Cold Email: How to Raise your Response Rate

As part of my acquisition process, I send around 50 cold emails to selected hotel managers. Of those 50 cold emails, I got roughly 2 interested responses. Well, that’s a response rate of 4% and I didn’t really like this number. So I tried out a different approach to raising the response rate to my cold emails.

When you are contacting smaller hotels via email you usually have no other chance to send an email the hotel manager (who is usually the hotel owner as well). But when it comes to bigger hotels or hotel chains you can easily find somebody who is holding a position above of the hotel manager. There is always someone sitting in the companies headquarter or there is usually a district or area manager who is responsible managing more than just one hotel.

To find out the email addresses of those district managers or of people working at the companies headquarter I used a pretty useful Chrome plugin called Hunter. With Hunter, you can simply visit a webpage, click on the Hunter button in your Chrome browser and Hunter will collect all email addresses it can find within the homepage’s source code.

If you use Google or DuckDuckGo to research a few contact persons you can usually easily detect the right email address with Hunter.

Short Guide on Hunter

Here is a short guide on how to use Hunter:

1. Visit https://hunter.io/ and create an account. Hunter offers a free plan where you can make 150 searches per months.
2. Download the Chrome Plugin here: https://hunter.io/chrome
3. Simply click the Hunter Button on any business homepage where you need to find the right email address.

It is usually no problem to find an email address of the right contact person who is working in a higher corporate position than the hotel manager himself. Then I started to email contact persons who are sitting in the headquarter of a certain hotel chain and most of them replied within hours.

Here is the great part about how they replied:

All managers delegated the email to those responsible for it by putting her into the CC when replying to me. This was, of course, the hotel manager I actually wanted to contact. Example: I emailed a contact person sitting in Hilton’s HQ with reference to a hotel in Berlin. The hotel manager of Hilton Berlin now received a CC of the email from his principal in the HQ. The great thing: ALL hotel managers who received my email as a CC from their principal replied to my email.

This is a very simple technique you could use for your cold emailing as well. I will continue to test this approach and I will keep you up to date here on my blog.

What is your favorite technique to raise the response rate when sending out cold emails? Let me know your best trick by commenting right below!