s sales email strategy is an ever-evolving process, requiring reps to directly appeal to their prospective customers’ needs throughout the buyer’s journey.
Beyond the necessary personalization, there are several proven ways to improve your sales email success:
- Write to Be Understood: Salespeople often try to sound smart in their emails, which hurts their reply rates. More than 70% of emails are written at a 10th-grade reading level or higher, but if you write between a 3rd to 5th-grade reading level you’ll see 67% more replies. To do this, write in smaller paragraphs with simple sentence structures and with short, common words.
- Ditch Formalities: Many email recipients will skim the email preview before deciding whether they want to read the full message. You don’t want the preview to be taken by phrases like I hope this email finds you well. Open with the immediate relevance of why you’re reaching out and frame that in a way that’s valuable to your recipient.
- Be Direct: One recent Lavender analysis of 28.3 million sales emails for a LinkedIn blog post found that emails perform best when they are 25-50 words total. Keep your message short and direct
- Test Everything: The best way to improve your sales email success is to pay attention to your email KPIs—how could your individual email elements like the subject line, intro, and any images impact the recipient’s actions? A/B test messages and quickly adapt your strategy based on what your data suggests works best for engaging your prospects.
Sales Outreach Email: Before and After Lavendar Optimization
Here’s a visual example of Lavendar’s Email Assistant with a before and after optimization.
Sales Email Case Study – Lavender
Lavender has more than 20k active users sending millions of emails every week. Customers include Twilio, Brex, Clari, Lucidworks, Sendoso, MasterClass, and UserGems.
Twilio provides a customer engagement platform used by more than ten million developers worldwide. Before using Lavender, Twilio was in the midst of transforming its sales strategy to focus more on personalization and improving the quality of its outreach. Its team had made significant investments toward coaching and promoting better writing habits. Lavender aligned perfectly with those goals and reinforced the behaviors that Twilio hoped to emphasize and train in its organization.
With Lavender, Twilio’s reps achieved a 60% increase in meetings booked in the first six months, despite having 11% fewer sales reps.
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