How to Write a Business Proposal Email (With Example)

An email that is used to persuade clients to do business with you is called a business proposal. Writing a solid business proposal is a skill that will help your company succeed. To help with revenue growth, business proposal emails can be sent in a variety of formats to both new and current clients. We go over how to write a strong business proposal email in this article.

Main conclusions:

• Provide the buyer persona, needs analysis, goals, schedule, scope, and expenses of your proposal.

• Make sure your email is legible, professional, and contains all the information the recipient has asked for.

• Add any necessary follow-up actions or a call to action asking readers to take a particular action.

What is a business proposal email?

A letter sent in the early to mid stages of a sales pipeline is known as a business proposal email. The majority of these proposals are made in business-to-business exchanges.

After a prospective customer has consented to examine the conditions of a sales transaction, a business proposal may be sent. We refer to this as a requested business proposal. Emails solicited for business proposals can be used as stand-alone sales documents or to respond to grant, research, or bid requests.

Another option is to send the buyer a business proposal email as your initial point of contact. It's an unsolicited business proposal in these circumstances.

In either case, if you want your business to expand, a business proposal email needs to be successful. A well-crafted proposal begins with a clear objective statement, explains the idea in brief, adheres to the proposal email format, and demands acknowledgement from both parties.

How to draft an email business proposal

Think of your email proposal as a sales pitch for your business. What should this draft contain in order to close the deal? It must be convincing first. Second, a business proposal email ought to accurately represent the services or products being provided.

Take the following actions to draft your email business proposal:

1. Complete a buyer's persona

A buyer's persona is a document that contains the buyer's values, motivations, and demographic data. Think carefully about the target audience for your business proposal. You can make essential decisions about tone, expected formality, and sales content by determining the buyer's persona.

Interviewing current customers is one technique to develop a buyer's persona. You could, for instance, send your clients an email survey. By using the study, you can gather personal demographic data that will help you better understand the age, gender, and occupation of the buyers within your clientele.

You might discover that, despite your targeting of marketing directors, chief executives are the ones making the buying decisions.

Popular social media platforms are a source of targeted user information for many resources nowadays. Regardless of the approach you take for your client research, utilize the data you gather to create a generic buyer profile. That is the persona of your buyer.

All of your sales communications with this audience and other similar audiences—also referred to as look-alike audiences—should take this description into account.

2. Perform an analysis of needs

Look up any information that might be pertinent to the particular client your proposal is aimed at. We call this a requirements analysis. Ideally, you get to sit down with the prospective client and ask them questions during a needs analysis.

"If you could wave a magic wand and solve one problem in your business, what would it be?" is an example of a needs analysis question. Consider asking, "Imagine we solved the problem you mentioned earlier." as another example of a question. How much would that save your company in terms of time, money, and other resources? Getting information that can be used to create a proposal is the aim of these questions. You might only have limited information available to you if you are responding to a request for proposals or sending an unsolicited proposal.

If appropriate, you should also speak with other members of your network who can provide you with information about the needs of your potential client as part of your needs analysis research. To foresee their issues and offer a solution, you could also invest some time in researching the business online.

3. Pay attention to your goals and schedule.

You should begin your email business proposal with an objective statement. This is what an executive summary would be called in a formal setting. A proposal email differs from other emails in that it does not need an executive summary; however, you still need to state your goal clearly at the beginning of the email.

Think about the following inquiries to determine the purpose of your proposal:

• What is required by the client?

• Which client problem is this proposal meant to solve?

• In what way does your solution address the client's problem appropriately?

• For instance, "Bizzy Commercial Floor Care's goal in submitting this proposal is to use only direct-hire labor to reduce the cost of Family Grocer Company's nightly cleaning service by 15%."

• For Family Grocer Company, this objective statement provides solutions to two issues. Keeping cleaning in-house lowers the client's floor care costs while also guaranteeing that quality standards are upheld.

• Having a solid objective statement at the top of your email will generate curiosity, which is crucial, particularly for unsolicited proposals where you don't know the recipient well.

The project timeline is something else you should consider. When Bizzy Commercial Floor Care takes on Family Grocer Company's business, they might need to hire labour for 30 days, and the contract's duration could be six months, a year, or month-to-month. All of these things need to be taken into account and included as early as possible in the email process for a business proposal.

4. Describe the proposal's scope.

Once a general timeline and goal have been established, the scope lets you get specific about how the project will be carried out.

• The who, what, where, when, how, and why of the proposal are often referred to as its "scope":

• Who will be involved in the project? This encompasses the workforce, account managers, and stakeholders. Who will be the client's primary point of contact? Who is going to provide the good or service?

• What: What is scheduled for delivery? What's the project going to cost? What terms apply to payments? What obligations does the client have? What responsibilities will you be taking on?

• Where: What location will the project be held?

• When can I expect to receive the goods or services? Does it get delivered once or on a regular basis? When can a customer contact customer service with a problem?

• How: How are matters conveyed? How is the project going to be carried out? If it is recurring, how frequently? How are you going to make sure you are fulfilling the client's expectations?

• Why should the client cooperate with you? Why did you decide to use this particular good or service to address the client's issues?

5. Provide cost estimates

The client must be able to recognize the cost and accept it for the proposal to be successful.

Put a price in your proposal based on the data you've already collected. The client's preferred cost may already be known to you if you had the opportunity to conduct a needs analysis during which you conversed with the client. However, you can still come up with a price that works for both you and the client by projecting labour costs and other business expenses.

An example email proposal for a business

Create your own by utilizing this sample email for a business proposal: