CIENCE has dedicated numerous articles to the cold email outreach channel: We’ve talked about the email personalization hacks, follow-up strategies, and best email subject lines. We have paid close attention to the question of how to structure an email, when to send it, what to say in the body of the email, and how to grab the prospect’s attention with the opening line. However, there is still not much said about how to end an email professionally and what counts as a strong closing sentence.
The thing is, our memory works in a very special way, making us remember more recent information better than anything said and noticed before. For example, during your school years when you were preparing for a test, the topics you covered right before the exam were probably easier for you to remember than the ones you had to revisit. In cognitive psychology, this tendency of the human brain is called the recency effect.
Because of it, when reading an email, the prospect’s last impression of your message is the key factor that defines whether or not they react to it. This doesn’t mean that creating a strong opening line, or subject line is less important than the last sentence of an email; they are just serving different purposes. The first ones are about catching the prospect’s eye and keeping them reading the email, while the latter one is about making them want to engage in a conversation. To help you with your email lines, we’ve gathered a few essential tips every salesperson needs to know about good closing statements for cold emails.
Here are some strategies you should keep in mind when writing email ending lines. Feel free to adjust them to your business’ tone of voice and style of communication.
The rule of thumb is that you can and should include CTAs in a sales email. Whenever you add it as an opening line or right in the middle of your argument, CTAs prove to be most efficient when used in the last sentence of an email. If you don’t know how to construct a strong CTA, use this formula:
A simple example of a good CTA could be:
Should we set up a 15-minute talk to discuss effective go-to-market strategies sometime next week?
When building dialogue in real life with someone you barely know, you wouldn’t just pitch yourself and your achievements to your prospect instead, you’d rather demonstrate an interest in keeping this conversation going by asking questions and showing empathy.
When writing a cold email, the rules of the game remain the same. Questions work best as email-ending lines because they provoke your prospect to answer, especially when you’re talking about something they might be truly interested in. Here is an example of how to use the benefits of your services in a question:
Would you be interested in checking out a short presentation on new ways to nurture leads within your target audience?
No doubt, you’ve done your best to write a perfectly strong email: You’ve personalized it, you’ve made sure to make your offer sound as appealing as possible, and you’ve included a strong CTA—yet it still feels like it is not enough.
In this case, to polish your pitch, you can use your company’s previous experience with some other clients or some recent company’s achievements to prove your credibility. The last sentence of an email is the best space to be creative and insert some interesting facts that distinguish you from your competitors. Here is how we do it at CIENCE:
The last few years have been an interesting time, to say the least. But that isn’t holding up investment rounds, and with the right growth strategies, companies rise out of the ashes of crises and turn into the next powerhouses, like Uber, Okta, or Square—all CIENCE clients, by the way.
Even when you think your perfectly scripted email leaves no space for fun and personalization, the P.S. section is what is going to make the best email closing line for you. Writing something cheerful and empathetic is what differentiates your email from a cold template. Here is how we incorporated the P.S. section for our email campaigns:
What are your thoughts on meeting up on March 10th since we are both going to attend the same event?
P.S. I hear it will be a warm, sunny day in San Francisco. No need for a jacket! :)
To distinguish yourself from all other emails your prospect gets daily, you need not only to personalize the email but also personify yourself too. A formal email ending has to include a corporate signature, with your real photo, name, job title, and email on it. This way, you’ll stop being just another anonymous Internet user but associated with a profile, which your prospect can trust more. Here is how it typically looks:
According to a study conducted by Boomerang, emails that end up with gratitude, get more replies. According to their statistics, different variations of the “thank you” phrase get 1.3 times more answers than the simple “Best, [Name]” signature. Even more, the strongest one is “Thank you in advance,” which only proves that people like being appreciated, even when it comes to a simple email. Therefore, don’t forget to include thoughtful signing-off phrases for closing an email to elicit better results.
Now that we’ve established the main strategies to keep in mind when writing email ending lines, here are a few closing sales email samples that you can start using right away:
The last few words you put in your email define how the prospect is going to remember you. If you want them to come back to you and set up a call, include a strong CTA; if you want to first talk with them and figure out their business needs, qualify them with a question; and if your goal is to make them want to become one of your clients, share some cases you’ve recently accomplished and that you are proud of.
After all, the best email closing line is the one that helps you achieve your business goals, regardless of what it is: more converted clients, more appointments, or more readers of your blog. If you’re still struggling with email outreach, leave it to us and just enjoy the results of our work.