Predictable Revenue: Turn Your Business Into A Sales Machine With The $100 Million Best Practices Of Salesforce.com

by Aaron Ross

Sending Your Campaigns Start by sending 150-250 outbound emails per week, over the course of 3-4 days. Again, your goal is to receive an average of 5-10 responses per day, because if you get more than that, they will start dropping through the cracks. One of the biggest mistakes our clients make is sending too many emails per day. Send the messages either before 9am or after 5pm, and avoid Mondays and Fridays. (Sundays are okay.) If you are using emails, expect a 7-9%+ response rate (excluding bounces). This rate includes all responses: positive, negative and neutral. For most newly built or purchased lists, you will get a 20-30% bounce rate, exclude those emails from your response rate calculation. So if you send 150 emails and receive 10 responses and 50 bounces, your response rate is 10% (10 responses / 100 valid emails). Be methodical in how you handle responses! Response handling is critical to make sure no responses fall through the cracks. Log them and keep them organized. I suggest you create some standard email templates you can use for your most common responses.