Sales Intelligence & Automation Blog

Calling Prospects After Opened Email | Cirrus Insight

Written by Erika Desmond | Aug 10, 2015 4:00:00 AM

If you’re already using Cirrus Insight, then you’ve been enjoying the benefits of email and link tracking. You send an email, you’ll know when someone opens it, and when they click on any links you placed in the message. ( Here’s how it works in detail) Great too for sales, right? Now, you know people that more likely to be interested in your product and which ones aren’t responding at all. You can adjust your strategy accordingly. A common tactic is to send out your emails and then call the prospects that open them. They should be the people who are most interested, right? Well, that’s not guaranteed. Calling someone after they’ve opened your email, either right away or later, doesn’t always lead to a positive conversation if you’re not careful. Let’s go over how to effectively call someone after they’ve opened your email. 

Scenarios for Your Email Being Opened

The ideal scenario is someone opens your email, likes what they see, and then they’re magically receiving a call from you. But an email open doesn’t mean they’re interested. Only means they've opened the email. If it’s their first time opening the email, there’s a chance they’re just glancing at it before deleting or archiving it. A good trick to sort out the truly interested is to see who opens your email multiple times over a period of time, or who clicks a link you’ve included. If they’ve clicked through, or keep coming back to the email, then you know there’s engagement. But otherwise, if it’s only been opened once, they could have immediately deleted it, quickly glanced at it then forgot about it, or actually read it. When you call you can’t assume anyone of those particular scenarios.

Call Immediately Strategy

If you want increase your chances of a prospect having your email on their mind, call briefly after they’ve opened your email. You don’t want to call before they’ve had a chance to look over the email. If you’re too quick you can seem a little a scary (people don’t like to feel like they’re under surveillance). Most likely negative response you’ll get from people when you call right away is people saying they’re not interested. A tactic for dealing with this is agreeing that the prospect shouldn’t be interested based on that email, and then switch to telling exactly how you can help their specific company, based on asking a couple questions.

Call Later Strategy

Maybe you’ve been giving the prospect space to see if they engage, or maybe you’ve simply been busy, but either way you’ve ended up waiting a little while before calling. We’re talking a couple days. The first thing you’ll want to do is see if you can jog their memory, but not press too hard. If the person doesn’t remember, or doesn’t think they got an email from you, don’t worry about it. Agree that it’s possible they didn’t and that’s why you wanted a chance to talk, instead of flooding their inbox. Embrace whatever the prospect’s response is and roll with it.