What do Real Estate Investment, Financial Advisory, Software development, SEO, Marketing Services and Lead Generation have common?
From my perspective there are two things:
Firstly, they account for over 90% of the spam emails I receive through LinkedIn and secondly, I ignore them all.
I guess it’s a numbers game and if these service providers send enough cold emails they will get some responses. However I hope they’re not expending significant time or resources as the hit rate from such approaches is very low.
In reality, it only takes one small tweak to increase the likelihood that your target will respond significantly – in my case to close to 100%. Maybe I shouldn’t be writing this publicly as I’m giving the key to capturing my attention!
If the message includes reference to someone I know personally that will help. However, if the email states that the person I know suggested that they reach out to me, then I am highly likely to respond because I don’t want to reflect badly on the person who gave the recommendation. One caveat: this assumes that I care about the relationship with the person that gave the recommendation!
So, if you’re one of those people that has sent me 5 emails without reply, stop sending them and instead cross-check your network to find out whether you know someone that knows me personally. Contact them, ask about me, and if you still want to connect with me, ask them if you can mention their name!
This is not the only way to increase the likelihood that a stranger will respond favourably to your approaches. I have spoken about the importance of commonality a number of times in past blogs. The use of common connections as discussed here is only one application of commonality. Others include common interests, backgrounds, associations (societies, alumni groups, membership clubs etc), work experience etc.
Investing time to uncover such commonalities indicates that you consider your target important enough to separate yourself from the spam crowd. And, while some people may consider it intrusive and ignore your approaches, the same people wouldn’t have replied to a spam email anyway so you’re not losing anything other than the time it too to make the connection.
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