Jim Kukral of Revenews outlines a generic business development email he received and what his problems are with it. Essentially he points out that it’s impersonal, it’s obvious it’s generic, and the company isn’t showing much effort by not personalizing their pitch for how their company can help him.
This brings up an issue I’ve been meaning to discuss that has to do with conversion. When website owners focus on conversion rate, they often think of it only in terms of people performing actions on their website such as buying a product or filling out a lead form. This is also usually the kind of conversion rate that is measured, usually through a web analytics application.
What about trying to improve and measuring the conversion rate of your companies outbound efforts? Those efforts could be sales emails such as Jim’s, efforts to find partners, efforts to find investors, outbound phone calls, etc. For some web businesses, these types of activities may even be more important than the standard conversion rates we measure.
Once you’re measuring these conversion rates, try tweaking your approach and quantifying the results. I’d be willing to bet if the company who sent Jim that generic email personzlied the results they’d improve their conversion rate, and isn’t getting customers important?