How many businesses to contact in a week

You have a list of three hundred records and the urge to write to all of them looks reasonable. Everyone who follows that urge ends up in the same place: by week three, behind on replies, forgetting follow-ups, sitting on a burned sending history.

The limit isn’t sending

Writing a message takes five minutes. Reading a reply, actually looking at that business’s site, writing a second message specific to the person and arranging a call takes half an hour.

So the number that governs volume is not your sending capacity but your reply capacity. Send fifty and get five replies and you have two and a half hours of work that week. Send two hundred and it becomes ten hours, and those ten hours land on top of something else.

The arithmetic has to run backwards: how many hours can you give, what is your reply rate, how long does one reply cost you. What comes out of those three is how many messages you can send that week.

If you don’t know your reply rate

On the first round you don’t know it, and measuring is faster than guessing. Start with a batch of twenty, wait two weeks, count the replies.

Twenty is a small number statistically, and you are not after a precise rate. You are after an order of magnitude: zero replies, two, or eight. Those three call for completely different plans, and twenty sends is enough to tell them apart.

The same batch also tells you about the message itself. No replies at all means the problem is not volume; it is the message or the targeting.

The second benefit of small batches

Splitting the volume has a benefit unrelated to measurement: you can fix the message.

Write to three hundred people at once and you have shown one flaw in your message to three hundred people. Move in batches of twenty and the second batch goes out with what you learned from the first. What you learn is usually predictable: the subject line is too long, the opening sentence is about you, the screenshot is missing.

Domain reputation is a limit too

There is a technical limit that gets overlooked. Hundreds of emails suddenly leaving a new domain is a familiar pattern to mail providers, and the response is the spam folder.

Which makes low volume in the first weeks a deliverability measure rather than a discipline. Ramping up gradually is what gets your messages as far as the inbox.

Counting follow-ups as volume

The most common planning mistake is leaving follow-ups out of the arithmetic. Forty new messages this week means forty follow-ups next week. By week three you have forty new plus eighty follow-ups, and you seize up.

There are two ways out. Either you keep the weekly count of new sends low enough to leave room for follow-up, or you cap the number of follow-ups. Both are acceptable; being undecided is not, because under indecision the follow-ups are always what gets dropped, and follow-ups are the class of message that brings the most replies.

A practical starting point: twenty new businesses a week, at most one follow-up each. That stretches a three-hundred-record list over fifteen weeks. It sounds long, and at the end of it you still have a working sending address and a method you have actually tested.