This little 3-step program will help you get people to respond to your emails. Email, Wait and Follow-up. That’s all you need.

Step #1 - Send them a proper email and state what you want
Make sure the dots and spaces are all okay, and be sure to type the contact person’s name (if any) properly. DON’T CAPITALIZE EVERY CHARACTER. The contents of the email could be something along these lines:

• Email Topic: right to the point - tell what you want (like “Ad proposal” or “Possible interview with mister X” or “Publishing proposal for game Z”)
• Greetings (”Hi,”, “Dear Editors,” etc.)
• Very short description about who you are, what you do and what you want (“I’m and independent game producer at company Y and would like to discuss about a potential publishing deal with you”)
• Additional details (“Our game has got over N number of downloads and have been featured in magazines such as…. yadda yadda da… and screenshots and demo can be seen at this website: http://yourgame.com/screenshot.jpg and http://yourgame.com/demo.exe”)
• Ending (“Best Regards,” or “Regards” or something similar, depending on who you are contacting)
• Contact details (Full name, title, company name, website URL, phone number, skype, MSN/ICQ/AOL info)

Step #2 - Wait
Be patient. It may take week or month before people have time to react and response. Give them some time.

Step #3 - If you don’t get an answer, send another email and remind them gently
Follow-up is very important. After the 1st email I don’t necessarily get a response (response rate varies depending on the contact, but huge corporations don’t tend to answer easily), but after I send another email I usually get the response within days. Just remind them gently about your offer. You can forward your previous email with a reminder note if you think it sounds better.

The content of the second email could be something like this:

• Email topic: again right to the point (“Publishing proposal” or “Follow-up on publishing proposal”)
• Short greetings (“Hi,” etc.)
• Very short reminder note: (“I just wanted to follow-up on you about the publishing proposal I made some time ago. I’d really appreciate if you could find time to check out my proposal and get back to me”)
• Ending (“Best Regards”, “All the best” or something that suits you)
• Contact details (Again the same info as previously: Full name, title, company name, website URL, phone number, skype, MSN/ICQ/AOL info)

That’s it. If the second email doesn’t work, then I’d presume they are not interested in your offer. But so far I’ve got a response from everywhere I’ve contacted after the follow-up email. I expect my 100% rate drop, but I’d believe you can raise the response rate from 30-50% to 70-90% with this simple system: Email, Wait and Follow-up