To have any chance of working every email needs to be correctly addressed to the person responsible for making decisions on who to hire and every email needs to be followed up by an actual phone call and possible traditional mail.
I think that the rule is that you need to have made contact at least five times before there is any hope of turning anything into a sale.
I would not have considered sending out 1000 emails as to follow up all of those is going to take a pretty long time and you only have a short while (a couple of days tops) before the email is forgotten... Assuming that it ever made it past the spam filter.
Note that some servers will mark email campaigns as spam attacks an effectively close down all emails from someone through that server.
Happens all of the time with Virgin.net where IP addresses are blacklisted on bulk but that's the nice thing about dynamic IP addresses. Switch your server off and on again and you get get a new IP address.
All in all your wide net is probably your worst enemy and you need rather to be looking at small batcvhes of 40-50 and set up a CRM system to monitor your correspondence with each potential client.
HTH,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I totally agree with Shaun. How did you get this list of addresses, did they opt in at your site, or did you just buy them. If it's the latter you're always going to have less response. Think of the amount of junk mail you get in a day. I know I switch my computer on to loads, from seo companies, web design companies, through to someone who wants to share 4.5 million pounds with me. These are all junk to me because I never asked for them. If you bought your list I imagine people are thinking the same.
Far from building a good reputation you could easily be destroying any you may have. As Shaun says, you can turn this in your favour a bit by following up with a call or letter. This way you stand out from the junk mail crowd a bit.
Seems a first time in site history Bob but I think that You, Kris and myself are all in agreement on this one.
I'm off to a clients now, don't know if you want to expand on my CRM line above as when people run these campaigns they forget about organised follow up and I know that's an area that you are particulary knowledgeable in.
I just tend to record which postcard / email has hit which business at which date, what my follow up was and record any client reaction. Positive or negative. I just use Excel for that but I know that you are a lot more organised in that area.
Talk later,
Shaun.
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Shaun
Responses are not meant as a substitute for professional advice. Answers are intended as outline only the advice of a qualified professional with access to all relevant information should be sought before acting on any response given.
I agree with your all they never work and are a totala waste of valuable time.
I am like Shaun, I follow up if I have time with a phone call, and record it on an excel spreadsheet. To be honest I haven't done any for a while now.
I would never go and buy a data base and just email as like you say if it goes in the spam/junk box, people automatically delete them anyway without even reading whats its about.
Try targeting specific small businesses, might be worth driving round some small industrial estates to see whats about, as its difficult to tell by an advert how big of small they are.
@Shaun - I think the person has an issue with their methodology and there is no point looking at systems until they change their approach.
Although I have not used it, this system looks good http://www.intouchcrm.co.uk/ because it combines CRM and email marketing. It also has SMS and Social so you can track all forms of communication.
As others upthread have said, you have to be very careful with email "marketing" because many will simply treat it as spam. That's especially true if the email is seen by people like me, which could quite easily be the case.
(People like me = IT/programmer/geeky types who have been using teh interwebs since before it gained mass appeal and who have seen the rise of spam from almost nothing to the levels it's now at.)
I have a very simple rule of thumb: You send me email marketing where I haven't specifically opted in to receive it, I refuse to ever do business with you if it can be avoided.
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Vince M Hudd - Soft Rock Software
(I only came here looking for fellow apiarists...)
