Thanks for the post, really usefull. But what is the general response rate to this kind of emails, does anyone has any stats?
Personally, I always click spam on that kind of thing unless I've shown somewhere that I'm actively searching.
But this is true.
Also the advice about including a specific actionable time to make the next step is golden. Telling people exactly what you want converts best in most scenarios.
Case in point, a few months ago Udacity sent me an e-mail which went in some detail about a blog post I'd written, some of my Stack Overflow answers...it was pretty clear the person writing had actually taken the time to read some of my stuff, so even though I wasn't looking at the time I wrote back to thank them.
As other people have pointed out, this also works the other way round. I actually 'reverse cold-recruited' an interview out of Stripe a year ago using the same methods, just applied from the perspective of the job hunter rather than the recruiter.