7 rules for writing sales emails

Recently we've received several proposals from a well-known eCommerce provider asking us to switch to them from Plimus (our current online payments processor). Their somewhat insistent email has induced me to write this post - 7 simple rules for writing sales emails, that we follow here at Jitbit:

1. No questions. "Please tell us your sales volume, and we will send you our rates". No way! Send out your rates table in advance. When a recipient reads your email, he is not deciding whether he wants your services or not. He decides whether he deletes your email right now, or after a while. So no questions.
   
   
2. Create a USP (a unique selling proposition) and place it at the top of your email. Give your recipient one good reason why he should spend another second reading your email. Give him, what Bob Walsh calls "the Hook" - your initial statement which differs you from all the other junk.
   
   
3. Know your competitor. Visit their website, look through their features and prepare a short list of your features that beats them, before offering your services. When you ask someone "please switch to us from XXX", be ready for the appropriate question - "why the heck do you think you suit me better than XXX?".
   
   
4. Make it short. Be succinct and make your email clear.
   
   
5. Read it aloud. This is a great tip from professional editors.
   
   
6. Don't CC multiple recipients. Instead, send multiple personalized emails (for example, by using our MailJet email marketing software).
   
   
7. Don't send it! Save your email as a draft and re-read it in the morning. If you still like it - send it.

Interesting finds for today:
-Gavin Bowman talks about Idiotic Version Numbers
-Don't listen to your users by Jeff Atwood

24 Steps to a Successful Startup

How do you build a successful startup?

Here's how. 24 steps to success.

Uninstalling Firefox

Yesterday I had uninstalled Firefox and spent an hour cleaning the registry from Mozilla entries, cause after removing Firefox and switching to IE7 I got a lot of glitches. I googled a bit for some software cleaner which would remove these entries automatically, but found nothing. So I had to go through all the entries manually.

A rule of thumb when developing an uninstaller is: if your application registers some file associations, adds autostart entries, changes the system settings or anything else, please be so kind to restore everything back in the uninstaller. I was surprised that Mozilla developers are not aware of this rule.

Quote of the day and interesting finds

Awesome quote:

Don’t be stupid. Borrow more. At $20,000 in debt, if your business model doesn’t work, you are in trouble. At $2,000,000 in debt, if your business doesn’t work, the bank is in trouble.

(via foundread)

Interesting finds for today:

• Amazon has announced that it's MP3 download service will be available for non-US customers in 2008. This "iTunes killer" offers DRM-free music (unlike iTunes) from all four major record labels (unlike iTunes).
• Google Docs, which I was so skeptical about, is testing offline access to its services via Google Gear (a browser extension).
• Google is testing new experimental search features like keyword suggestions, different search-results layouts and other. You can become one of the testers.

Unknown Icons

Yesterday my friend's 13 years old daughter asked me a question I couldn't answer. "What is that icon on the 'Save' button?" she asked, "What does it mean?"

It took me a couple of moments to figure out what she's talking about. Then it took me several minutes to explain.

"Why would anyone use a 1.5 Mb ugly box, when you can save 4Gb on a tiny flash drive?"

Well, here it is. A whole new generation of users who never saw a 3½-inch diskette.

What should I draw on a save button, so "MySpace-generation" would understand? Is it time to rethink our usability standards? Or should we stick to the classics?