I agree with Stuart - avoid it. DON'T do it. It's annoying. I get 50-60 email a day. I don't want more, I want less. Opening email priorities go to Clients, Family, close friends - not always in that order... people I don't don't know who are trying to sell me something... they get deleted. Too much competition to get (and keep) my attention.
Start with YOU. Read ANYTHING by Jeffrey Gitomer on Sales. www.gitomer.com
Find a way to get introduced. Know something about THEM before speaking to them. Be interestED, vs interestING.
Vince
Ideally find someone who can introduce you. Cold emails are very hard to pull off, yet a warm introduction always gets a response.
If you have to send a cold email, KEEP IT SHORT, make sure you are clear on what you can do for the person reading the email, and what it is you are asking for.
Get them asking relevant questions, and you are now in a conversation.
Yet another cold email ignored?
Before of writing your next one, don’t forget about these 9 points:
1. Make it about them, not about you
2. Generally speaking, the longer the email is, the lower the response rate will be
3. Write it like your writing to a friend, or at least, using a conversational style. Marketers who do cold email never use stuff like “Hope this finds you well.”
4. The smaller the ask, the more natural to answer. Qualify your leads merely asking: Would it be interesting for you? Or something similar. Don’t ask immediately for the call, or even worse, for sale.
Also, the CTA should be clear. Are you contacting a new potential mentor? Write “Would you mind meeting up for 10-minutes? I’m free on Friday at X and on Thursday at every time.”
5. Make use of an outbound email automation tool to optimize your process. From my experience, the best are Quickmail and Mailshake. If you care about your time, don’t spend days on trials as I did, just use one of these two
7. The more personalized, the better. Did you attend the same University? Is it raining in the city of your prospect? Tell them to grab their umbrella this morning.
8. Always follow-up. Don’t be shy. Your prospects could have been busy when you sent your initial email. Don’t be ruthless, even forwarding the 1st email and add “In case you missed my email last week” it’s enough. But a general rule is, if they ignored your first 3 emails, they would ignore your first 5. So send 7 :-D
9. Add humor if you can. Check Jon Buchan’s work for more!
