By Mary Whitman

If you’re an email marketer then you have likely wondered time and again just how you can connect to an influencer, decision maker in a major company you’re targeting, or any target prospect for that matter. The trick to it is really writing effective emails that are better at transforming the responses you get from clients from cold silence to warm responses. You want to write emails that your leads are just aching to respond to.

We had a conversation with Elena Vidic, the marketing manager at assignmentgeek.com.au and asked her to tell us about some of the hacks she recommends to improve email response rates. According to her, before you even get to the hacks themselves, there are some preliminaries that you have to take care of to make things smoother for you farther down the road. The first is to automate the email sending process. Since you’re likely to send out a large volume of emails, the last thing you want to do is to overwhelm yourself by doing it manually. You should also do your best to personalize the emails that you send out. That said, here are some hacks you can begin to apply immediately to triple the response rate to your emails.

Connect With Your Prospect on Various Levels

If you really want to make an impact on your prospect then you have to learn to master the power of the multi-touch approach. That means not just setting an email to your prospect but also try to reach out to them on another profile. For example, you could send them a detailed message on their LinkedIn inbox and then only send them an email telling them about the message you sent them on LinkedIn. That way, the main body of the message is on LinkedIn but the pointer to it is in the email. You could tell them “Hi, ‘insert name here’, I just sent you a message on LinkedIn regarding….” Whatever you do, however, do not spam them and try to make your message as warm as possible.

The Power of the Group Outreach

It has always been said that a personalized approach is the best way to send out an email when marketing. However, sometimes it can be more effective to take advantage of group psychology when you’re trying to get through to a specific group of prospects.

Say, for example, that you’re reaching out to a select group of people, such as influencers at similar companies or a variety of influencers in the same company. You can start an email thread with them and either make an offer or an inquiry. You can then ask them to give you a positive response via a reply. If one of them sends a reply, the others are likely to be influenced to also want to reply since they will be influenced by the group.

Let Your Prospects Be Part of Your Responses and Forwarded Emails

Sometimes it helps, even more, to make your prospects feel like they’re part of something big when you include them in ongoing conversations. The major catch here is that those ongoing conversations are relevant to your prospects. So, say there is a RE: or an FWD in the subject line of your email. This mail will typically be part of a thread and will be a response to an earlier discussion or query. That means that it’s very likely to add information and value to the discussion.

People will naturally be drawn to such emails because they feel like they’re getting value from the in-depth information that they’re getting. That means that they are more likely to open the email and respond. Do make sure, however, that the content is relevant to the recipient of the email.

Listen Before you Speak

You need to listen to your prospect first before you can tell them anything because there will always be clues in what they tell you that will point to what it is that makes them tick.

Of course, you can ‘listen’ to them in a variety of ways. You can read their blog if they have one and get acquainted with what they cover on that blog. You can also check out their twitter handles and other social media profiles. You can even post comments to their posts to get a neutral conversation going with them.

You can use these conversations later as the basis of your emails to them. Since you’ve already taken the time to listen to them and build a strong bond with them, it will be much easier to know how to tailor the email you are sending them. They will also be more likely to respond positively to your email.

Use Business Formats for Unknown Email IDs

Sometimes you don’t know the email id of a prospect but really need to reach out to them. It’s pretty obvious that if you send out an email to the wrong address the email will bounce back. So how do you get the right email address?

Some prospects never publish their email ids. However, you can infer them using a few simple rules. If you have email ids for other people in the company then you can infer that the prospect’s email id is likely one of the following:

firstnamelastinitial@company.com

firstname@company.com

firstname.lastname@company.com

and so on. This is the typical business format for email ids. You can use tools to help you identify ids and also to verify them so they don’t have to bounce back. There are lots of them, like Email Hunter or Kintegra Labs Email Verifier.

Your prospect will get plenty of emails every day and so the only way you can get through is to stand out. You can use these hacks to help you stand out and make that first crucial connection that will hopefully be the beginning of something great.

Mary Whitman is a blogger and freelancer from Adelaide, South Australia. In her spare time, she enjoys talking about Sustainable Development and Art.

Email stock photo by antstang/Shutterstock