5 Email Marketing Hacks to Triple Your Response Rate

Imagine if you could pick a top executive, investor, customer, or someone you’ve always dreamed of meeting and have a personal conversation with them. In today’s day and age, this is more possible than ever before.

This power is achievable if you know how to write emails that receive opens and responses. In this article, you will learn a few hacks to get high response rates on cold emails.

Before I dive into the tactics, let’s keep a few things in mind. 205 billion emails get sent a day and most of them are automated. It’s important to make any email you send out seem personal and show your target that you are a human – not a cold, lifeless robot. It’s easy to get turned away through email when people don’t view your email as true human interaction.

Without further ado, here are a few creative hacks to really capture the attention of your email recipient:

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Use Multi-Touch Outreach

For important outreach to valued individuals, it pays to reach out on multiple levels.

Not only is the recipient more likely to notice your extra effort, you get a valuable second chance to direct their attention to your message. For example, after sending an important outreach email, go ahead and send a LinkedIn message saying something like, “Hi there, just sent you an email regarding [X]…” This prompts the recipient to at least check out your email.

While you never want to be considered spam, you do need to go the extra mile in a respectful way.

Include Advocates In Group Outreach

It’s widely known that you should send direct one-to-one emails to individuals to make it seem more personalized. However, here is a case where you can use group emails to increase your response rate from a particular individual(s).

Use the power of group psychology to your advantage.

Strategically set up an email thread where you reach out to a few choice people with an offer or ask. Include advocates in that batch. Then, have your advocate(s) in the thread send their positive reaction through a “Reply All” email. Your target is more likely to react positively when they see others in their position responding favorably.

NOTE: I am NOT saying bulk email 300 people on the same email. Be strategic. Make it clear why you are emailing these individuals together.

Include Them In Forwards And Replies

Try looping someone into a relevant conversation that they will find valuable. Seeing the FWD: or RE: before a subject line usually means that you are getting a deeper layer of information. People are more intrigued by getting that additional context. I am far more likely to open an email with a RE: because it means there is an ongoing conversation.

NOTE: People will feel cheated if it is not a real chain with relevant information. False subject lines are not the way to your recipient’s heart.

Show That You Care What They Have To Say

If they have a blog, read what they have to say, and post comments. If they are an active Twitter user, engage with them through tweets, direct messages, and retweets.

Then, use your previous engagements of their content as a starting point for your email. By this point, you will have already built rapport and shown that you appreciate what they have to say. They are more likely to recognize who you are and will be far more likely to respond.

Quickly Find An Organization’s Email Pattern

You will never get a response if you start off with the wrong email address.

Unfortunately, many people don’t give out their primary email address, and others make it impossible to find their email at all. All of the research in the world serves no purpose if the person you are trying to reach never publishes their email address online.

Fortunately, there is a unique solution. Pattern matching.

Many companies and groups use a specific pattern of first name and last names combined with their URL. If you have the email addresses of a few people at an organization, this pattern may be easy to spot. Some common patterns include: First@Company.com. FirstName.LastName@Company.com and FirstNameLastInitial@Company.com. There are also free tools that automate this research, such as EmailHunter.co.

With today’s overload of emails, we only take a few seconds to browse an email. So make these emails count.

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Shannon Wu is the founder of Mr. Progress, a digital innovation firm that partners with fast growing companies. Share with her your email marketing results! Connect with her on LinkedIn.

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