[domodomo]

What took the longest for me wasn't the sending of the emails, but the research that went into finding who to email. This would be the same deal if I was cold calling. And I'm not sure how to automate this, you just have to slog through it. You can only call or email as many people as you can find after all. So that's the bottle neck.

So if the time investment is a wash, then it's really a question of what converts better, not based on bulk. I have a feeling calls will...but I don't have the personal data to prove it yet.

It's interesting you had bad experience with calls though. Were you selling something? Maybe that's the difference.

[dave_sullivan]

You can automate it a good deal with a mix of scraping and mturk, but that will result in both e-mails and phone #s, so your choice on what to do with them.

And experience w/ calls--I wouldn't say it was bad experience, it was just better with e-mail--tends to cut to the chase and replies are a better indication of interest. Everyone's selling something--even if you just want to talk to someone about their problems, you're still selling them on the proposition that it would be a more valuable use of their time talking to you than doing something else. And that doesn't make you a bad person, it just doesn't make a difference whether you're asking for money or someone's time.

But yeah, would be very interested to see your results w/ cold calling vs email, if you do two more rounds of e-mails and leave 3 vm messages on your cold calling before giving up, I'll bet you still do better with e-mail. But again, very interested to see your numbers, so very cool experiment!