What are Your 1st Meeting Conversion Rates for Outbound Email?
June 01, 2020
by a searcher from University of Toronto - Joseph L. Rotman School of Management in Vancouver, BC, Canada
Hi, we've spent a couple of months doing proprietary outbound email (cold email) and all experience has been during COVID-19 so we have no benchmark for conversion rates from a unique email to a 1st meeting.
In April we were at ~ 2% conversion (unique send to 1st phone call meeting) and in May about ~1.2%. Understanding that industry, geography, send times, and subject/messaging, among many other factors, will impact this considerably, we wanted to know what others have achieved for these types of cold email campaigns.
We've relied more heavily on 1st meeting conversion rates since replies have sentiment issues (positive vs. negative replies)
All feedback welcomed! Thank you for your help.
from New York University in Los Angeles, CA, USA
Ive been cold emailing and after about 200 companies, This worked for me:
1. Identify the owner name (very important)
2. Call in first and ask for the owner by first name. The front desk will almost always ask you what it is about. Don't say you are with a company. Say you are a former engineer, lawyer, whatever looking to talk to (owners name) about a joint venture. 80% of the time they either take down my info or send me through to the owner. You can also get around this by calling on off hours and seeing if there is a directory line so you can leave a VM with the owner.
Try to at least leave the owner a VM. At this point, I would send an email to the owner which has about a 10% reply rate in my experience. Only if the owner doesn't return your calls or emails, I would send a "confidential" letter address to them.
I've had call backs from hand written letters from the same guys that ignored emails. It leads me to believe that most owners send my emails to spam or never read emails that at first glance may look like a biz broker. I use a similar script for email as I do letters. Happy to share more as I go further along this process.
from University of Toronto in Vancouver, BC, Canada