When the Columbus Crew Premium Sales team was tasked with filling the suites and club seats in their new stadium, they knew building relationships with their clientele would be their key to success. With that in mind, the sales team didn’t hesitate to leverage the Thnks platform to send strategic tokens of thanks to their clients. Items like “Thnks a Latte” coffees, branded stadium seat cushions, Grubhub lunches, and several other thoughtful gestures of gratitude, were sent to clients to strengthen and nurture valuable relationships. Their efforts boasted a 93% open rate and helped them to completely sell out their club seats and suites.
“We here at The Crew are thankful for our new stadium, and the fact that Thnks helps us share that gratitude with our premium customers has been a powerful relationship-building tool. Thnks helped us meet our sales goal, but more importantly, helped us establish better bonds with our fans and clients,” said Colin Cook, Director of Sales at Columbus Crew.
A success story like that starts with one simple problem: a business needs its clients to open information and media, like emails, from them to grow. However, as the digital arena grows at an unprecedented pace, sales teams are faced with roadblocks like spam filters, email fatigue and notification blocks that are keeping that messaging from reaching their audiences’ inboxes. As sales teams for years tried to bust through the noise with catchy subject lines, time-optimized posting and more, we found simply incorporating gratitude in your sales technique as a fool-proof way of boosting your email open rate and business-to-client communication. Here are a few tips for bringing gratitude to your sales strategy.
Evaluate how you’re communicating with your targeted contacts
Are you choosing the right type of prospect outreach for the person you’re writing to? 69% of email recipients mark an email as spam based on the subject line alone, so ensuring that each part of your communication is filled with relevant and useful information is essential in getting your clients to even open it. You can make sure you’re sending out messages that are important to your prospects by adding emotional intelligence (EQ) to your messaging.
Imagine yourself in your clients’ position
By imagining what it’s like to be them, you can better incorporate EQ into your future interactions. What’s going to make you stand out and be more memorable in their eyes? One way to catch their attention is by using personalized gratitude tactics to customize your email templates. Studies have shown that recipients of emailed expressions of gratitude feel more ecstatic than other email recipients. A few ways that you can go about using gratitude in sales emails include the following:
- Naming your prospects in your subject lines.
- Customizing your email snippets with information relevant to them to attract your recipients’ attention.
- Thanking them for taking the time to read your message.
Taking the time to make curated emails that dial into details will not only shift your prospects’ impressions of you in a positive direction but also help you build long-term relationships that will lead to a greater ROI for your business. An easy way to start is by regularly acknowledging your current clients, and you’re sure to discover their elation for a sincere “thank you.”
Write a well-crafted email
The most important part of building this connection with your prospective clients is the email itself! When it comes to strengthening customer relationships, Thnks has a surefire list of things to keep in mind while drafting your email that’ll boost your chances of getting engagement.
- Picture yourself sitting across from the person you’re emailing. The more closely you envision your prospects, the easier it is to address them, as well as evaluate and understand the various challenges that they may face.
- Evaluate your intro. Especially for small businesses, it’s essential to do a little digging on your prospective clients before sending emails. If they have an account, one of the best places to find relevant information about your target is LinkedIn! If you find any connections or interests that you have in common, use that in the introduction of your email to connect with the recipient and obtain higher open rates. You can pull from one of the following to construct a powerful opening:
- Their LinkedIn description
- Their company’s recognition in a recent publication
- An award their organization has won
- A mutual connection that you have
- Something from their company’s website, such as a piece of content
- Potential goals that they might be attempting to achieve
- Imagine that your written words are being spoken. By writing conversationally in your messages and avoiding too much formality or jargon, you can actually increase the chances of your email being opened.
- Pair your “asks” with explanations. It’s no secret that time is a valuable entity, so if you’re going to ask your prospects to take the time to meet with you, make sure that you’re showcasing how that meeting will provide them with value.
- Pretend you have to cc your boss on the email. Each time that you compose a message to an important contact, determine whether or not your supervisor would approve of what you’re sending. You can even email a test message to your manager to get their approval.
- Include an expression of gratitude. A simple and effective way to separate yourself from the wall of people clogging up your prospects’ inboxes is by sharing thoughtful “thank you” notes with your contacts before and after you’ve had the chance to connect. You can do this in writing or you can…
- Say Thnks! An easy way to express your gratitude for your client is by sharing a few Thnks gestures. If you send gestures that are personalized in alignment with your targets’ preferences or interests, then you and your business will become more memorable. A few tokens of gratitude that you can share include:
- Their Favorite Lunch so they have one less meal to cook while working from home
- A Pumpkin Spice Latte for the prospect who’s overly eager to see some fall foliage
- A Movie Night at Home so they can spend a Friday or Saturday night enjoying a film while we head into cooler months and see how Pure Storage used Thnks as their most powerful sales tool.
To learn more tactics to help improve your sales game, download our ebook, 7 Tactics to Move Prospects Through Your Pipeline Faster with Gratitude, and see how Pure Storage used Thnks as their most powerful sales tool. Interested in learning more? Sign up for a demo, or click here to learn more about expressing gratitude in business!
