Julian
My son’s name is Julian. But that isn’t what we call him, or at least not unless we really want to get his attention. As an infant, he was a bit of a “Fussy Gus.” So we started calling him Gus. Then somehow it progressed to Gussy. It stuck. Poor guy. But when his Mom really wants to get his attention, she will sternly say “Julian.” He will turn immediately and look.
In fact, I think all Mothers since the dawn of time have done this. Mine did. Yours probably did too. That’s why when someone uses your first name, you pay attention. So let’s use it in our B2B SaaS sales process.
Sales Hack: Use First Name in Email Subject Lines
I’m assuming you’ve all heard this before, “The Subject Line is the most important.” I won’t say that because it’s cliche and quite honestly not true. But I will say that the subject line of an outbound sales prospecting email is extremely important. Here’s why:
Most of your B2B prospects use Gmail, even if they are a business, they use Google Apps for business (Gmail for email). Even if they don’t use Gmail, their mail client is typically organized similarly. Your prospect’s inbox looks like this below….
Note what is in bold font. The name of the sender (you) and the Subject line. When looking at this information your prospect decides if they should open your email or not.
Start your outbound prospecting email subject line with “*|FNAME|*, …” That was a merge tag that auto-populates the first name based on what software you are using to send. But you can manually type the name too of course. All of our reps do this and we have proven higher open rates when we insert the first name before the subject line.
Give it a try! Test it out in your emails and see if it improves your open rates. Test it out on your children and see if they improve their behavior.
