Send the messages either before 9am or after 5pm, and avoid Mondays and Fridays. (Sundays are okay.) If you are using emails, expect a 7-9%+ response rate (excluding bounces). This rate includes all responses: positive, negative and neutral. For most newly built or purchased lists, you will get a 20-30% bounce rate, exclude those emails from your response rate calculation. So if you send 150 emails and receive 10 responses and 50 bounces, your response rate is 10% (10 responses / 100 valid emails). Be methodical in how you handle responses! Response handling is critical to make sure no responses fall through the cracks. Log them and keep them organized. I suggest you create some standard email templates you can use for your most common responses. Don’t ignore bounces—clean bad emails out of your database as they come in. Over time they’ll just clutter and fog up everything you do. Learn to love “out of office” replies—those emails have the names and contact information for more people to target, such as executive assistants who job it is to help route you to the right person in the company! Mass Email—So You Got A Response First of all LOG EVERY RESPONSE into Salesforce.com (or your Sales Force Automation System), and update the contact as necessary. Once you begin doing high-volume prospecting, sending hundreds of emails per month, it’s very easy to let great responses fall through the cracks. The goal of every mass email should be to establish and close a prospect on a next step. That next step should be either one of two things—but NOT both: Who is the best point of contact for …?” (to get a referral); Or, When is the best day/time for a quick discussion around…?” (to set up a conversation with the prospect).