How to write to info@ and other general addresses

Often the only door

In Germany every business website has to name an email address for fast electronic contact; the law on digital services requires it. More than 3.4 million German companies are small or medium-sized, over 99% of all. At a small company, the address in the imprint is often the only one written anywhere.³²

Who reads info@

Not the person who decides. The office, an assistant, sometimes the owner between two other things. Their job with each email is to sort it: answer, forward, or delete. A sales email asks them for a decision that isn’t theirs to make. So it gets deleted.

of decision makers say cold emails miss because they aren’t relevant

61%

call out generic, impersonal messages

48%

average reply rate of sales sequences¹

3%

That is with a named person on the other end. Nobody publishes reply rates for info@ as such; we found no study that measures it. What the numbers do show is what gets ignored everywhere: messages that could have gone to anyone.¹

First a question, then the offer

So the first email to a general address is not a sales email. It is a question the reader can answer in ten seconds: who looks after this, and how do I reach them? Or: could you pass this on? One sentence on who you are and what it is about, so they know where it belongs. No offer, no prices, no links.

If nobody answers within a few days, the offer follows in the same thread: one line back to the question, why you write to this company, what it gets out of it, and a request to pass it on to whoever is responsible. Still no name in the greeting. Never “Dear Sir or Madam”, and never a name you guessed.

A name changes the conversation

When the office answers “Ms Berger handles that”, the email is no longer cold. You write to Ms Berger, say who pointed you to her, and stop writing to info@. One person at a time pays off: sequences to one or two people per company get 5.1% replies, against 3.5% for three or more.¹

What not to do

• Send the full pitch, brochure and price list to info@. Nobody reading it can say yes.
• Invent a name, or put “Dear Sir or Madam” over a sales email.
• Write to info@ and several employees at once. It reads as a campaign, not a conversation.
• Follow up with “just bumping this”. Each email needs its own reason to be read.
• Skip the company because no name is published. The imprint address is a real door.

How Arlo does it

Arlo looks for people by name first. If none of their addresses checks out, it tries the company’s shared mailbox: the one its pages publish, else info@, kontakt@ or office@, checked like any other address. The email still goes to the person, by name.

If Arlo finds nobody by name, the company itself becomes the contact, and Arlo writes the way a good salesperson does:

1. Day 0A short forwarding request: who you are, what it is about, who is responsible. No offer.
2. Day 4The offer, if nobody answered, then the rest of the plan. No name in the greeting, and a request to pass it on.
3. A nameA reply naming the person responsible makes them a contact. Arlo checks their address before anything is sent, the emails to the general address stop, and that person gets a first email of their own that says who pointed Arlo to them.

Like every first email to someone new, the forwarding request waits for your approval before it goes out, unless you let Arlo send first emails on its own.