November 10, 2020
Alrightyyyyyy, for today’s show we’re diving into HOW to hook inquiring clients from the very first email. So if you’re someone who keeps getting ghosted or feels like you’re never booking clients or clients are never emailing you back after you respond to their inquiry…. Then do not go anywhere this episode is for YOU, my friend. We’re gonna dive into the nitty-gritty of exactly WHAT you should be including in your first initial email to a client and HOW to go about doing it. This episode is MEATY and GOOD so let’s get to it!
This is a topic that a lot of people struggle with especially in the service industry. What to include in your email to an inquiry client. A lot of people deal with ghosting. You respond to an inquiry and then you hear crickets. We will break down and analyze what exactly you are including or not including in your first email to an inquiry.
This is for all emails but especially in the first email to a client, write how you actually speak in real life. We cannot reiterate that enough. Genuinely sit down and speak it out loud, and if it does not sound like you talking to your best friend, scrap it and try again. This is something that can instantly create a connection or not. It can make you sound like a trusted best friend or make you sound like a stuffy business person.
Basically in that first email, we say screw professionalism. When we say screw professionalism that doesn’t mean screw excellence. You can still respond with excellence and a timely fashion, but we want that to permit you to not write like a corporate robot. You don’t have to respond to every inquiry like (*robot voice) “Thank you so much for the inquiry. I am very honored you are considering me for this service”.
Talk like a human being.
If your personality is not bombastic like ours, that is fine you don’t have to respond in that way if that is not authentic to you. Respond as you. Authentically as you talk, as you say words, the verbiage that you normally use, the slang you use. Ensure that is present in your email. We can’t tell you the number of times that we get responses back from clients from our first email that say, “I love you so much, I feel like I’m already your best friend”. For us, and our businesses, that is our goal.
Writing how you speak in real life helps you connect as a friend and a human being. We try to create that email how we would texting a BFF because we genuinely want to be friends with our clients.
Professionalism is different from excellence. Excellence can still be achieved while still screwing a professional voice that we put in a box in our minds.
You want this to be as luxurious, informational, and professional as possible. This is one area where you can harness professionalism while still keeping that personalized BFF voice or connection-oriented voice. This is a great way for you to serve your clients from the minute they get that first email back from you.
A lot of people in the service industry are moving away from giving the pricing in that first email, but we are very strong believers to give the pricing directly upfront. People get so frustrated with the games a lot of people play.
Think personally, when you reach out to someone about their service and they won’t even tell you a general idea of pricing or what the pricing might be. They say instead, “Well tell me more about your project or let’s hop on a call”. You don’t have time for that! You want to know if they are within your budget and if their services are even with what you are looking for before you waste any more of your time.
It feels disingenuous, it feels like you are being strung along. It’s annoying. It makes people feel frustrated that their time isn’t being valued. Especially in the event space where a lot is going on in your client’s mind for planning. They don’t want to sit there and spend an hour or more total going back and forth and then jumping on a consultation. They want to know if there is even a possibility to work with you, feel it out, and see if it’s the right fit.
A great way to do that is to put it into a high-quality pricing guide. In that pricing guide, you can welcome them to the experience, what it looks like to work with you, you should have that written out in the email as well, but put more information about that into the pricing guide. Include what you do for your clients and how you are different from your competition.
You can attract and repel your ideal clients.
Other things you can include in your pricing guide are :
Stop hiding behind your work.
Use a high-quality, close-up photo of you smiling- at the camera, face to lens is in there with a good bio (can be the same one on your website). It elevates and personalizes yourself along with your slang that we talked about in the first point.
It also makes your job easier as a business owner, with stinky situations down the line because you were upfront with saying those things from the start. A good example is in the photography industry clients not valuing the fact that you also edit the photos. When you deliver a gallery they might ask for raw images (unedited not JPEG images). If you don’t say that upfront in your contract or FAQs you can’t assume people, not in the industry would know that. It’s not their fault if they genuinely didn’t know and you didn’t forth write in saying so. Make sure one of your FAQs, if you are a photographer is, “Can I ask for raws?” and you say “No, no you can not!”.
FAQs are a great way to serve your clients and answer any confusions or pain points or uncertainties they may have.
Not only is a high quality branded pricing guide helpful for you as the business owner, but it also gives your brand a higher elevation of quality. And if you are charging good prices it benefits the quality of why you are priced as so. It elevates the entire experience and quality of your branding as a whole, so when they see the prices it makes more sense. If you have the pricing in your email as a text and no pricing guide, it doesn’t seem as luxurious.
How do you create or find such a thing to help create your high quality branded pricing guide?? Well my friend we have officially announced that we will be releasing The Heart University Shop, which is packed full of resources for creative entrepreneurs and entrepreneurs in general. Included in that is going to be a pricing guide template for YOU with all these sections that we have mentioned and more. You open it, customize it to you and your brand, and you can step away with a personalized high-quality pricing guide that will help you hook those inquiries from the first email.
We wanted to make these guides available to everyone even if you don’t have Photoshop experience so we used Canva. We made them in Canva so it would be so easy for you to customize to you and your business! Photoshop can be so complicated (trust us we know from experience) and that is why we wanted to make it in a software that would be accessible to all of you!
We live in a day in age where people do not like to wait. That is why Amazon Prime is now a thing and it keeps pushing the limit. It was two-day shipping but if you live in a big city it can be one-day or even the same day. It proves the point that as human beings we do not like to wait, we like to have things instantaneously. As entrepreneurs, we have to take that human knowledge of how human beings work and apply it to how we run our businesses.
That means if people are reaching out to you for that service, you can’t assume that you’re the only person they are reaching out to. We have to remember that who they will book with is most often the person they connect with the most, fits their budget (if that is a concern), and checks all their boxes. You can check all their boxes but if you respond in 3-4 days someone has probably already beat you to it. They’re not going to wait for you because you are a magical unicorn, the name of the game is whoever connects with them the fastest.
We highly recommend trying to respond on the same day at a max of 48 hours. But within 24 hours is best! It will put you light years ahead and is shocking how many people don’t do that. Not only will it make you professional because you are on top of it, but is also setting up that client communication on the perfect foot right from the beginning. If it takes you five days to respond to them, they will already be annoyed that it took you that long to respond to them. There will already be a sour taste in their mouth. Even if they end up working with you and love you, there will still be a part of them that thinks, “Why did it take them that long?”.
If you are at the capability with a team, and you are out of office, still have the priority of getting back to people within 24 hours and have your assistant/team member respond as them or you(depending on what the email is). If you don’t have a team member something that you can do that is still being honorable to get back to them is have an autoresponder saying you are on vacation for this week and not able to get to your email and will get back to them ASAP. That is something you can do if you want to be off the grid for vacation and fully away from work.
They still might go with someone else that week even if you did send that email, but it is better than not saying anything and getting back to them a week later apologizing. Have that autoresponder on or a team member on it!
Another thing that is a great way to respond to emails within 24 hours is using email templates. This saves you soooo much time and mental energy. Just because you have an email template doesn’t mean you automatically sound like a robot. It means you have simplified your process and are using a template that you would naturally respond to every email with anyways. Use that as your basis then customize/tweak and send off. It can save you twenty to thirty minutes in that first email you are writing.
We just talked about The Heart Shop launching in a couple of weeks, but in addition to PDF guides that will be in our shop is our email template pack for you to purchase. In this, all our emails are laid out such as first initial inquiry, follow-up, email asking for a review, and so many more. These are actually the email templates that we use in our business and we encourage you to customize them and give you sections to do so. It’s genuinely what we use in our photography businesses and how we communicate with our clients and gives you a great foundation with your emails as well.
This one addresses the tone of how you write. Obviously, you should write with your own personal verbiage on how you speak, but specifically, this point is to be confident. Standing tall in your worth is ATTRACTIVE to people. Confidently saying this is who I am, who I serve, and don’t serve. You don’t have to say the word “don’t serve” even in the language of who you serve. The opposite obviously is unspoken but is there.
Don’t be afraid to be confident and bold.
Say these are my prices, this is who I work for, and the experience that I offer, and don’t apologize for that. Don’t be an arrogant jerk by ANY means… but don’t be afraid to show your confidence in yourself!
It is super important to explain who you are priced the way you are without using those exact words. Explaining that you strive to create an experience that is x, y, and z and will show up, and go above and beyond with x, y, and z. By saying that will automatically explain your prices without actually explaining them and actually SHOWS the experience.
That information typically goes into your pricing guide but also put that into your first email. Have information on what it is like to work with you and how you serve. Explaining how you will make their lives better, solve their problems, eliminate their pain points, and things they are struggling within this season.
How are you going to show up and make their life better?
Be confident in that, stand tall in that! Don’t bulldoze anyone. Don’t be the person coming after that first email saying you are willing to discuss budget, we do not recommend that. Don’t be wishy-washy like a needy boyfriend. There are very few situations we would recommend that. So stand tall in yourself, services, and prices.
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WASSUP FRIENDS. We’re Evie + Lindsey, co-founders of this wild partayyy called The Heart University. Our goal is to empower entrepreneurs to kick freaking BUTT in their businesses, dive down into the heart of their why and how, and serve you with all possible tools you’ll need to up-level your business game and CRUSH those goals of yours.
Whether you’re coming to an in-person workshop, joining our online course, or soaking up all the strategies via this blog or our podcast, we’re STOKED you’re here + can’t wait to see you out there kicking butt.
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