Agencies

give them a miss.

I wouldn’t use them. They put an additional charge on top of what you’re charging, making you less competitive compared to the next guy.

Also, they don’t do anything that with time and inclination you cant do yourself?

Take a day to find websites for agencies/companies in your area (in your field) who you could potentially work for. Local searches on Google and yell.com can be good for this.
You’re looking for contact details and the type of work they do.

Get as many email addresses as you can, but try and find out who is the ‘freelancing decision maker’ for each particular company. Personal addresses. Its best to call their reception and ask this – you don’t actually have to be put through to them! Be creative ;-)

Next draft your email. Make it as short as possible while getting your sell across, and make sure you have a call to action “call me for a quote, have a look at my online portfolio, Reply to arrange a meeting” etc. keep it simple, polite, and don’t stick lots of html, images, wiz bang stuff in it. Ideally you’ll have an online portfolio to link through to? Make sure your subject line is again, concise and relevant. Don’t be ‘kooky’.

Send these out to each of the personal addresses you’ve got from above. Don’t send out one bulk mail with all the addresses in the To: field, and definitely don’t hide the address in the BCC field. Straight into the junk bin if you do.

Sit back and wait for the responses. DON’T be disheartened if you only get 2 out of 50 emails, that’s actually not bad going, and don’t keep sending repeat mails. Give it time.

Hope this helps.

elastic, post: 565 a écrit : Don’t send out one bulk mail with all the addresses in the To: field, and definitely don’t hide the address in the BCC field.

Uh.. that's quite interesting - are you saying that most email accounts are set up to filter BCC emails into the junk box? I guess so.

if the To: or From: field is blank on incoming mail, most corporate filters will mark the mail as spam and junk it, yes.

The answer is to send it to your own address and then BCC all recipients. You could be smart and add your email to your address book as "Undisclosed Recipients" or something similar so the receiver will see this as the from alias and there will be an entry in the To: field.

I would suggest using a CRM system (I Use ACT!) to keep a list of all clients and leads. You can then mail merge a template to all leads and it will generate an email for each recipient.

How is emailing it to yourself and blind carbon copying it to everyone else any different to emailing it to one company and then blind carbon copying it to all other companies?

All the other companies can see the one address you have sent it to of course...

Yeah with Undisclosed Recipients they wont see that it's your email but those other companies will still be entered into the BCC, so wont their email program just put it in the junk mail... or does sending it to yourself as well cause it to do something weird with the BCC and make their email appear as if its in the 'to' field?

Also, a little tip.

If you’ve got a website (and you should have) you can do some really simple conversion analysis.

Most hosting packages will offer some kind of user stats. If they don’t, sign up with Google Analytics – I additionally do this anyway, as it’s got some good tools in it. Either way you should be able to track how many people visit each individual page per day.

Now create a duplicate of a page in your site. This could be your portfolio page, your home page – whatever you think would be good for people to land on. You could even create a brand new page of you feel the need.

In your email, make one of you calls to action “click here to see my portfolio” and link through to the page you’ve just created.

Now say you send out 20 mails on Monday. On Tuesday, you reword your mail and send out 20 more?

By looking at your stats package, you can see how many people have clicked through to your site, depending on how you phrased your email? Its not terribly scientific, but it could give you an insight into ‘what words make people click’.