Episode Details

[Authors note: The following is Part 2 of my “Writing Great Outreach Emails” series. If you’d like to master the art of email outreach and download all 3 parts (including a BONUS checklist to help you craft your next message), Click here to download ‘The Insider’s Guide to Writing Great Outreach Emails’.]

I get it.

Who’s not busy? I’m busy. We’re all busy. Everybody’s busy.

But other people being busy isn’t a valid excuse for you not getting any responses to your cold outreach messages. Most likely the lack of response has nothing to do with the recipient being busy and everything to do with making one (or more) of the most common mistakes I see people making when sending cold outreach emails.

Having both sent and received thousands of outreach emails in my career, I have a good sense of what works and what doesn’t. Early in my career as a trailer editor I was tasked with reviewing hundreds of cold submissions from other trailer editors so we could build our roster of freelancers (which included sifting through hundreds of résumés and multiple boxes of VHS & DVD demo reels...yes I just aged myself there).

Later in my career I started a boutique post-production marketing agency and hired multiple employees via cold job listings (after sifting through thousands of emails for each one).

And now having put myself out there very publicly with my website and podcast, I receive between 5-10 solicitation PER DAY from people who want to sell me their products, get on my podcast, put links on my website, have me pass along their résumé, or have coffee and “pick my brain.”

Needless to say, I know what outreach messages look like from the perspective of the person receiving them. And the vast majority are just plain bad.

Before identifying the most common mistakes and breaking down why most outreach emails fail to receive a response, however, it’s imperative that you put yourself in the seat of the person whos’ about to receive your message.

This is a process I like to call:

Crawling Into the Brain of Your Recipient

Picture in your mind right now a person you reached out to recently. Maybe it’s a famous editor, director, producer, bestselling author, or even a studio executive.

Imagine them in their daily work environment.

Imagine the amount of requests put upon them for their time, their opinions, and their expertise.

Imagine them being so busy they have to frantically eat lunch every day at their workstation.

Now imagine their email inbox.

While it may seem nearly impossible to compete for a busy person’s valuable attention given how little they have available, it is possible to stand out amongst the noise if you construct your outreach message correctly and you go out of your way to provide value to this person (more on providing value in my ‘Insider’s Guide to Writing Great Outreach Emails’). But because “providing value” is an elusive concept, and because outreach can be a tedious, time-consuming, and slo