Getting in touch with the right people

CEOIt can be unproductive and often boring sending out email after email to try and lease out some of my sites, so many companies seem to be making contacting them by email nigh on impossible! Spam has played it’s part in that I am sure.

Still, I often get the feeling my emails never get in front of the right people, customer services would likely be the wrong people who could just as easily dismiss my email as marketing spam so I have been trying to reach for the top and although nothing concrete as yet, it seems to be paying off.

I have emailed companies like overstock.com in the past but no response, this time I googled for the CEO’s name of the company I was contacting, which is usually easy enough to find out from press releases etc, I would then send 3 emails and check for them bouncing in the form of:

johnsmith@company.com
j.smith@company.com
jsmith@company.com

These seem to be the most frequent used formats used and it’s been very successful with 2 emails usually bouncing and one getting to the right person, so instead of responses like this from customer services;

We’re always looking at ways to make xxxxxxxx.com even better and your comments are a big help to us. I’ll make sure to share them with the right team.

Thanks for getting in touch with us. I hope you’ll visit us again soon.

Best regards,

I have been getting responses like this from the CEO:

Hi Scott,
 
Thanks. xxxxx and xxxxxx will be in touch.
 
Regards
xxxxxxxxx

(Names have been xxxxx’d out)

This is much more encouraging, I would also guess that my email being passed down the way from the CEO to someone in charge of their marketing would be looked at closer than an email going through customer services and being sent upwards. I have now spoken to 3 companies regarding a lease this week which at the very least makes me feel I’m making some headway and being a bit more productive :)

About Scott Jones

Scott hails from the north east of Scotland and started earning online at the end of 2000 building websites for local businesses during which time he won an award from Lord Alan Sugar for Excellence in Enterprise. After having quite a bit of success with domaining Scott mainly runs educational evergreen websites which generate over 3 million visitors per month but is always on the lookout for a fresh thinking out of the box way to turn a buck. Follow on Twitter.

Comments

  1. That is good advice. With the top man assigning it out you already have him on to the case a little. If the person who he mentioned does not contact then you can easily follow up with the top man again now that initial contact was made.

  2. Scott, i’m really interested in your actual lease contract…

    Any chance you could show us a copy of this doc?

    Thanks in advance!

    • It’s mainly geared towards .co.uk domains so will have to be reworded if I get a .net leased, I’ll have a look and try and document the main parts to it so others can make up their own.

  3. Right on, Scott! And the same shoot too high tactic works perfectly when you are trying to setup meetings using a phone and a canvas list!

  4. Great tip, Scott. Getting the message to the right person is the most important part. I hope the deal goes through. The tip will surely come in hand in the future.

  5. I’ve been using the same technique for several years when cold-emailing companies to introduce myself (I’m a freelance copywriter by trade). In my experience, aiming high definitely gets a better return. I generally work with relatively low-level marcom folks on a daily basis, but sending an intro email to a VP or CEO has a better hit rate than sending directly to the marcom person. The VP or CEO also knows the right person to route you to.

    One caveat though. I’ve noticed diminishing returns over the past couple of years. Reaching someone at a really big company using this technique is still a good bet. But I’ve had less success at mid- to small-sized companies. I’ve noticed, from in-bound mail, that some companies are using a different email domain name to the one they use for their web site. And I think hosted email, like gmail, is gaining ground, making this more difficult. When I first started doing cold-call emails, I was getting close to 20% returns - amazing for direct mail. But a recent email blast I did to a list I generated from trade show exhibitors gave less than 5% returns: mostly due to address-not-found problems.

    Couple of other ideas I’ve used for finding the right email address format: if you trying to find for a technical person’s email and you know the name and domain, try searching Google groups. Also, try searching social networking sites like LinkedIn.

  6. It’s a fine line between drumming up interest in a domain name and spamming. What is your time period between cold calls for the prospective client?

    Undoubtedly it yields great returns but one has to thread carefully nonetheless.

  7. I’ve used this technique quite successfully to locate the names of journalists at various publications, too. A couple of other common variations are john.smith@company.com and john_smith@company.com.

  8. So essentially you’re performing a small scale directory harvest. Crude, but effective I suppose.

  9. Thanks for this usefull article, i boomarked this page and i will defently use this techniqe when my own blog is a bit older.

  10. I had success with this method today using a little different twist. If you have an industry blog, post something about the company you want to contact. Once the article is up, email the marketing manager and let them know about the recent “news.” Many times you’ll get a link back and build an email exchange with someone at the company - then build the relationship.

  11. Just curious if anyone here uses Linkedin order to find the types of contacts you are looking for. I have had some success there.

  12. Also note that for large companies where there may be a lot of people with the same name they might throw a number on at the end…ie
    john.smith2@bigcompanywithmultiplejohnsmiths.com

  13. I never thought it could work so well. I have recently started and am seeing great reply mail after mail. This is swesome!

    cheers,

  14. Great tip, Scott. Getting the message to the right person is the most important part

    Mikael’s last blog post..Ny stil på semoblog

  15. Scott,
    Excellent strategy, most writers discourage reaching for the top. You make it look easy. Thanx for the tut.

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