Writing to people who have never heard of you

Prospecting is the harder case, and you should know that first

The published benchmarks split response by who you write to rather than by what you send them, and that split is the single most useful thing in the series for anyone considering cold mail.

Prospecting is the bottom row of both tables - roughly half the response, and a return that starts a long way below the one a house list produces. We would rather put that at the top of the page than bury it, because a buyer who walks into cold mail expecting house-list numbers concludes the channel does not work.

These are United States figures, self-reported by the marketers who ran the campaigns, and there is no equivalent Australian series. Treat them as the shape of the thing rather than a forecast of your result - the honest use is to compare channels and list types against each other, not to predict a number for your campaign.

So the order of operations matters. If you have customers you have not written to, write to them first - the lapsed ones especially. The same money does more work there, and it tells you whether mail suits your business before you spend it on strangers. Prospecting is for when you have already done that, or when you are new enough that a list is exactly what you do not have.

Named accounts, where a letter reaches a desk an email does not

The business-to-business case is the strongest one. The person you want has an inbox with a filter in front of it and a phone that screens unknown numbers. What they do not have is a way to delete an envelope with their name on it in ink.

Post rooms and receptionists triage mail the same way every day. Window envelopes, logos and franking marks go in one pile. A hand-addressed envelope with a stamp goes on the desk, because it might be personal and nobody wants to be the one who binned it. That is the whole mechanism: the envelope buys the opening, and the letter has to do the rest.

This suits short, researched lists. Forty accounts. Two hundred. Verify the name and the title first - a letter to someone who left eighteen months ago undoes the effect you paid for. Then say in the first sentence why you are writing to them, not to a category they belong to.

Farming an area, one street at a time

The other shape of cold mail is geographic. Real estate agents have done it longest, but it holds for anyone whose customers are drawn from a radius - trades, clinics, local professional firms. You pick the streets you actually want, not the whole postcode, and you write to them on a cycle.

Cadence matters more than volume. Quarterly pieces to six hundred households, each naming the street and something that has genuinely happened on it, do more than monthly mail to five thousand - written monthly, a handwritten letter stops reading as personal by the third one, which is the only thing you were paying for. The real estate page goes further into cadence and what to put in a farm letter.

For cold mail, the envelope decides everything

When you write to a customer, the envelope only has to survive a glance - your name on it is a reason to open it. A stranger has no such reason, so the envelope is not packaging. It is the whole first impression, and every decision about it is a decision about whether the letter is read at all.

• Hand-addressed, no window. A window is the most reliable signal in the pile that a machine produced what is inside.
• A stamp, not a frank. Franking marks say bulk before the envelope is turned over.
• No logo, no teaser copy. Nothing on the outside that says what it is. Curiosity is the asset.
• A return address in the same hand. It looks like a person, and it gets undeliverable mail back to you, which is how you clean a cold list.

Envelopes can be written on their own if the contents are already printed, and the longer piece on envelope marketing covers what the evidence supports.

We do not supply the list, and that changes how you plan

Autopen writes and posts. We do not sell, rent or broker data, and we have no prospect list of our own. Where your names come from is your decision - your own research, a professional body directory, a broker you engage, or a map of the streets you want. Before you buy anything, read what the Australian rules actually require, because addressed mail and email sit under different obligations and the difference surprises people.

Whatever the source, address quality decides the campaign. Mail is unforgiving in a way email is not: a wrong address is money spent on nothing, with no bounce message to tell you. Budget the time to check rather than the money to buy more names.

What to write to someone who has never heard of you

• Open with something true about them. The suburb, the site, the thing their business does. It is the proof a person chose this envelope.
• Say what you do in one sentence. Not the full range. One thing, the one relevant to them.
• Ask for something small. A short conversation, a look at something, a reply. Nobody buys from a cold letter; they agree to a next step.
• Sign it from a person with a direct number. A switchboard undoes the letter.
• Keep it to about 120 words. Long letters from strangers get put down mid-paragraph.

Volumes and what it costs

Indicative rates, exclusive of GST and postage. Minimum order 100 pieces.

• 250 named accounts, 120 words, handwritten envelope - about $3.45 a piece, $863 for the run.
• 1,000 households, 110 words, handwritten envelope - about $2.78 a piece, $2,775 for the run.

Work the cost side out before anything else. The calculator gives you a per-piece figure for any volume without asking who you are - and cold mail is the case where that number has to be held against your margin first, because the response rate will not rescue it.

When this is the wrong answer

The thing that kills prospecting is contribution margin, and it kills it at every volume. If a converted customer is worth eighty dollars in gross margin to you, then at any response rate a cold list plausibly produces, the campaign loses money - and mailing more of them loses more, because the cost per piece is close to linear. Work out what a new customer is worth before you write a word. If the answer is small, nothing about the paper, the pen or the copy will rescue it, and we would rather say so now than after the run.

It is also wrong when your own list is untouched - a business with four years of past enquiries it has never written to is holding the better-performing list and mailing the worse one - and when you cannot get accurate addresses for the people you actually want. Cold mail to an approximate list is not a cheaper version of cold mail. It is the same cost, spent on nobody.