11 Sales Email Templates for Better Outreach: Subject Lines, Calls to Action & Follow-up Advice for Sales Teams

Sales is many things. Hard. Obnoxious. Satisfying. Joyful. It depends on the day, right? You may not know that sales email templates can be all of these things, too.

Sending your best sales pitch out into the ether and receiving nothing back is hard and obnoxious. On the other hand, nothing compares with using a great sales email template and booking ten appointments in one afternoon. That’s a definite check in the satisfying and joyful columns.

Sound a little overly optimistic? It’s not. Research shows email is still one of the most robust marketing methods.

For instance, “Email is almost 40 times better at acquiring new customers than Facebook and Twitter.”

Moreover, email is useful throughout the life of the customer and beyond. According to recent sales statistics, “64 percent of sales professionals who cross-sell say email follow-up is the most effective cross-selling strategy,” and “43 percent of sales professionals say email is the most effective channel for selling.”

You need email, plain and simple. Sadly, sales reps don't see much success with sales emails. That's often due to:

• Poorly written or optimized subject lines
• Missing preview text
• Body copy that misses the mark
• A lack of testing for all of the above

The good news is that’s where sales email templates come in. An effective sales email template can get you where you need to go, all from the comfort of your office chair.

Even better news: We’re gonna give them to you!

Sales Email Best Practices

Before getting into the templates, let’s discuss best practices and essential starting points for sales emails. Many important factors govern how well your email performs, such as the subject and opening lines, as well as general readability and engagement.

There’s also the fact that your sales email template needs to correlate with the purpose of your letter. If there’s a mismatch, you’re less likely to reach your audience effectively.

The result? Fewer prospects. Fewer meetings. Fewer sales.

More tears. That’s best avoided, right? Right.

Struggling with email deliverability challenges in your sales efforts? Discover the power of a well-executed technical email setup to overcome these hurdles.

Use Effective Calls to Action (CTAs)

Even though this part comes at the end of the email, we will discuss it first. The call to action (CTA) is easily the most crucial aspect of your email. Even if all the rest is optimized, it won’t matter if customers don’t know what to do with themselves at the end of your email.

The call to action should be clear, specific, and immediately actionable, and it needs to include all the tools for them to take that action. You might ask them to:

• Call you back + offer a phone number
• Respond to your email + tell them to click reply so they know it’s not a do-not-reply address
• Check out a link + offer that link in the underlined text of a different color
• Take advantage of a free download + direct them to it with a clear link or a clickable image

Address this first, then move on to the rest of your optimization goals.

Use A/B Subject Line Testing To Improve Open Rates

Okay, you have a decent CTA. Now it’s time to make sure they actually open the email, and that comes down to the subject line. This is where you tell them what the email is about without being too “salesy" about it.

Your subject line can take many approaches. For instance, it can:

• Include a benefit or offer (this is what they’ll get from reading)
• Make a joke (something timely or goofy, like a “why did the chicken cross the road” variation)
• Directly call them out for not taking action (like not responding to your last email)
• Use statistical numbers to promise what they can accomplish (such as how the use of a product increases their sales)
• Offer a discount (like a sales or referral code)
• Address specific pain points, such as "Are you struggling to..."

Consider using the prospect’s name in your cold email subject line. This is a good way to personalize it and make them feel as though you know each other.

One warning, though. Be wary of including your company name in the subject line. Your goal is to make it about them so that they’ll click on it, and your company’s name could make them feel like it’s about you and what you want. You can mention it in the body of the email instead, either in the intro to let them know who you are or at the bottom when you sign off.

However, if you have good brand awareness and your prospects are pretty warm, go ahead and add your name! In this case, your name might get them to open the email. This is a matter of trial and error, as well as gut instinct.

If you're struggling with email subject line variations, try our free tool. Tell it what type of email you're writing, and our ChatGPT-powered email subject line tool will generate ten subject lines you can test.

Once you’ve got some subject line ideas, test them against one another. Send out batches of emails and see which subject line message gets you better results and conversions. Then tweak that one more and test it against the previous round’s winner. Test, optimize, repeat.

Use Preview Text to Attract Clicks

Make sure to use your preview text as well. This is the text that follows the subject line in the inbox snippet. If you don’t specifically fill it out, it will just pull from your email body copy, but that’s unlikely to be as effective as a 140-character sentence that you craft yourself. Every word counts!

Track Open Rate Analytics Over Time

Now that you’ve optimized, it’s time to put metrics to work for you—track figures like subscribers, open rates, and clicks. When you do get responses and make the call, track those figures, too.

If the above info made you feel it’s entirely, utterly impossible to keep it simple … well, you’re not alone. And it’s true that it might take some time to integrate all of the above steps, but that’s okay. Time is something you have, and as long as you’re moving forward, your efforts will likely pay for themselves.

Now that we know more about how to write better emails let’s jump into the sales email examples.

Effective Sales Email Templates that Convert

Sales professionals need a range of different email templates to reach the variety of potential customers they’re pursuing. Each of these has different structures, from the introduction email to the last Hail Mary missive. However, they all aim toward the same goal: getting a response.

Whether you want your recipients to email back for pricing, to learn more about your small business product suite, or to say “hey” (a more important step than you might think), it’s all about that response.

We’ll help you take your best shot at getting one with each of these templates. Dig in.

1. Cold Email Outreach Sales Emails

This is the most common type of sales email. When most people think of sales emails, they more often than not conjure up images of cold email campaigns queuing up en masse to unsuspecting recipients that (may or may not) need their product.

Contrary to popular belief, cold sales emails can be refreshingly human—and effective at opening up a line of communication. Here are two of our favorite simple cold email templates:

Additional example:

The structure of this first email type is simple because you want only one thing to happen. That one thing is a quick call ASAP. Don't use the email to explain everything you do. Avoid referencing specifics. All of that information should be on your website, which they almost always check out before deciding to reply (or not).

Because getting your response rate up is the only goal of this email, your only job is to pique their interest. Then, offer a phone number and watch what happens.

If you need more cold email templates like the ones above, and they are specific to B2B, check out our article on 12 B2B Cold Email Templates.

2. Prospecting Sales Emails

One of our most effective cold sales emails relies on one significant assumption: It assumes that you know your recipient is already a qualified prospect.

Let's start by defining what exactly a sales prospect is. The difference between a lead and a sales prospect is that a "lead" comes first—and once a member of your sales team qualifies that cold lead, they become a (warmer) verified sales prospect within your overall sales process.

So, with that context in mind, a prospecting sales email is being delivered to a warm lead once we have a reasonable degree of certainty they'd be a good fit to become a customer of our product.

Here's our most effective prospecting sales email template:

The main difference with this prospecting sales email, as opposed to the more generic cold email above, is that this approach has a more personalized, direct approach designed to make a very confident first impression on your prospect.

3. Pitch Emails

Similar to our previous email that starts the conversation confidently, delivering a pitch email means you’ll be coming on very directly. You strongly believe that your product or service can help this prospect (and they'll get a massive return on their investment), so it's your job to get them on board. Pitch them.

Here's our most effective pitching-focused sales email template:

4. Introduction (Referral) Sales Emails

When you're not sure who the right decision maker is at your target organization, it often pays off to skip additional layers of research and jump straight to sending a sales email to the closest fit person you can quickly track down.

That's where the introduction referral approach comes into play—because you'll be asking for an internal referral to the most well-suited person to field your incoming request.

Here's our most effective referral sales email template:

That's it—short and sweet!

5. Appointment Request Sales Emails

This one is relatively straightforward. You've got a qualified prospect, now it's time to reach out and schedule an appointment so you can further qualify them for your product.

Here's our most effective appointment request sales email template:

With this approach, you have one very specific goal—to get your prospect on the phone at a specific date and time. When you make your call-to-action very clear and direct, you stand a much higher chance of getting an equally clear response, whether that's a yes or a no.

If that answer is a no, you can either attempt to schedule a better time to connect, or you can probe for other reasons your prospect is objecting to the call.

6. Follow-up Sales Emails

Here's one of our favorite follow-up email templates for once you've already made your first outreach attempt—whether a previous email, phone call, or what-have-you—and you haven't heard back yet:

Make it as simple as possible for the prospect to respond with what you want. This email clearly states that you want them to respond with a day and time for a call. Adding three explicit times for a call implies that you wrote this email for them specifically. It implies you looked at your calendar and sought out three openings for yourself.

Another helpful tip is to show the times in their time zone. Make it easy for them; don’t make them figure it out. That’s your job, and a good customer relationship management system (CRM) will make it much easier for you to offer this.

If they reply with a time and it’s already taken, tell them and suggest other times, or have a colleague take the call.

7. Reminder Sales Emails

Here's our most effective reminder sales email template. It’s geared toward getting your prospect to take that final action on the last outstanding task after they're already interested in buying:

You can also create reminder sales emails for your eCommerce store when customers leave the cart without finishing the transaction. Here are some free abandoned cart email templates you can follow.

8. Thank You Sales Email Examples

All right, so you've delivered your pitch, and it went well. It's time to close the sale and officially get this customer on board.

Here's our most effective thank you-driven sales email template to send after you've had a solid meeting or delivered a demo:

9. Post-Transaction Sales Emails

Here's our most effective hand-off sales email template to help ease the transition to a success or support team member who'll be handling your (new) customer from here on out:

10. Check-in and Follow-Up Sales Emails

Got some mildly-warm prospects that asked to be kept in loose touch with you for future opportunities to work together? Here’s our most effective long-term follow-up sales email template for that:

Send variations of this simple follow-up email at reasonable intervals, based on either when your prospect requested to receive the follow-up—or at a frequency that doesn't burn them out.

11. Getting a Response

This email directly reacts to when a prospect takes an action but does not respond to you. It should be a high-quality missive from sales reps to their prospects, directly addressing the fact that they have not responded. While this might feel aggressive, it’s an excellent way to prompt action from genuinely interested people. Therefore, it’s an important strategy, mainly if you’re contacting them for the last time.

For instance, if a prospect has opened an email but not replied, or if they’ve viewed a landing page that was part of your email campaign but not taken action, this is an appropriate step. If you want, you can customize the email with information you gathered via a form, their LinkedIn profile, or somewhere else (just don’t be creepy about it, obviously).

Here’s an example of how a SaaS company might do it:

Crafting a compelling sales email can sometimes feel like an art form, one that requires a fine balance of creativity and strategy. For those who find this process daunting or simply wish to enhance their existing approach, resources like Close's AI Email Writer offer invaluable assistance.

By leveraging such tools, sales professionals can efficiently produce personalized and optimized emails that resonate with their audience, ensuring no opportunity is missed.

Common Sales Email Template Mistakes

Okay, so you’re ready to turn all those leads into sweet, sweet cash money.

There’s one problem, though. Your email templates aren’t converting, no matter how hard you try. This could be for several reasons, including:

• Your copy is off and isn’t connecting with prospects
• Your subject lines aren’t great
• Your preview text is off, or you aren’t customizing it at all
• You haven’t aligned your email template with your goals
• You aren’t using email templates at all
• You have weak or nonexistent calls to action
• You’re slinging content without testing it

While none of these might seem insurmountable, none of them are. Let’s take a look.

Ready to Super-Charge Your Sales Emails?

Revenue from email marketing is only growing and is predicted to grow even more in the years to come. If you’re looking to jump on the Email Template Train to a Successful Sales Station, these templates are the best way to get there.

It’s not enough to just send out those first cold emails or referrals that rely on a mutual connection. While those are great ways to get started, you must also create excellent follow-up and stalled customer sequences.

That’s where a great automation tool such as Close comes in. Close can help you track leads and prospects, contact them regularly without breaking a sweat, and close more deals. (Seriously, it’s right there in the name.)

If you want to learn more, we invite you to watch this 10-minute software demo or browse our free resources today. If you’re ready to dive in, you’re welcome to try our product for 14 days—with absolutely no commitment.

Get ready to see greater success in your outreach, from social to email to calls and more. Give Close a try today!

(And yes … we’re working on those revenge email templates. Promise.)