In a tight economy, it’s tempting to reach out to EVERYONE you know with a solicitation email for new business or a job (if you’ve been laid off).

Resist that urge.

Sort of.

Resist the part that says you will write one email and bcc your entire list.

But, your network, particularly if you’ve been cultivating it and you know something about each person can be contacted.

Here’s one way to do it.

My new client, GeniusRocket, has a pretty cool crowd-sourced video process that delivers ad agency quality videos about 1/5th of the cost.

That’s a good value proposition.

But, it needs to be framed and sent in a relevant manner.

So, I went through my 2500 Outlook contacts and pared it down to 400.

I put the list in Excel.

I wrote an email (using Word) describing the GeniusRocket offering and set up a mail merge.

Then, I did one more thing.

I added 1-3 sentences to each person’s email explaining on a personally relevant level, based on our previous interactions, why I had decided to send him/her the note.

It looked something like this:

Joe	joe@gmail.com	We chatted at the event last month about your efforts to better tell ‘your story.”
Bob	bob@gmail.com	In our last email exchange, you mentioned that you were looking for unique ways to explain your offerings to your prospects.
Matt	Matt@gmail.com	Really enjoyed your blog post on how video is replacing text as the means of communication, so thought this would interest you.

 

Did it take time?

Heck, yes!

A ton of time.

What’s more, I only sent out 20 –30 emails each day, so this effort took about a month.

But, that way I could judge from the response rate whether the actual content of the email was generating the desired response.

By rev 9 of the email, I was up to 70% response rate. Still room for improvement, but much better than Rev 1 (about 15%).

Plus, in the eyes of much of my network, I wasn’t just asking for business, I was sharing something relevant.

Lesson: Even though it is easy to send everyone one big email for you, what’s more important? Getting the email out? OR adding to your personal brand and your bottom line?

You will be far better off, in both the short-term and the long-term in both new business generated and networks cultivated if you invest the time to help each member of your network understand-individually-why you are sending them a note.

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