How many cold emails / messages / letters should I send?

This depends on several factors.

Firstly, how much does your service cost?

The lower that fee is, the more emails you should send.

When I was sending a lot of cold emails, we would send from 250 to 1,000 per month. This figure would vary based on what data we could get, and how many meetings we’d already got booked in.

This approach provided me with more meetings than I could handle, but looking back, I was inefficient.

For starters, I didn’t send follow-up emails. (I never looked up “How to cold email” – I probably should have…)

And I wasn’t targeted enough. I would buy lists of senior Marketing contacts and send the same email to all of them, personalising only the first name.

If I were to go back in time, I would have spent more time thinking about who we wanted to work with. I’d then send 20-50 heavily personalised emails per month to prospects at companies that excited me or I knew I could get amazing results for. On top of this, I’d send at least 300-500 emails per month without heavy personalisation.

Based on the results, I would modify my strategy for the following month.

If the heavily personalised emails to ‘ideal’ prospects generated massively increased response rates, and those leads looked like they had potential to become paying customers, I’d increase the time I spent sending personalised campaigns.

Conversely, if the response rate didn’t increase substantially from my additional personalisation efforts, I would try it again – but with new prospects/copy.

If it still didn’t generate an increase in responses that justified the additional time writing personalised copy, I’d focus less resources on this type of campaign.

Make sure to use some software to automate sending your emails and follow-ups. I’d send 1 follow-up email every 7 days for 7 weeks. I left such a delay out of common courtesy. I knew I was the least important person in their inbox – and it didn’t feel right to badger people too frequently who’s only crime was not replying to me.

Some people send follow-ups with more frequency than this – and such an approach may generate responses faster. I may have experienced yet more responses this if I had been less focused on good manners. However, as I was often already generating more calls and meetings than I could handle, I had no reason to test this.

Cheers,

 Jon