Training for Translators

Classes for translators and interpreters

warm e-mail


Corinne McKay

Warm e-mail marketing: a success story

In 2014, I listened to two episodes of Tess Whitty’s podcast Marketing Tips for Translators that got me thinking about the whole “warm e-mail marketing” idea. Tess interviewed Joanne Archambault about marketing to direct clients that you can’t meet in person and then interviewed Ed Gandia about his warm e-mail marketing system, including his online class on the topic. I’ve always been a bit wary of e-mail marketing (seems spammy, hard to find the right contact person, hard to know what to say), and I’ve generally stuck with letters, postcards,  in-person networking and referrals to find my direct clients. But these two podcast episodes made me think a) maybe it’s just that I’m approaching e-mail marketing in the wrong way, b) it’s good to evolve and try new things and c) now that I travel for the ATA Board, I have less time to travel to client conferences, so e-mail marketing might be worth a shot.

First, I downloaded Ed’s free cheat sheet on warm e-mail marketing. The whole idea, drastically simplified, is to send short, highly personalized e-mails to potential clients, and to hopefully create a meaningful connection that might lead to some work. The concept appealed to me, so I signed up for the next session of Ed’s warm e-mail marketing class. Again, I was a little skeptical: I’m not a huge fan of pre-packaged online classes where there’s no interaction with the instructor, but the registration fee of under $200 was low-risk, and I forced myself to carve out the time to listen to all of the audio lessons over the course of a couple of weeks. Then, it was time to give the system a try.

My first two e-mails were to potential international development clients who had recently won a big contract involving French-speaking countries; I felt positive about what I wrote, but got no response from the recipients. But I forged on, surmising that I needed to send at least 10 e-mails before I could get a representative sample. My next e-mail was to a publishing house that I’d contacted a couple of years ago with a book translation idea. At that time, the publisher was interested, but the foreign rights arrangement was complicated and the project ultimately fizzled. Flash forward to a few months ago, when I read an excerpt from an interesting book by a French author, and out of curiosity I went to her website to learn more about her. Whoa; right there on the “News” page, the author (whose books are selling really well in Europe), stated that she was actively looking for an English-language publisher, and her books struck me as being right up the alley of the publishing house I’d contacted back in 2012. So, I composed a warm e-mail to my contact person, along the lines of, “I’m not presuming that you’d hire me, but here’s a potential translation that looks like a great fit for your audience.”

Within a day, I got a response from my contact person, saying that she’d look into the book I had suggested, and that as luck would have it, the publishing house had just acquired the translation rights to another French book on a similar topic, and would I be interested in submitting a sample? Well, right there, I knew that the time and money I invested in Ed’s class had just paid off: I had resisted the urge to write a long e-mail, to be overly self-promotional, or to just ping my contact person for no apparent reason (“Got any work for me?”). I had shared a piece of useful information, and it had really paid off. So, I’m excited to say that I submitted a sample, the publisher was happy with it, and I’m now under contract to translate the book between now and May…at which point I can tell you the details instead of referring to the project in veiled terms! But the point being, give warm e-mail marketing a try…


Corinne McKay

Marketing by e-mail, on paper, or both

In marketing your freelance services, you may wonder (or at least I do!) whether it’s better to market to direct clients by e-mail, on paper, or both. I don’t have a succinct answer to that, but here are a few thoughts.

For a long time, I was a devotée of marketing on paper: writing out a full-page cover letter, attaching my resumé and a business card, sticking it all in an envelope and mailing it to the potential client. I also did a number of postcard marketing campaigns, and I do think there’s a place for paper marketing materials:

  1. They stand out: most people’s postal mail is 95% ads and bills. So, although your marketing packet is a type of ad, it’s also interesting, and personalized, and shows that you took more than 30 seconds to put something together for this potential candidate.
  2. They stick around: once someone deletes an e-mail, it’s gone. But I’ve gotten inquiries from clients (literally) years after I sent them a marketing pitch in the mail, because my business card was still kicking around their office.
  3. They let you say more than you would in an e-mail: no one is going to read an e-mail that’s the equivalent of a full-page cover letter. But I’ve had fairly good success with full-page cover letters sent in the mail. They let you describe your recent projects, something about the client that makes you feel there’s a good fit, etc.

The downside of paper marketing materials is that they’re time-consuming and potentially costly to create and send, and your prospect has to make a very deliberate effort (in the form of calling or e-mailing you) to respond. There’s no reply button on a paper letter, so the prospect has to be really interested in order to follow up.

Just because I wondered what I might be missing, I recently joined Ed Gandia’s Warm E-mail Prospecting course. It’s online and self-paced, and I really like it. It’s helped me see the advantages of e-mail marketing–not blast e-mails that you send to 1,000 potential prospects with one click, but short (125 words or less), targeted, personalized e-mails that you send when you see a meaningful connection between you and the potential client. The appeal:

  1. They’re short: it takes me under one minute to read 125 words. I get a lot of unsolicited e-mail (marketing pitches from other translators, requests for information about freelancing, requests to speak or write or present, etc.) and when I open an e-mail and it’s short, personalized and to the point, I actually feel interested in reading it (here’s something written just for me and it will take two seconds…maybe it’s interesting!). But when I open an unsolicited e-mail and it’s 500 words, or begins with “I’d like to start by telling you about myself,” I often leave the e-mail “for later,” which usually means much later, or if the e-mail isn’t personalized, I end up deleting it without reading it.
  2. They invite immediate action: if your prospect is interested, they can click Reply, and simply answer, “Sounds interesting; can you send me some more information?” or “We may need someone like you in the future; feel free to connect with me on LinkedIn,” and they’re done with it.
  3. They’re easy to create once you get the hang of it: and easy is good. Easy is what gets done. Instead of tailoring the cover letter, then printing it, then printing your resumé, then locating a business card and an envelope, then stressing about whether the paper should be white or off-white, and whether it’s OK to use your leftover Christmas stamps on business letters, and so on, you just fire the thing off and you’re done.

Readers, other thoughts on this?