A lot of startup work is done by communicating intentionally and serendipitously with people you don’t know. Conversations with people outside of your personal circle but in your industry can be incredibly important in starting and building your business. But sometimes it can be difficult to make those connections, particularly over email.
Like most people, I get a lot of emails and probably for 50% of them all I only read the subject line.
And that’s frustrating, I know. Because I’m often the random name appearing in a stranger's inbox that ends up ignored. And when you do get through to someone, it’s often a really valuable conversation.
I recently got an email from two young women working on a project similar to my company and who wanted to connect. I almost missed it. I was in the process of checking the delete box when I did a double take and read it instead.
As a result, my team had an awesome conversation with their team. We talked about the business of media, startup strategy that worked for us and just girlpower chatter.
In that conversation, I realized just how much I’ve learned since we founded our company almost two years ago. I also realized how important it is to me to share that knowledge with other young founders.
So I’ve been auditing my email-reading practices: questioning what usually catches my eye and wondering what I’ve missed. That process has also led me to tweak the way that I write emails to strangers in the hope that it elicits a better response rate.
Here are some tips I’ve learned:
1. Your subject line is make or break
The email I was talking about — the one I almost missed — had the subject line, “Crowdfunding advice.” In that subject line, I immediately know what the email is about and why I’m receiving it. I also know that the sender is familiar with my work and knows that my company started with a crowdfunding campaign. I knew I had to reply because of how desperate I was for encouragement during our long road of crowdfunding. So when you’re writing your subject line, you need to but two specific things in just a few words: describe the email’s content and allude to a specific ask.
2. Have a specific ask
This advice also applies to the email itself. The women looking for crowdfunding advice ended their email to me with the note “Let us know if you're able to chat.” From that ask I knew that they wanted a conversation instead of just emailing back and forth. If they had just said, “Hey this is our project we’re trying to crowdfund like you did,” I might not have responded. But since I knew they were looking for specific advice from my team, I responded. Coincidentally having a specific ask was a point that my own team struggled with during our crowdfunding. We were sending emails asking people to donate money to our campaign but we danced around our ask in the beginning. A mentor of ours sat us down and said, “Ladies if you’re serious about this you need to write like it. Ask people for money and don’t make them read paragraphs of fluff language before you make your point.” We saw results as soon as we made that change - meaning we raised our capital.
3. Be relatable and show that you’ve done your research
I’m highly unlikely to respond to emails that aren’t personalized. If your language is copy-pasted or coming from a PR firm it’s pretty easy to tell. On the other hand, if you tell me what your work is about and use comparisons to the work you know that I’ve done, then your email feels more personal and genuine. It also give me a good jumping off point to understand what you’re looking for and how I can help you. In the very first sentence of her email, the women I recently connected with said, “We just graduated with journalism degrees and like you, didn't want to feed into the traditional type of newsroom.” I instantly related to them because they had done the work of identifying what we had in common.
At the end of the day, we all know that you have to send a lot of emails to get a couple of responses. But these techniques are a great way to make your email stand out from the crowd - and maybe get you funded.
