If you’ve followed my writing for a while, you know I believe in the importance of knowing how to send a good cold email. Cold emailing well is the superpower that can let you grow your network from pretty much nothing to being world-class. It’s the superpower that can help you take your freelancing business to a full-scale consultancy. It’s the superpower that can get you endorsements on a book or get an important article shared.
In other words, it’s a great skill to have.
I had the opportunity to contribute to a piece by Haley Hoffman Smith, the Director of Community for the Next Gen Summit. The NGS is one of my favorite events for ambitious young people out there that’s held every year. Check out the article.
Slayback’s 3 Rs of Cold Emailing
Haley doesn’t call it this, but my advice comes back to Slayback’s Three Rs of Cold Emailing: Relevance, Rapport, and Responsibility.
You want your email to be relevant to the person you’re emailing and you have to make it clear that it is relevant to them. What do you want? Why from them?
You want to establish rapport with them. Why should they reply to you? Why should they care about you?
And you must take responsibility for the conversation. If you are trying to get a time to meet, you have to give the times. If you are trying to get a specific blurb out of them, you have to ask for it. You don’t get what you don’t ask for.
This also means you have to resuscitate (extra R) the conversation if it falls by the side. A Very Busy Person may be very busy when you email them. Don’t expect them to cull their email inbox 4 weeks later looking for conversations they missed. Taking responsibility for the conversation includes you sending an email to them saying something simple like:
Hey Zak,
Just wanted to put this back towards the top of your inbox in case it got buried during the weekend. Please let me know if anything in my previous email wasn’t clear or if you need more info from me.
Zatsch
And of course, you can use the scripts I developed to make cold emailing all that much easier for you.