A Simple Hack that Tripled the E-Mail Response Rate.

Before I jump into the details, a quick context— I worked as the Head of International Marketing at Locus.sh (An AI & Deep Learning powered technology platform to optimize logistics). One of my key responsibilities was to generate leads in North America & South East Asia (in 2018), and as most blogs might say the fastest & the most effective way to get a head start in generating leads was & is still Email!

Disclaimer: This hack worked only in South East Asia & interestingly, didn’t work at all in North America. Try it out & see if it works for you & your company!

Disclaimer 2: I don’t work at Locus anymore, I recently put down my papers and this blog was lying in my drafts from more than a year & thought it would be good time to post the different experiments that I had run and share my learning’s of executing the Go-To-Market Strategy in North America.

Cutting to the Chase:

Aggressive International expansion was a key goal for us in 2018 & we wanted to take our brand to North America, South East Asia.

Indonesia turned out to be a core market post our initial research & we as a team were going all out to establish a presence in Jakarta.

We had decided to sponsor a logistics conference there but that would not cut it! We had to set up in-person meetings for our Sales team to ensure significant ROI from this engagement and cold e-mails were the best way forward.

Here is what we focused on:

We wanted to personalize as much as we could to not make it look like an automated email. We wanted it to give the reader a feeling that we had done our research about them before we sent this email out.

So in the first email, Instead of beating around the bush, we wanted to hit the nail on the head with a very specific subject line which clearly communicates our intent of reaching out, i.e., to meet them & discuss how Locus could optimize logistics at their company.

In the email body, after a quick introduction to establish the sender's credibility, we went straight to the point on letting the prospect know we are in their city & the reason why we would like to connect.

The other important part of the email was the hook — The 6 client names that we mentioned which also included 1–2 competitors from their industry and/or the bigwigs in their country. This would want them to at least give us an ear. Or so we thought!

This email gave us a response rate in single digit percentage, but the next email tripled up that response rate. Have a look.

Email 2:

So there were a bunch of different thoughts that we put in for this.

We wanted to send in a follow-up, but with a shorter Subject line.
“Following Up” sounded just right and to the point. We believed it would be a very intuitive phrase that would make anyone at least open the email to look at what we were following up for, but there was a catch. If
we are sending a follow-up email with a different subject line, it meant that the email would be created in a different thread! To solve this issue, we thought about pasting the previous conversation in the follow-up email. We also wanted to add the below line, which Gmail auto generates when you reply on the same thread.

“On Wed, Jul 24, 2018 at 1:04 PM Pranav Divakar <pranav@locus.sh> wrote:”

We believed this would give the reader a context on my previous email which was on a different thread. We were also hoping to make the reader feel a little guilty that they haven’t replied to us on the first email.

Even with a strong belief on the premise of our approach, it surprised us that we started getting a lot more replies than we thought!

And here is when we believed we found our golden egg! We started using this technique in every single email campaign that we did for North America & to our shock, we fell flat! This experiment just didn’t work for NA region like it did in the South East Asian region and this perplexed us.

In hindsight & to my best understanding, I believe the psycho-sociological differences between the regions played a part here, as they should in your marketing too. While a follow-up email in North America might still have a perception of ‘Spam’, in South East Asia when done right it can evoke a completely different & favourable reaction.

Either way, you should try this out & let me know how the experiment goes :)