The email line that's client repellent
Interesting; I ran essentially the exact same experiment a while back (June to August 2012) and had a different conclusion!<p>-- 68 incoming consulting leads<p>-- group A: responded to 34 with "let me know how I can help"<p>-- group B: responded to 34 with "would <date-and-time> work to discuss this further?"<p>-- group A: 20/34 (59%) responded, 14/20 (70%) led to contract negotiation stage<p>-- group B: 6/34 (18%) responded, 5/6 (83%) led to contract negotiation stage<p>So "let me know how I can help" outperformed (p < 0.01) suggesting a date/time.<p>There's a few possible explanations for the discrepancy:<p>* The kind of clients I had are different than Robert's clients. At the time I mostly did software engineering consulting and pair programming, and my clients were small units in mid-to-large size companies.<p>* I only ran mine on incoming leads, not outgoing (solicitation) leads. It sounds like Robert did it for everything.<p>* Content of the e-mail matters, not just the last line. Perhaps the way I write my e-mails is such that kicking the ball back to them is better for me, whereas Rob's style means a different strategy works better than him.<p>* Something changed about how people read e-mails in between my experiment and Rob's article.