Hey folks! Armand from 30 Minutes to President's Club here, breaking down how to write super skimmable sales emails. 

Most sales emails are way too long, cluttered, and confusing. They make a prospect work hard to pick up the key information. This is a terrible practice. 

If a prospect needs to read and reread the email just to make sense of your message, you can't blame them if they don't bother to respond at all. 

That's why the best sales reps have honed their craft in writing super skimmable emails. These emails offer:

• Clarity — some quick formatting touches make the message easier to understand
• Structure — differentiation between outstanding questions, CTAs, and other important sections
• Brevity — the message is direct, without fluff or preambles

Let's be honest: no one wants to read blocks of text from their phone. So why not send something shorter and easier to digest?

Here are three ways to transform clunky messages into super skimmable sales emails.

#1: Layer your big emails with colors, bullets, and bolds

I mentioned this in an earlier post about sales recap emails, but here are my golden rules for stupidly short, easy-to-read emails:

• Use bold underline for sections
• Use bold for headers
• Use red for action items
• No more than 4 bullets, 2 lines each

Now, let's use them and transform a clunky sales email into a short, skimmable message.

Imagine that you're getting to the finish line and approaching vendor review in a sales cycle. It's common at this stage for sellers to write ridiculously long emails with questions, action items, and recaps lumped together. 

It might look like this… 

CLUNKY

Sure, there are a lot of moving parts. Multiple workstreams are going on with multiple action items in each workstream. But if you send your prospect a wall of text like this, you're giving them no clue what to do with it.

Compare that to the example below. Using the golden formatting rules, I prefer to turn this into a mini MAP (mutual action plan) email where we section out each work stream and make it abundantly clear what needs to be done by whom.

SUPER SKIMMABLE

This email is easy to read, clear, and succinct. Just the way sales emails should be. 

• We bolded text and headers to emphasize key points
• We used red text to highlight their action items
• We used sections and bullet points to organize the information

We also got rid of all the fluff so that the action items would pop.

#2: Shorten your prospecting emails (3x3 email)

Our second culprit shows up in prospecting emails. I often receive three-thousand-word Shakespearean sonnet emails that give me massive heartburn before I click unsubscribe.

The 3x3 email framework makes sales emails more concise and direct. Here are our guidelines:

• No chunk of text can be longer than 3 lines
• Each chunk of text = 1 idea
• Eliminate preamble words
• Everything must fit on one phone screen (the no-scroll rule)

Example 3x3 email: 

The first paragraph shares the context and problem. The second paragraph shares the solution. The last block of text ends with a short CTA. It's really that simple — sales emails don't need to be more complicated than this. 

Your emails may break the "no-scroll rule" if you're writing a more thorough email, like a Joint Execution Plan (JEP), explaining technical jargon, or answering a ton of questions from your prospects. 

But for prospecting, recaps, or proposals, you should always have the entire message fit on one screen. 

Lastly, get rid of all the preamble words like "checking in" or "circling back". It's unnecessary. Just say the thing you want to say.

#3: Structure their emails and isolate every question

It's common to get a bunch of questions from your prospects that are all over the place. 

But just because a prospect sends you a long list of unstructured questions doesn't mean you have to give an unstructured answer in return.

The best way to respond to something like this is to structure your reply in blocks, where each answer is below the respective questions. This lets the prospect know that they've been heard and that every point's been answered.

How Superhuman helps to write insanely skimmable sales emails

I'm a firm believer that writing better sales emails will directly increase your sales (what a surprise!). And one of the best tools I've used to write extremely crispy sales emails is Superhuman. 

Easily respond to questions with Quick Quote: 

Superhuman's Quick Quotes are fast and beautifully formatted. When a prospect sends a long list of questions, I can easily go through and select, hit enter, and I've got an organized response to each inquiry. This ensures every question gets answered and nothing slips through the cracks.  

Keep it clear and consistent with Snippets

Templates can encourage good habits. In Superhuman, I create Snippets for everything from prospecting, to recaps, to waking up prospects who might ghost. Snippets support rich formatting, so your golden rules of formatting can be baked in. Plus, if you're working in a team, you can share your winning emails with Team Snippets.

Keep it brief with Superhuman AI

Superhuman AI is like having an editor right in your inbox. Superhuman AI gives you the ability to quickly "shorten" or "simplify" text to remove extraneous words and improve readability and formatting. 

Curious to try it? Get a free month of Superhuman thanks to 30MPC.