I have a new challenge

Good morning!

This is my weekly buy-a-business update. Some weeks things are going great. Like the weeks:

• I talked to a ready-to-sell ecom owner with government contracts

• The week I said the idea to buy an offmarket Boomer owned digital business keeps getting better.

This week was not one of those weeks.

I have an issue: owners aren’t responding to my emails.

In the last couple of weeks, I sent 35 highly targeted emails (not an email blast) to leads. The result? Crickets. No responses.

It’s odd, because the ~15 emails prior to that got 9 responses

Streak (my Gmail CRM) tells me 9 of my last 35 emails were opened. That’s a 25% open rate, which is not good.

I think one of a few things may be going on:

• I’m targetting businesses SO neglected that even their email is neglected. For example, I got a bounce back on one website’s public sales email address. Yikes.

• Streak’s email tracking software is interfering with my deliverability

• My email account is getting penalized/flagged by email firewalls

Streak

I’m going to reach out to Streak to see if there is any history of their email tracking interfering with deliverability. My drop in response rate coincides almost perfectly with the period I started sending the emails from Streak.

Now that I’m thinking about it, I’ll probably just turn off Streak tracking altogether this week and see what happens.

My email account

All seller inquiry emails are going out from my personal Gmail address… with good reason.

I believe the sellers I’m trying to reach are WAY more inclined to open an email from “mikemclean154@gmail” than a branded domain.

It also adds to the persona I’m trying to build.

I’m a regular guy looking for a business to buy, and yours caught my eye. I’m not a private equity fund. I’m sending the inquiry from my personal email account. I think the sellers I’m trying to attract resonate with that.

That said, I wonder if using a personal email is hurting my deliverability.

Mail tester gives me a 7.2/10 out of 10, so I’m not overly worried.

But, I have a couple of ideas I can pursue:

• Open new Gmail addresses (keep total sending down by spreading out my outreach between multiple emails)

• Use an email warmup tool like Warmup Inbox

Just keep going

Maybe when you’re targeting websites as outdated as mine, you need to:

• Expect a high bounce rate (or a lot of unopened) and email more

• Pick up the phone

I found an ecom business that sells spices and teas. It had a great brand and an extremely outdated website. I purchased a $5 bottle of fajita seasoning to use as an “in” before contacting the owner.

Problem is… every email I use bounces.

So someone clearly has a functioning business with no email address. Crazy.

I will try to call this business this week.

Thanks for reading this week.

Mike