In Business, relationships play a vital role as they are the fundamentals and the main driving force that help business firms in fulfilling their target sales. Companies especially Start-Ups funded by Angel investors, and Venture Capital firms are required to build a good rapport with their customers to expand their businesses. And all such relationships don’t happen just like that out of thin air.

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In order to achieve a meaningful relationship that creates a win-win situation, business firms need some good old seasoned professional networking that includes drafting a professional Email.

1. Know your customers/clients

Before going ahead and start drafting an e-mail, one should know their audience. Once you know the type of clients or customers you are addressing it will be a lot easier to draft an appropriate email.

In general, there are usually six types of business firms that end up writing to each other and that needs different writing styles for emails to be effective and capable of sending the right message.

Now, that might seem to be a little overwhelming, but it is necessary for business firms to learn about how to draft an email to put their views.

The six types of buying centers in business firms include –

i) The initiators:  When writing an email to these members, the sender of the email should know that they initiate the request to purchase a product or service.

ii) The Influencers:  These members have the power of influencing the purchase/sale decisions. Usually, they are the key executives on behalf of the firm.

iii) The decision makers: They decide about various product requirements and conveys them to the suppliers to fulfill their orders.

iv) The Users: These are the members, who will be using the products or services sold or served by the seller or the service provider.

v) The Buyers: Buyers are those, who have the formal authority to select who the suppliers should be.

vi) The Gatekeepers:  The gatekeepers have the power and authority to stop sellers from buying a product or using a particular service.

While drafting the email, you need to be aware, whom from the six, your email is aimed at.

2. Familiarizing business with the company’s strong suits

When you are targeting a company that doesn’t hold a monopoly in the market, it is pretty obvious that the concerned company might be having some competitors in the market and as such, you should need to know their strongest suit. As a drafter of email, you need to know what makes that company (email receiver) stand-out among its competitors.

It’s most likely that the concerned company may already have mentioned about it on their website. But don’t expect to find a section called “Strongest suits” or “Outstanding features” in their website, instead, read the “About Us” section.

Then the next step involves going through the company’s mission and vision statement, and as such you will get to know their features for which they stand apart from their competitors.

3. Know about the company’s competitor(s)

In order to make an unbiased decision about the company, you must also know about the company’s real competitors in the market. Business firms should have a good idea about the industry as a whole.

One of the best ways to find out who the real competitors of the company are is to check on social networking sites such as Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and other business forum sites. You should search for the company on the LinkedIn company page and scroll down to the “Other Companies People Viewed” section. In this section, one may find a few competitors. Gather their names and do a little research on them as well.

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As a sender of a business email one should have a basic knowledge as to who are the big players in that particular field or sector and how they are different from each other. You don’t have to dig into every minute detail, just go through the relevant portions of their business. After all, it doesn’t hurt to be well informed.

4. Get to know the company’s financial health

While researching the concerned company or firm it is important to browse through its website, scroll down to the “Investor Relations” tab. Most of the big Multi-national companies out there have their quarterly earnings conference calls and annual reports in their official websites.

Therefore, take some time out to listen to those publicly available quarterly earnings conference calls and go through the company’s annual report.

After going through such research, you as a drafter of the email will be able to sniff the company’s actual financial health, in addition to gaining knowledge about how well the company is performing financially.

Not only will you be able to know about the company’s financial health, but would also get to know about the new products or services that are launched by the company, the risks that the company is facing and also whether the cash inflow is increasing or has the revenue gone stagnant.

5. Know your product/service

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It is important to know in depth about your product/service before you write an email about your offerings. A product or service that you offer are brand ambassadors of your organization and when writing the email – you should have an in-depth analysis of your product or service before explaining it to the client through an email.

Before writing an email, you should know why the company would be interested in buying your product or utilizing your services. What is the USP of your product or service; that you are offering should be considered before writing the email.

Keys to drive the highest gains  through effective email drafting

Here are some of the areas that are recommended to focus on to drive the highest gains through effective email.

Referral -Be aware of the fact that as a company gets hundreds of emails every day. You are not the only person who is cold emailing them, and the chances are that they might discard your email even without reading it properly. So it will be a little easier if you have referrals in the form of employees/customers of that company who may help in referring about your business.

Industry jargon – Business firms are not some ordinary salesperson next door, and therefore you shouldn’t look and behave like one either. As an email drafter writing on behalf of your company; you need to be well versed with the industry jargon before getting ready for holding face to face meetings or else they might dismiss you as another average salesperson.

Conclusion

As a business firm, if you are planning to gather information about a start-up you can check out their profile on CrunchBase. Browse through their official website for their mission and vision and then go through their profile to find legitimate details about their rounds of funding, recent hires, acquisitions and other relevant press releases that would help you in drafting an effective email.