What Not to Do in Your Email Pitch :: An Open Letter to “Alex”

With the digital marketing landscape shifting the focus more on email marketing, I seem to have been getting more and more email pitches.  Some of them are from spammers and some are legitimate.  Some make me laugh.  Some make me cringe.  Some get my attention, but most end up in the trash or flagged as spam.  My biggest pet peeve is receiving an email that is generically addressed “hi.”  I think it is fairly easy to figure out my name…the domain and name of my business is Colleen Eakins.

Last week I was reading about how writing better email pitches helped Ryan Luedecke increase the revenue of Sumo Jerky and then I received the following pitch from a possible spammer named Alex:

Hi,

My name is Alex and I am an Online Strategist.

I’ve been tracking the success of your website while doing some research on your industry—I’m impressed with your company, but there are some real opportunities for growth that you currently are missing.

Are you interested in several proven strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to your site? In 20 minutes I can show you how to fuel your brand and generate more revenue from search engines and social networks.

This is a $500 value free of charge.

I’d like to follow up about this with a quick phone call. Can I call you this week to discuss your campaign?

Thank you
Best regards,

Alex

This guy could have really learned something if he had read about Ryan’s methods!  I started to trash it after reading the “hi” greeting, but I then I thought I would write “Alex” back.  Here is my reply:

Hi Alex,

I don’t typically respond to cold generic pitches because they tend to beguile the message they contain.  I actually find it offensive and usually mark them as spam and trash them.

You sent me a generic pitch, but I will send you a customized response.  If you really were “tracking the success of [my] website,” you would have at least addressed the email to me by name.  After all, you are sending the email to a “name” at my domain name dot come…also my actual name.  A quick Google search could have confirmed that for you.

A quick search and read of my site to include my blog would have also kept you from wasting your time since these proven “strategies to use content and social media to drive relevant traffic to [my] site” are what I am already doing.  I have even written a few blog posts on your “proven strategies.”

Just some friendly advice:  The above extra steps will help your pitch go over better and net you more conversions.  Also think about expanding your sentence, “but there are some real opportunities for growth that you currently are missing,” to point out a few actual points.  You do not have to list all of them but some bullet points work well to pique a potential client’s interest.

You have to let the potential client know WIIFM and acronym for “what’s in it for me?”  Telling me your service has a $500 value does not do that.  What will this value bring me?  It’s like handing me a mystery box and telling me it’s worth $500.  $500 of what?  Fish roe? Snake skin?  I have no use or interest in either.

I know you have probably sent hundreds of these types of emails out and making them generic and automating a response as a follow-up makes your life easier.  However, it can’t be good for your sales conversions.  As an “online strategist” you must know that is pretty important, right?

Best of luck to you!

Colleen

After I was done writing, I decided not to send the email.  After all if he is a spammer, I do not want to provide validation to his list that my email is a working one.  So instead, I decided to write about it and post it here.  For more tips on how to successfully write a cold email pitch, check out Ryan Luedecke’s post, “How I grew Sumo Jerky to $10,000 a month.”