Ask HN: Why the hell can't you return my email? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Why the hell can't you return my email?

8 pointsflippyhead14 comments

OK, I guess this is a bit of a rant, but... I do not understand some companies/startups/projects that don't reply to email inquiries. Specifically, my email inquiries. But as I'm not very special, I presume these same companies/startups/projects are also ignoring many other (un)important people.

In the companies/startups/projects in which I participate, I always make it a point that I/we reply to all inquiries with an open mind and a pleasant tone. Many-a-time, I've gotten incredibly useful feedback, customer intel, or hires due to the serendipity and response to these kinds of interactions. Even Steve Jobs made time to reply (or at least appear to reply) to any and all kinds of Regular Joe's.

So seriously, I want to know: with what else exactly are you so damn busy?

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It was culture shock for me when I became a Product Manager for Database at Oracle. In one day, I was suddenly getting 50-100 phone calls every day - and even more emails than that. And these were emails/calls from all over the world. For the first few days, I wasn't even able to make it through listening to all my voicemails - I had to learn to start deleting them after two seconds if I wanted to finish vmails before lunch. Emails were the same - if I didn't recognize the sender after the first couple of sentences I just had to delete the email. And this isn't even beginning to discuss the initiatives that were on my plate already. As a Database PM, everybody wants your time and wants you to help them on their initiatives.

And I worked for Steve. He didn't answer most of his emails. He literally had a dozen secretaries screening him. Even internally, he would often simply ignore emails.

First off, I think you should consider that you do not have any right or entitlement to an (I assume) unsolicited message.

I have been on both sides of the table with this. In my own work I frequently cold contact folks who I think might be relevant leads. I also cold contact folks for any number of other reasons, if only to pick their brain.

Most of those people don't respond, and that doesn't offend me! After all, they're probably very busy people. I usually try reaching out again with a shorter message to bump their inbox. It's not at all personal, and I encourage you to detach from the idea that a response has anything to do with you as a person (it may, but it is likely just as frequenly irrelevant).

Now, for my work I receive anywhere from 50-100 emails a day. This is not quite as much as the Oracle PM who also responded in this thread, but let me demonstrate why it is not feasible to respond to them all. During my day, I:

• Work, for 8 hours, between 9 and 5, with larger or smaller breaks for eating and unloading my brain. I don't have a commute because I work from home.

• Go to the gym, for an hour (not including commute, 20 minutes each way).

• Cook dinner, about an hour. Eat dinner with significant other, another hour.

• Develop a side project which may or may not become profitable in the future, a few hours.

• Watch whatever TV show I'm not caught up on, at least an hour.

• Spend miscellaneous time with my significant other, up to a few hours. May overlap with TV show.

• Sleep, at least 8 hours.

• Read social media/tech/financial/industry news, an hour or two distributed throughout the day.

...etc.

Like I said, it's not personal. I have a finite amount of time, and I'm not generally willing to compromise my time for an unsolicited message unless it's from someone I know or it's a compelling message from someone I don't.

With two kids under 4 I sometimes don't have time to respond to my Mum's email, let alone the OP's :-o.

I'm the founder of https://touchingbase.io which provides follow up and analysis for Gmail.

As part of our analysis, we count the number of emails that are deemed important (they have responded to).

Our top 3 customers in terms of email volume over the past year are:

* 22474 emails over 2717 contacts

* 21018 emails over 1299 contacts

* 18058 emails over 1800 contacts

That works out to 50-60 important emails received and sent PER DAY. Remember, this is email they have actually replied to. It doesn't include newsletters and other email they deemed not important enough to respond.

Keep in mind, these people have other things to do besides responding to email.

Can you post a sample email that you're not getting a reply to? Chances are, you're not making them self-interested enough.

Write better emails. Seriously. Once I learned how to do this, my response rate for emails jumped substantially and thankfully, it's not hard.

The two areas that are the fastest to focus on optimizing are the subject line and the organization of the message body.

Subject lines need to be informative and explain exactly what you're getting when you open the message.

"Hi, I'm a big fan!" (email about how you'd like to meet them for coffee)

vs.

"Hi, I'd like to buy a cup of coffee and meet you on <date>"

Second, make the email as short as possible and communicate exactly what you want up front, as quickly as possible (talking first 2-3 sentences). People have limited time to process email and many hate spending their days chained to their mail client to the point we try to get it done ASAP. Save them time and tell the recipient what you'd like the outcome to be within the first 2-3 sentences. "I'd like to meet you for coffee on DATE/TIME and discuss X, my treat. Are you available?" or "I enjoyed your work on Y and would like to interview you for an article. Are you available to chat DATE/TIME on the phone?" etc. Maximize your ask and minimize the amount of thinking they need to undertake to process it. Sometimes emails do require longer explanations for context or the reason for contacting, but that still needs to go below the initial CTA. Putting a ton of context before the CTA forces people to spend a lot of time reading your email to figure out what you want and they're more likely to just delete it.

Even if you get writing emails figured out, there's no guarantee people will respond. I've sent hundreds of cold contact emails before to individuals, businesses, and other organizations and watched them disappear into the ether regardless. Ultimately, people are busy, they might not be interested in your email or what you're talking about, their spam filters might have eaten your message, they want to respond and forget to do it and you get buried under the next hundred messages, the dog chewed the ethernet cable to the SMTP server just as your email was on the wire and your message got corrupted in transit, the list of reasons is endless. Ultimately, email is asynchronous communication by design and people will handle it differently. It's frustrating when you don't get a timely response and you can choose to either send them another message or accept it as the cost of communication and move on.

> the dog chewed the ethernet cable to the SMTP server just as your email was on the wire and your message got corrupted in transit

Haha, excellent example

Edit: I'd also like to say I agree with you. I notice I tend to write too much, and some times the recipient isn't even reading the whole mail because they ask a question which I've already addressed in the first mail.

Why the hell can't you return my email? With what else exactly are you so damn busy?

Do you use this tone when writing your emails? Perhaps that has a relation to your observed outcome.

Among my business partners, we talk about "brain cycles" rather than time. There's the famous explanation that Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg wore/wear the same boring thing every day to conserve brain cycles -- basically the need to process information and make a decision.

Emails gobble up brain cycles, and you can't just stay up longer to get those back. You actually have to rest and sleep. They're more precious than time as an input for a decision maker.

So it's not that it's personal. People just can't respond to everything, and you don't always make the cutoff. If you really think you have something valuable to talk to them about, email them 4 to 5 times before you give up (usually a few days to a week between emails is the way to go, depending on how urgent it is).

Had a job in an operations / service quality as manager in a large bank. Institutional side, not consumer, so questions were often tricky or a case of "How the hell did this person think of this?"

Not customer support, just operations. Mainly working on regional projects, which most enquiries pertained to.

About 400 emails per day, from real people. Calls - almost none, mainly me calling other people back because their emails were confusing, and on some occasions playing good cop/bad cop with my boss playing the other role (super internal politics).

But answered every one of them. Only possible because I had a really fantastic team.

We took pride in what we did, because with our own projects we'd be left waiting days, weeks, with no answers from internal customers, despite telephone calls, promises, often for really simple tasks.

Go the extra mile. It's not that tough. Have an empty inbox at the end of the day. And don't shoulder the burden. Coach those around you to take off that burden, it makes the job much much easier. Relationships forged can be really great, just by hitting reply. And sleep much easier just by knowing everything has been done.

Nice people don't reply negatively.

Besides, your messaging clearly sucks.

Here's a thought provoking Godin blog-post on prospects.

Your prospects are hiding > http://sethgodin.typepad.com/seths_blog/2016/01/hiding.html

On a tangent I really believe you should never use a donotreply@ email address on your companies communications. You're missing tons of valuable feedback and opportunities to help cumstomers.

As a "regular joe", receiving a reply from someone I admire is a great feeling. Richard Stallman and Noam Chomsky come to mind.

I think a lot of people hold their hands close to their chest if they think you're a competitor.

What kind of information/response are you looking for in your emails?

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