Email is not redundant, salespeople just need to start using it right, claims a recent survey.

Email has been around for decades, enabling sales teams to instantly communicate with prospects, send proposals and successfully nurture long-term relationships.

The question is, in the age of social media and an abundance of content, can email compete as a relevant outbound channel?

According to a recent survey by Campaign Monitor, email is doing more than just competing, it’s winning.  

For hospitality, brands email is still the number one preference for sales communication. At 66% it is twice that of Direct Mail (26%) and Mobile Apps (25%).

Over half the respondents of this survey checked their emails more than ten times a day. “It is by far their preferred way to receive updates from brands.”

It is no surprise then that more and more companies are now endorsing email as the most reliable and effective channel for revenue generation.

Doing email right, however, means focusing on mobile

Litmus tracked over 17 billion email opens in 2016 to discover where clients are reading emails. They discovered the Apple IPhone to be the top email client.

According to their report, desktop now represents only 16% of email opens. As more companies opt for cloud-based solutions this is set to decrease further in 2018.

Bucking the trend Webmail opens have increased from last year, from 27% to 30% of all email opens, however, this is still eclipsed by mobile.

According to digital experts, ‘We are now in the mobile era, with mobile representing 54% of all email opens’

Litmus confirms this. They looked at over 360 million emails and found that just 8% of email marketers use a desktop-centric design for their emails, instead focusing first on testing emails on mobile. It is clear that customers now expect their emails to be optimised for a small screen.

“If a message doesn’t look good on their small screens, 70% say they’ll just delete it, while 23% will look at it again on a computer and 16% will unsubscribe, ” says US marketing technology group Acxiom. Only 9% will make the effort to try to read the message on their smartphone.

According to the 2016 State of Email Design, because of this 72% of email marketers are now using responsive email templates in their emailing campaigns that adapt to the size of a user’s screen.

Marketers are doing great, but what does this mean for sales?

It’s fair to say when it comes to getting email right, marketing teams are leading the way. Now, salespeople need to act in the same way, adapting to the changing email habits of their audiences. This means focusing on mobile. 

For marketers “The biggest reasons customers open an email are personalisation and discounts,” says Acxiom.  “Customers are only slightly more inclined to open an email offering a discount (72%) than one with a personalised subject line (62%).”

Salespeople can easily adapt to this growing expectation for personalised communication. Adding your client’s name to the subject line or attaching a clients logotype and company name to the body of an email can both be simple ways to keep those personal touches.

Similarly, salespeople should be adding images to email designs as part of their sales communication. 100% of mobile email clients are now displaying images from an email automatically, and 82% of email clients support images and videos in email as part of their responsive design. 

As the subscriber landscape changes, the competitive advantage of brands comes in getting email right. It’s not easy, you have to run tests, see what works and develop a process to capture the attention of prospects.

Alongside this, you are competing with an inbox of other emails demanding action. With all that in mind, how do you ensure you and your stand out?

The way to make email better is by being aware of the changing habits of customers, and the role different technologies are playing in changing how and when people communicate over email.

UpMail is the only sales acceleration tool that helps Hospitality sales teams to target and track prospects quickly and easily with data-driven, on-brand content so that they can communicate better and convert faster.

Used by over 500 Hotels across Europe, among them brands like Mercure, Hilton DoubleTree and Jurys Inn, UpMail empowers salespeople to tell a more compelling story, with more impactful content, from prospecting to proposals to client nurturing.

Contact one of our dedicated team members to find out how UpMail can help you and your team.

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