How to Use Data Effectively in Sales Outreach Emails
Data has become a fundamental part of how businesses understand and communicate with potential customers, and data in sales emails is one of the most important ways it happens. Why? Because email is still the most-preferred way people want to communicate with businesses.
It’s also the most direct way to engage them—in a world where prospects do most of their research and vendor comparisons on their own, email puts sales teams back in the driver’s seat when it comes to how and when to engage.
In this guide, we’ll explore exactly why data in sales emails has become so invaluable to sales success and five actionable ways to leverage it in your future outreach.
Quick Takeaways:
- Sales data provides businesses with critical insight on customer behavior.
- This data enables greater targeting, personalization, and campaign performance.
- Data-driven email personalization is expected by buyers at every stage.
- Sales email data powers performance-optimizing tactics like A/B testing and segmentation.
Why Data Matters in Sales Emails
When it comes to succeeding in a modern sales environment, there’s no alternative to good data. It’s the key to unlocking insights that enable targeted, personalized, engaging sales strategies and eliminating the guesswork that once led to so much wasted time and energy for sales reps.
Data empowers sales teams to be confident that every communication, campaign, and interaction with a prospect will pay off. Here are the key areas of sales where data is making the greatest impact:
1. Understanding Customer Behavior and Preferences
Today, every interaction a potential customer has with your brand—from website visits to content downloads to direct inquiries and more—can be tracked and fed into a larger data pool that provides a complete picture of your pipeline.
With this data, you can better understand your target audience as a whole, as segmented groups, and as individual prospects, depending on how you view and drill down into your data. This understanding is crucial for tailoring your sales emails to match the interests and needs of your prospects and increasing the relevance of your communications.
For example: If you see that a prospect views a particular product page, you can send an email inviting them to do a product demo. If you learn over time prospects who view that page consistently respond to the demo invitation and convert after it happens, you can standardize the email as a regular part of your sales process.
2. Personalization Powered by Data-Driven Insights
B2B buyers want more personalization than ever before. Not only do 71% of consumers say they expect to experience personalization from brands, 76% say they become frustrated when they don’t get it. Not only this, but they expect personalization at every single stage of their journey—even during awareness and discovery.
Sales emails are a critical part of delivering on this expectation. Simple tactics like using your prospect’s name and referring to their company can go a long way. At the same time, emails provide a platform for sharing dynamic content tailored to unique prospect needs and preferences. Data, of course, is needed to execute all of the above.
3. Enhancing Open Rates, Engagement, and Conversion
Because data helps you send higher-quality sales emails, you can also expect that it will enhance their performance. Data plays a critical role in optimizing important sales email metrics like open rate, click rate, and conversion via CTA follow-through.
For example: Analyzing past email campaigns can reveal the types of subject lines or formats that lead to higher engagement. You can use this insight to create better campaigns in the future.
In short: Incorporating data in sales emails transforms your sales outreach from a shot in the dark to a targeted and informed effort. It equips you with the necessary tools to not only capture the attention of your prospects but also engage them in meaningful ways, building connection that leads to conversion.
In the next section, we’ll explore 5 specific ways you can power your sales email strategy with data to boost your overall sales performance.
5 Powerful Ways to Use Data in Sales Emails
1. Personalization Through Data
We know that personalization is expected at every stage of the sales process, and that it improves overall engagement. Identify the key ways you want to personalize your sales emails, and standardize the collection and leveraging of those data points in your email strategy. For example: Perhaps you decide to always include a high-value content asset in sales conversation follow-up emails.
To do this most effectively, be sure that your sales reps collect data about the buyer’s most pressing interests and needs. You can then have a set of content assets at the ready for your reps to choose from as they prepare their follow-up outreach.
2. Segmentation for Targeted Outreach
Email segmentation allows for targeting and personalization to happen at scale, and data is crucial to this process. Sales audiences can be segmented by everything from demographic information, geographic location, company needs, industry, budget, and more.
As data is fed into your CRM and email marketing platform, you can automate the segmentation of these lists so emails can be batched and sent in targeted ways. Thanks to these tech-driven capabilities, the process for creating email segments is simple. Once you determine your criteria and set up workflows in your software tools, you simply create content as needed, select the right lists, and track performance.
3. A/B Testing for Continuous Improvement
Speaking of performance tracking, A/B testing is one of the most effective ways to optimize sales email performance in an ongoing way. By definition, A/B testing means sending multiple versions of a sales email to your intended audience, with different aspects (like subject lines or CTAs) varied to see which ones perform best. Then, you can analyze the results and refine your strategy over time.
Most sales email platforms have this capability built-in, so it will automatically collect the data from your email campaigns and summarize it for easy viewing and analysis.
4. Crafting Compelling Subject Lines
If you write a lot of sales emails, you know subject lines can be one of the biggest points of stress for sales teams trying to create emails that convert—and for good reason. They’re the first thing people see when they receive your email, and 64% use them to decide if they’ll open an email at all.
Using data to enhance subject lines is one of the surest ways to improve email performance. Leverage data to help you personalize using names (or another data point), target relevant callouts, align subject lines with particular pain points and needs, or highlight specific content within.
5. Follow-up Strategy Optimization
Data can guide the frequency and content of your follow-up emails. Track how recipients respond to different follow-up intervals and content types to determine the most effective strategy. Some recipients may respond better to a soft nudge, while others may need a more direct approach.
This largely depends on the stage of the purchase journey stage and other determining factors such as purchase readiness, or the influence your specific contact has over the purchase process. Your CRM data is powerful for this part of your strategy since it requires tracking data on an individual prospect basis.
Incorporating these data-driven strategies can transform your sales emails from generic outreach into powerful, personalized tools of engagement and conversion. By leveraging the vast amounts of prospect data at your disposal, you can ensure that your sales outreach always resonates.
Putting it All Together
Data in sales emails isn’t just a helpful resource to use—it’s become the cornerstone of how B2B sales teams develop, execute, and refine their sales outreach strategies. It’s essential to optimize and leverage your data in a comprehensive way and at every level, including:
- For both automated and manual outreach
- To send individual messages and larger campaigns
- To engage prospects at every stage
- For optimizing sales email performance over time
Doing all of this successfully requires having the right tools in place to streamline and support your strategy long-term. If you’re looking to level up your use of data in your outbound sales emails, RevBoss can help you do it.
Our platform and services are custom-built for SaaS companies, startups, agencies, and other high-growth B2B companies.
Schedule a quick call with us today to learn how we can help you win more clients.