Our job at PipeCandy is to help customers write high conversion sales prospecting emails - the ones that get 20 or 30 responses per 100 emails. Doing this over and over again in our previous startups and now through PipeCandy, we figured a rule that never fails.The 3, 30 & 30 rule of generating high quality B2B Sales leads through email.There is only one goal for sales prospecting emails - which is to get a positive actionable response (a confirmation for a phone call, a demo or a visit or even an introduction to another colleague).To get there, there are two milestones.‍

The milestone of 3 seconds:

‍If you notice the inbox reading patterns of people or your own, you’d realize that people scan from top to bottom and not left to right. What does that mean?People don’t read your email subjects. They scan vertically through their inboxes for hooks. They are looking for words that would arrest their vertical movement and hook them into a ‘left to right’ reading pattern.Essentially you are breaking a pattern. And what have you got? 3 seconds! That’s the span of time you’ve got before the scroll position moves, taking your email out of their eyes.You’ve heard email marketing gurus saying that subject lines are important. Now you know why - because, the scanning pattern of emails are against opens. Your prospects are reading emails like how lifeguards in the Miami beach spot trouble in the waters amidst an ocean of beach goers. Your prospects’ eyes look for familiar names. Yours isn’t. Then they look for words in subject lines that are hooks. That’s why, for a while, we all wrote our prospect’s names on the subject lines hoping they will notice it. That’s done to death already.What you instead need to put in there is words that perk up curiosity or a fear of missing out (FOMO). Can you plant curiosity or FOMO within 3 seconds? That’s your subject line challenge!Sample this: We recently helped a customer get 90% open rates for a chat SDK product which is used for support (as niche as it can get). But 90%? How?Here’s their original subject line: Has your app gotten chatty lately?Here’s how we rewrote it: Skynet vs. Yelp - Whose support is better?Of course, I don’t endorse Skynet ;). It’s just a placeholder there.  Let’s say the email is being sent to the mobile product manager at Yelp. He may or may not know Skynet. But the fact that someone’s comparing her support with that of Skynet, gets her attention. The “vs.” creates curiosity. The “better” part of the question creates a fear of missing out (on knowing why Skynet’s support might have something better to it that Yelp needs to know and perhaps follow!) This is just one example. Every subject line you write has to be readable and understandable in under 3 seconds and should plant a sense of curiosity and / or a fear of missing out. Now, on to the second milestone, shall we?

‍The milestone of 3 minutes

‍Now that you have created a sense of curiosity & a fear of missing out, it’s now time to feed those emotions. Subject lines are not tricks. They are a teaser to what’s coming. If you disconnect your subject line from your prospecting email’s content, your prospects disconnect from your brand for a foreseeable future. You’re making a promise to say something valuable and your prospects are willing to commit 3 minutes to your email. Now, the time is to fulfil that promise.

‍Some Don’ts:  

• Don’t flaunt your company

 Your company having 5000 employees and few of them just opening a satellite office in the moon aren’t the reasons why your prospect gave you her 3 minutes. Reserve self-congratulations for the P.S part of your email, if you can’t go without them.  

• Don’t congratulate or fake-flatter your prospect

 Stop opening your emails with congratulatory notes on how your prospect is the real world IronMan. He isn’t so low on self esteem that he craves for positive strokes from a stranger who sends unsolicited emails. Be genuine and get to the point.  

• Don’t say everything that has to be said about your product or service in a bulleted list the one of I am doing here :)

 I said 30 & 3 rule. In fact, it is 30,3 and 30 rule. The goal of your email is to get a 30 minutes meeting. So leave something to do in those 30 minutes. Don’t pack your demo (GIF files in an email that demonstrates your product? Noooo!) or say everything good about your product in that email.All you need to do is to say one thing (or may be two things) that reaffirm the fear of missing out or satiate the curiosity. That’s all there is to a prospecting email!I’ll end this quickly with an example.Hey James,I see that you’re the product manager for mobile at Yelp. Am I right?At 5 million MAUs (note: that means ‘monthly active users’) per month, you must be getting a lot of support work on your hands. The guys at Skynet (I bet you know them and probably envy also) had the same issue. Our thingamagic (note: whatever your thing is called) helps them support gazillion stuff in unreasonable time (note: This is the curiosity satiation part or one where you reaffirm the fear of missing out). Are you guys at this efficiency at Yelp? I see that you use NotSoMagicThingy for your app and it doesn’t scale to this level of efficiency...and so goes the email and an ask for a demo etc. You get the drift.Jeez! This post is already long and you’ve got what I am saying. So go ahead and try this - It’s as simple as 3, 30 and 30!Happy prospecting!