Sales Emails: 7 Tips to Get More Replies in 2025

How do you write a sales email that actually gets replies? Most don’t. They get ignored, deleted, or worse—marked as spam. If your emails aren’t getting responses, the problem isn’t your product. It’s how you’re pitching it.

People don’t know you. They don’t trust you. And they have zero reason to stop what they’re doing to read your email. You have seconds to grab attention, build trust, and convince them to respond. That’s why every word matters.

So, how do you make sure your sales email works? Follow these seven steps:

• Understand your audience
• Write a solid subject line
• Stick to one topic
• Tell a story
• Address benefits & pain points
• Use a strong CTA
• Read your email out loud

Sales emails aren’t about luck. They follow a formula. Get these right, and you’ll stop getting ignored. Let’s break down how each step makes your emails impossible to ignore.

Understand Your Audience

Before you can even start writing your cold emails, you have to know who your audience is. Given that 64% of small businesses use email marketing to reach leads online, it’s safe to say business professionals know the importance of good research.

When you know your audience, you can use the correct jargon or industry terms in your copywriting. This proves that you are knowledgeable about a topic, which will add authority. This will help the reader trust you, and want to engage.

If you don’t know your target audience, and you can’t address their wants and needs, should you even be sending that email? People quickly filter out messages that do not pertain to them and their immediate needs, especially in their email inbox.

So how can you draw them in once you have completed your research?

Write a Solid Subject Line

Speaking of filtering out irrelevant information, how many emails go straight to the trash folder before they are even opened? If less than 30% of prospects open your email, you need to revise your subject line. Try using A/B testing to see what works best in your industry.

One way to combat a low open rate is to write a catchy cold email subject line. In essence, subject lines are your one chance to grab a lead’s attention.

That means they should be short, snappy, and intriguing. Furthermore, they should get to the point of why you are contacting them. Anything over that character window tends to lose your audience’s attention, especially if the copy is vague.

Stick to One Topic

Now you can finally get into the body of your email. When copywriting for sales, always try to make the email as digestible as possible. The mistake many entrepreneurs and experienced professionals make is they include too much information. If your email is confusing and spread in different directions, your potential leads won’t bother.

One thing to remember when you’re writing both your subject line and the body of your email is to make sure they align. The reason they clicked on the email in the first place is because of the content in the subject line.

The goal is to build trust with your email audience, and tricking them into clicking on an email that’s irrelevant to the subject line won’t accomplish that.

Tell a Story

Our brains process information smoother through storytelling. It’s how we make sense of the world, and it also influences the decisions we make. Paul J. Zak, the founding director of the Center for Neuroeconomics Studies, wrote in Harvard Business Review:

“When you want to motivate, persuade, or be remembered, start with a story of human struggle and eventual triumph. It will capture people’s hearts – by first attracting their brains.”

Essentially, this is what experts mean when they talk about addressing pain points. What obstacles does your ideal prospect face in their work-life?

Address Pain Points & Benefits

The only reason someone will go out of their way to respond to an email, or purchase a product or service, is that it solves a problem. It might even solve a pain point they didn’t even know they had until you reached out! That is the power of persuasive copywriting for sales.

When you know your audience and their common or unique business problems, address them, and if they respond to you, explain how your product or service has solved those same problems for others.

This is a great opportunity to include a call to action, such as a case study, in your emails to provide proof and evoke an emotional response.

Use a Strong CTA

Use a strong, singular CTA that makes sense for your outreach goals. You don’t want to give people too many decisions because when overwhelmed, they may choose none.

Because CTAs are the best tools for communicating with your users, all reliable UK digital marketing companies use this in a number of ways. They should, however, be used wisely and imaginatively.

You want to avoid asking your prospects to click a link that takes them to a demo video and download a whitepaper, followed by replying to your email to book a meeting. Instead, you can include the created video in the email and your CTA can be a calendar link.

Read Your Sales Email Out Loud

Finally, read your email out loud for typos and general readability. When you read what you wrote out loud, you’ll be able to get a better sense of how your audience will interpret your copy. Leave your computer for an hour, focus on other tasks, and then return to your draft. Read it out loud again.

Does it still hold the same appeal after you cleared your mind and reset your thinking? You might be surprised how many words or sentences you change after doing this exercise.

Do Sales Emails Actually Work? Only If You Do This

Most sales emails fail. Not because your offer is bad, but because you didn’t do the prep work. If you don’t know your audience, nail the subject line, and make every word count, your email is heading straight to the trash.

A perfect sales email means nothing if it's sent to the wrong person. You need to find real prospects who actually care about what you're offering. That’s why research matters—who they are, what they need, and how your email solves a problem they actually have.

Even the best sales email won’t work if it lands in a dead inbox. That’s where email verification comes in. A clean, high-quality prospect list gives you a real shot at engagement.

FAQs: Sales Email