Sales Email Templates: How To Write & Examples

This guide covers how to write effective sales emails to engage prospects and close more deals. Learn tips for crafting compelling subject lines, email structure, calls-to-action, following up, closing deals, and more that sales reps can use to save time.

Email remains one of the highest converting channels for sales outreach. However, simply sending bulk promotional messaging fails to cut through noise and connect with buyers.

Using well crafted email templates designed specifically for sales prospects can massively boost engagement, pipeline growth, and closed deals.

In this comprehensive guide, we’ll explore everything you need to know about optimizing sales emails, including:

Benefits of Sales Email Templates

How to Write Compelling Sales Emails

Email Templates By Sales Stage

Examples of Top Sales Emails

Tools to Help Scale Sales Emails

Let’s dive in to learn how to craft emails that customers actually want to open, read, and respond to.

Benefits of Sales Email Templates

Instead of sending one-off generic sales missives, leveraging pre-built reusable templates provides many advantages including:

Saves Time

Well-structured templates eliminate the need to write personalized emails from scratch every time. This results in huge time savings.

Enables Personalization

Templates enable easy swapping of prospect names, companies etc. to retain personalization at scale.

Boosts Conversions

Optimized templates leverage best practices for calls-to-action, readability, length etc. driving higher engagement.

Improves Consistency

Standard templates align senders on positioning, offers and messaging for improved consistency.

Facilitates Testing

The ability to reuse templates makes testing subject lines, content etc. much faster and easier.

Speeds Training

Onboarding new sales reps with approved templates accelerates effective selling readiness.

The compounding productivity and performance benefits make building a sales email template library extremely worthwhile. Now let’s cover writing compelling emails.

How to Write Compelling Sales Emails

While having templates saves time, the content still requires optimization for prospects. Here are tips for writing high-converting sales emails:

Grab Attention With Subject Lines

Subject line framing can improve open rates significantly. Proven frameworks include:

  • Value propositions - Highlight your key benefit
  • Curated offers - Promote special discounts or content
  • Case studies - Reference compelling customer success
  • Industry news - Leverage timely events and triggers

Subject lines are key real estate to make recipients care enough to open.

Personalize Outreach

Avoid spammy generic messages. Research prospects to reference specifics like name, company, role challenges etc. to show familiarity.

Messages tailored uniquely perform better. Even minimal personalization helps.

Focus On Benefits

Don’t immediately sell features. Explain how you specifically help customers in their language tied to goals vs generic product pitches.

Describe the end value first before capabilities that enable it.

Social Proof Case Studies

Back up claims with specific examples of helping other customers. Namedropping recognizable logos as references builds credibility.

Proof is more compelling than promises when establishing trust.

Frame Urgency or Scarcity

Providing time limited offers, evaporating discounts or low inventory warnings compel faster action.

Fear of loss is very motivating.

Make Next Steps Obvious

Clearly tell readers any desired call-to-action, campaign code or link to click for more information within emails.

Removing friction and decision making increases conversions.

These best practices help sales emails drive engagement and pipeline growth. Now let’s explore templates tailored to each selling stage.

Email Templates By Sales Stage

Sales emails serve different purposes across the buyer journey. Here are email examples optimized specifically for each tier:

Cold Outreach Templates

Use these templates when prospecting completely new, unengaged leads:

Subject Lines

  • Quick question on [tool]
  • Does [tool] help you?

Template

Hi [First Name],

Hope you are having a great start to your week!

Wanted to quickly introduce myself and [Tool Company]. We help finance teams like yours at [Company] automatically consolidate Excel reports from multiple systems into interactive cloud dashboards.

This typically saves analysts 6+ hours per week of manual wrangling, prevents errors, and surfaces insights faster.

I noticed [Company] uses Excel actively in several presentations on your site, so curious if reporting automation is something that could add value. Want to quickly discuss to see if any fit?

Either way, really enjoyed learning more about [Company]! Looks like a great culture.

Best,[Your name]

The casual tone coupled with benefit positioning provides a soft sales touch to open conversations.

Lead Follow Up Templates

For prospects that previously replied or expressed interest, leverage:

Subject Lines

  • Following up on [tool] demo
  • Next steps on analytics reporting

Template

Hi [First Name],

I appreciated learning more about your analytics challenges on our last call. Automating stale manual Excel crunching definitely seemed like an urgent priority after recent acquisition moves.

As discussed, consolidating your business data into flexible [Tool] dashboards typically improves reporting productivity by 70%+ for teams like yours, saving hours of manual work while enabling much richer insights.

I’d be happy to provide access to a demo dashboard already configured for your industry to play around with firsthand for deeper evaluation. Let me know if that would be helpful.

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts!

Best,[Your name]

Review past points of connection to push the next step like access to demos.

Opportunity Advancing Templates

For hot leads requesting proposals or demos, use to push towards closes:

Subject Lines

  • [Tool] Proposal for [Company]
  • Next steps on analytics proposal

Hi [First name],

Further to our discussions on selecting an analytics platform for customer insights, attached please find the detailed [Tool] proposal for [Company].

Key aspects include:

  • Setup and installation services
  • Custom reporting dashboard scoped to your business metrics
  • Automated daily dataset ETL integrations
  • Support services and SLAs
  • Volume pricing discount details

Please review the specifics and share any feedback or questions. Also happy to discuss live if easier to align on next steps getting pilots rolling.

Looking forward to partnering together on the project!

Cheers,
[Your name]

Providing requested media and information preempts common objections to advance later stage opportunities.

Email sequence tailoring to each sales level boosts conversions. Now let’s explore full template examples across contexts.

Examples of Top Sales Emails

It’s also very instructive to dissect real-world sales email examples from top performing sales teams.

Let’s analyze 5 excellent templates spanning cold outreach, nurturing sequences, referrals programs and more:

1. Value-Packed Cold Outreach

This initial email does an excellent job establishing relevance to compel responses:

  • Subject line clearly summarizes the offering benefit
  • Opens by acknowledging current solution and friction
  • Explains positioning as an evolution vs rip-and-replace
  • Outlines ROI from increased efficiency and growth
  • Positions security and support as crucial buying criteria
  • Closes by expressing flexibility in exploratory discussions

Great example of communicating relevance through their situation paired with results. Now let's analyze an effective sales nurture sequence.

2. 4 Touch Nurture Series

Multi-email nurtures develop trust and relevancy over time:

  • Subject lines attract attention with diverse templates
  • Content offers constantly shift from educational to promotional
  • Product positioning evolves from awareness to capability details
  • Sequences capitalize on holidays and events for freshness
  • Effort shifts from pushing product to pulling in engagement
  • Crescendos into limited time discount offer as finale

Expanding beyond a single sales email drives conversions over time by nurturing interest. Now let's explore an example specifically targeted to the bottom of funnel.

3. Renewal Discount Promotion

Tactical savings offers help retain existing customers:

  • Urgent subject line with discount code grabs attention
  • Appreciates loyalty while acknowledging pricing concerns
  • Positions exclusive one-time offer to incentivize
  • Highlights generous discount terms as reason to act
  • Expresses flexibility to discuss further savings
  • Closes restating urgency to compel response

Well structured savings promotions encourage renewals from existing customers about to churn. Now let's analyze an example aimed at referrals.

4. Customer Referral Program Invite

Referral programs incentivize sharing with networks:

  • Urgent subject line encourages fast action
  • Appreciates loyalty and offers reciprocity
  • Positions exclusivity to compel signups
  • Emphasizes sizable rewards for referrals
  • Outlines simple steps to join program
  • Closes with contact details for any questions

Well structured referral programs expand reach exponentially via customer networks. Finally, let's analyze a sales email targeted to return inactive leads:

5. Winback Campaign For Churned Leads

Reactivating old opps requires creative messaging:

  • Timely subject line positions latest innovations
  • Acknowledges past disengagement
  • Tailors messaging to key friction points mentioned before
  • Offers exclusive savings to incentivize re-evaluation
  • Positions flexibility to restart conversations
  • Links to booking directly to reduce friction

Getting re-engagement often comes down to discounts and removing past objections.

Hopefully these real-world examples illustrate a variety of contexts where enhancing email conversations pays off.

Now let’s shift gears to explore tools that help scale customized sales emails.

Tools to Help Scale Sales Emails

Executing sales email outreach one message at a time severely limits reach. Thankfully many excellent sales platforms help overcome this.

Here are popular tools for scaling email campaigns:

Outreach

The leading sales engagement platform offers powerful capabilities to:

  • Easily build reusable email templates
  • Create multi-touch sequences automatically
  • Log emails and track prospect engagement
  • Structure complex multi-channel cadences across email, calls, text etc.
  • Surface insights on highest performing messages
  • Integrate campaigns into existing workflows and CRMs

This enables high volume personalized, templatized outreach driving exponential pipeline growth.

Salesloft

Another top sales tool, Salesloft also specializes in scaling high touch outreach with features including:

  • Simple drag & drop email template builder
  • Automated nurture sequence creation
  • Activity capture from calls, meetings etc.
  • Lead scoring and routing intelligence
  • Email analytics for open, clickthrough tracking
  • CRM sync with contacts, accounts, opportunities

Together this also powers productive personalized outbound communication.

Mailshake

Mailshake positions itself as the CRM and email marketing hybrid - combining intuitive campaign creation capabilities with contact management tools:

  • Automated email reminder workflows
  • Lead list uploading and organization
  • Activity tracking across devices
  • Email copy testing abilities
  • Open & link click analytics
  • Gmail Integration

The tight email and CRM unification simplifies sales outreach execution for small teams.

As shown above, many outstanding platforms help sales teams overcome manual one-off fielding - enabling consistent templatized and automated communication scaled across buyer journeys. This drives exponential pipeline growth.

In conclusion, taking the time to compile high converting email templates specifically tailored for sales provides a force multiplying effect on business growth. Combined with workflow automation tools, outcomes can accelerate significantly.

How to Use Just Think AI for Sales Email Templates

Just Think AI makes creating effective sales email templates easy. Here are tips:

  1. Share details on your product/service offerings and key benefits
  2. Provide ideal customer profile - industry, role, common pain points
  3. Indicate any unique value props or compelling case studies
  4. Specify preferred email style - formal, conversational etc.

With this information, Just Think AI can generate customized sales email templates tailored to your offering and buyers.

Just Think AI Prompts for Sales Email Templates

When requesting sales email templates from Just Think AI, provide:

  • Overview of product/service and target customer outcomes
  • Common pain points and challenges for ideal customers
  • Any unique value props, case studies, or social proof
  • Desired email style - professional, friendly etc.

These details allow Just Think AI to optimize sales email templates that align to your business, resonate with prospects, and drive more pipeline.

Let Just Think AI handle the busywork of crafting effective sales emails so you can focus on revenue generating activities!

Olivia Rhye
11 Jan 2022
5 min read