anyone got any tips on increasing email response rates? am getting decent open rates (~40%), but my reply rate is an abysmal 1.2% Better personalisation? Or maybe i need to invest more time into the initial prospecting part of the funnel instead? would appreciate your thoughts 🙂

Just curious,,,what do you hope to accomplish with email responses? are responses required to say, make a sale?

@Dan Taylor My reply rate is from 1.5% to 2%, but those are mostly unsub/opt out answers. Our call to action is 'Book a call' directly, so response rates are not so relevant I'd say.

Yeah my replies are mostly unsub as well. Guess I shot myself in the foot by not including a proper CTA, I guess my thinking was that I could have a back and forth with prospects before actually booking the meeting 🤦

Good response rate is 15-20% with 1-2% booking a call/demo

Have you tried mixing up email styles? Images, text, use of white space, different CTAs, email frequency etc Lots to test.

sure! I'll obviously have to anonymise it first but I'll drop it in the thread later

It's all about the market. How good are you in selecting your cold email list. If the list is good enough, demo rate will be amazing. I'm having that battle at the moment 😅

Yeah I'm my first round of cold emails I got an abysmal response rate-> but I spent a lot more time doing intelligent prospecting and managed to book 2 meetings in 2 days 🤩

Yes, exactly. Keep the quality on prospecting and results will come. Also always run A/B tests on messages and subjects! Worked very good for us, after few tests we found out whats working.

Again it would help to get specifics. My reply rates avg 30-40% so there's likely room for improvement

hey @Jenn Strout sorry I missed this, I've included some screenshots of my emails in the thread

Hey @Dan Taylor your call to action is 'booking a call' directly from email. So I think reply rates are not so relevant in your situation. Also, make sure your target market is well chosen. That's the most important thing, in my opinion.

Exactly mate. Didn't get a lot of success sending 300 emails a day a few weeks ago-so now I send maybe a dozen which are all really well researched and highly targeted-> had many more meetings booked through that

The icing on the cake is usually in the copy itself. You have to conduct a thorough research on your target audience, understand their problem and challenges, then sell the benefits of your product to them as a solution, test out different headlines and subject lines. Another thing is since you are targeting companies, the emails should be sent on weekdays and at appropriate hours usually between 9a.m and 12p.m. I like sending emails out at this time because that's when my prospect is a bit more relaxed and not tired yet.

As @Ifeoma Ilechukwu said, testing subject lines is a must :))

For me, the more senior my prospects are, the earlier I email them. My logic is: if they're the COO/CFO of a large company, chances are they're in back to back meetings more or less from 9 onwards. So by (schedule) sending the email at 7:43 I have a good chance of catching them on their morning commute and a better chance of them reading it Does that make sense?

What companies were you sending to, on the high open rates? I don't have any idea except this: If you targeted big companies they probably have software that opens emails automatically so they can avoid spam emails. This is just my guess, doesn't mean it's true!

Yea, it does @Dan Taylor. The strategy is to understand the position of your prospect in a company and then send a message at the appropriate time.

@Petar Yeah I thought it might be a firewall checking for phishing/malware but these emails are all sent to tier 3 accounts (under 200 employees) so not big companies. Also if they had the firewall surely the earlier emails would be opened more as well?

Yea, I'd wanted to suggest that too. The shorter the copy, the better.

If the Open Rate is that high (although you have a small sample), then it's usually a poor offer or a muddled offer. Target 150-250 words with the following components. To some, this will look familiar since I wrote a book about it called Story-Driven Outreach: https://www.amazon.com/Story-Driven-Outreach-response-compelling-Foundation-ebook/dp/B09SW2F8JV/ As an aside, for targeted lists like you have, Open rates should be above 50%. Response is a little more tricky but I'd expect 4-6% on that. Feel free to share the email copy so we can take a look.

hey @Jarie thanks for your input-had a look at your book. I am currently reading "predictable prospecting" by jeremey donovan, but will read yours next, looks really insightful. So using your template I would write something like: "subject: easiest way to reduce time to hire Hey John, Noticed your post on linkedin about the great resignation and couldn't agree more. Many HR managers I'm working with at the moment are struggling with filling positions quickly, if this sounds like something you or your team is struggling with-I thought it might make sense to set up a quick call as our solution helped [competitor] reduce their time to hire by over 75%. Does this sound like something you'd be interested in? Danny" how does this sound? my only concern is I don't actually touch on what our solution actually does-but I guess my job as an SDR is to generate interest as opposed to actually pitching the product. I like that its <70 words though (excluding signature/salutation etc)

@Dan Taylor that's a solid email. I think the only thing I would add is separate out the results and give it some more meat. Like say something like “our tool has helped over 150 companies like yours hire quality candidates that stick around 75% faster. Companies like [competitor] have recently used us to hire [specific position]. That results paragraph will be a lot harder to get at but if you have some good results and do some research, it's powerful. Again, soild effort on this. This is really a numbers game and attacking it from different angles. It might take 7 or more touches to get a response. One thing I have found that's effective is to split an effort into 3rds. 1st third: 2-3 emails like what you have 2nd third: 2-3 informative emails with only a P.S. CTA. Soft sell types. Like a trends report or some best practices to hire better, as an example. 3rd third: 1-2 emails that are back to original with a clear CTA. Timing on these thirds is between 2-4 weeks apart. I know, sounds like a lot but the idea is to give them a “rest” with solid helpful information and then hit them again.

Looking forward to trying this out! Thanks man 😎

That’s kind of you. I’ll take a five star review on Amazon for my book :-).

haha fair deal