Startup Moon: Let’s start with the results – Takipi went into public beta about 5 months ago. Although most of our users reached Takipi through different publications and our blog it was also very important for us to get to some large companies and brands. As Takipi requires installation on production servers, you can imagine it’s not an easy sell.
To get there, I used both cold emails and intros. The results – cold emails produced 7 meetings at Twitter, Klout, LinkedIn and more – 5 installations. Intros – 9 meetings which led to 2 installations. I’ve been using mostly cold emails ever since and I’ve learned that with prospects, bloggers and advisors I get much better results.
2 comments:
There are a lot of great tips in here that could apply to sending emails (cold or not) during a job search. The tip about cutting out lengthy introductions is really great. If I were emailing someone about a job, my hope would be for them to take a look at my resume and then ask me for an interview. My resume would give them my story; it would serve as my lengthy introduction. Therefore, the introduction in my email would need to be exciting enough to catch the potential employer's interest, but short enough that it won't feel like it's taking up too much of their time. I also appreciate the point about having specific subject lines. I always spend a lot of time contemplating what I write in an email, and then what to put in the subject line to sum it all up. Sometimes I'm worried that being to vague will upset people, but other times I worry that being too specific can come off as too up-front or startling (because the recipient may not yet understand why YOU are emailing them such a thing). It's nice to know that Iris' experience shows that being specific proves to be better at grabbing the recipients' attention. The idea of putting as many links/resources as possible in the email is new to me, but it makes total sense. Why not give the person an easy way to learn more about it? All you are doing is making it more convenient for them to get to know you if your email has done its job and sparked their interest. These are great tips that I will certainly keep in mind when sending business-related emails in the future.
I think something we should learn more about is how to write emails. There are so many different ways of addressing people based on their position relative to you, what the situation is, what you want, what they want, etc. We learn the proper ways of talking to people in real life based on experience- from watching people interact with each other and seeing how people react to them. With emails it's different- we aren't usually exposed to all the different ways of writing emails; we're just expected to be able to figure it out ourselves. For example, I've never really read an email where someone that I had authority over was speaking to me, since I'm not in authority over anyone, but I am expected to know the best techniques and the proper etiquette regarding how to phrase my emails to authorities. Most of us learned how to write proper emails by making it up as we go along, and it might not have worked out well for some of us. Even more importantly, you can't see how a person reacts to your email. All you get is their response (or lack of response), and from that you get very little feedback about how you could improve on your writing style. This article was very helpful on how to write a "cold email" to someone without the help of an introduction, and why this can be even more useful than an introduction. Some of the most helpful tips that I will try to remember are to keep the email short and the subject line specific, as well as to restrain yourself from writing long introductions that the recipient really does not care about.
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