Many of us are going to owe you a beer for this one! Enjoy your pie.

Sue

Double your diners? Am I the only one that subject line screams "scam" to?

Why in the world would you say that when you have absolutely no idea what his current numbers are and if he can even realistically do this or even needs to do this?

If I received an email saying "double your clients" I'd immediately trash it because the person that wrote that clearly is right off the bat selling me something before they know my business. They are so conceited and poorly trained that they have this incorrect pre conceived notion before even meeting with me.

Sorry Don, I think you are a bit off base here.

Unfortunately, that phrase

That particular subject line may certainly appear "spammy" to most of us here, but the main point to take away from this is that your Subject line is the equivalent of a headline used in a good direct response ad and your only goal with that is to get them to open your email and get them to the next line, with the goal of each line being to keep the readers interest and get them to keep reading.

It's important to remember though that "you are not your prospect" and the only way to know for sure what subject lines work best is to test a few and measure your results. While many of use here have seen it all when it comes to emails and spam, for the average restaurant owner, something like this may just get them to open an email.

Cheers,

Steve

I think this phrase seems spammy to an internet marketer. An actual restaurant owner may take a look at the email. Some will, some won't. It all boils down to a numbers game.
As to if a restaurant already has enough customers, I don't believe you will find many that couldn't stand to get more.

I agree with Midasman09 that it's important to put yourself in a potential customers' shoes and how they may perceive your subject line. But the only way to know for sure is to test out subject lines and see which ones get the most response. There's just no way to predict if a particular headline (subject line) will appeal to someone.


As for spam, sometimes to see if my email may be tossed into the spam folder, what I do when using email to get leads, is to send it to 2 or 3 emails to my own email accounts first and see if it lands in the spam folder. I have had a yahoo account go through fine, where a gmail account will land in the spam folder. So that's a crap shoot too.

Testing is the name of the game. It's the only way to truly determine if you have a winning headline. That's the bottom line.

I regularly do cold email. Here are the tactics that have worked best for me. As always your mileage my vary.

1.)My subject lines are usually some variation of "Quick Question", "Recent Follow-Up", or just plain "Hey..."

Reason Why: Two things... First off I REALLY don't want this to look like spam. I want it to look like a general personal email. My theory is that if it looks like an ad it will probably get deleted.

Secondly... That's President Obama's approach. Seriously. I'm not going to get into politics here (I'm a moderate), but his campaign has been brilliant at grass roots fundraising, largely coordinated by the internet. I made sure to get on his email list simply because I wanted to study what he sent.

Consistently all of his subject lines are VERY personal. Everything from the subtle "hey" to the not so subtle "This Is Urgent... I Need Your Help..." - The one commonality is that all the subject lines were personal.

2.) I make it look as much like a personal email as possible. This is not a sales letter. We're trying to open a conversation, not close a sale.

Reason Why: The moment our prospect opens the email they'll make a split second decision as to whether they want to delete it or read it. The moment it feels too "salesy" they'll delete it.

This means no big-a*s headings, no stationary, no images, no crazy font colors, and limited amounts of bolding. I do tend to make my fonts bigger to improve readability.

I usually start out by saying "Hey, I'm not sure if you're the right person to send this to. If not, could you please forward it on? I'd really appreciate it" - This has had VERY positive results for me. I've had my emails forwarded to entire departments...

3.) For this kind of work, I always use a Gmail account.

Reason Why: Services like MailChimp are great, but they're not designed for what we're trying to do.

Ideally the prospect should think you sat there and wrote out an email specifically to them addressing their specific needs.

The problem is that the spammers have made it bad. Just to be clear, we're NOT spamming. If the email is perceived as spam, we're doing it wrong.

So MailChimp and just about every other mass email provider put a big-a*s "UNSUBSCRIBE" and "REPORT SPAM" button at the bottom of every email. This is a dead giveaway that your email is NOT personal and that your prospect is free to delete it.

Also, I've yet to figure out how to make Mailchimp let me send just a "plain email". They keep forcing me into a template, which isn't what I want.

4.) I make great usage of Gmail's "Canned Responses" feature.

Reason Why: The problem is that we don't have time to personally type out all these emails. The canned responses feature is part of Google Labs and has to be turned on manually.

Basically it lets you save pre-fab emails and send them with just a few clicks. There's also a plugin for Chrome called "YesMail" that I've been playing around with and so far am impressed with.

Another service that does this is Tout, but it's way overpriced IMO.

The cool thing about this is that you can quickly modify the email before blasting it off. So if you know something about the prospect (and you should), you can take 10 extra seconds and personalize it a bit further.

5.) I send a maximum of 20 emails a day.

Reason Why: First off, I'm not a spammer. I'm very carefully selecting the prospects I want to receive these emails. I'm not casting a wide net. Those 20 emails are carefully targeted towards people I know are decision makers.

That means doing some research. Research takes time. Once I've identified a prospect, it doesn't take that much extra effort to learn a bit about them. This lets me personalize each email.

In other words I take a QUALITY over QUANTITY approach. I feel that 20 well targeted, personalized emails are better than 2,000 generic emails thrown into the wind.

Plus, keeping the number of emails down decreases the likelihood that Gmail will deactivate your account due to SPAM concerns.

Most days I don't do 20. Many days I just do 1 or 2. It depends on how much time I have. Which brings me to my next point.

6.) Cold emailing is not my only prospecting activity. It's one thing of many that I do.

Reason Why: I prefer approaching a small pool of well qualified prospects from different angels as opposed to trying to hit an entire army at once.

I've had better luck exposing a smaller number of people to frequent contacts from a variety of mediums as opposed to hitting a massive unqualified pool with a single medium.

7.) I always end with a soft call to action.

Reason Why: This is something else I picked up from Obama's email campaigns. Every email ended with a call to action. In his case it was usually "Donate $5", "Sign Up to Volunteer", or "Sign This List to Make Your Voice Heard"...

In our case we have to be careful because, as I said before, we don't want to scare off the prospect. My calls to action are usually either "Give me a call...", "Check out our website", or "Send me a quick reply".

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Thanks for reading. I hope this was beneficial to someone! :-)

Hey Don,

I sent this to my restaurant list Monday and have 2 sales and 3 appts next week for the sales guys. I was using mamby, pamby subject lines but this one got their attention.

The reason I was almost sure it would work is because my own email subj. lines are so boring, I delete most of them before opening.

Thx,
Sue