If you are writing to a 10,000-person company, info@ will not get you to the CEO. Small businesses don’t work like that. At a ten-person company the shared inbox is the owner’s inbox, and our own campaigns say it is the best address on the list.
Who reads info@
At a 5, 10 or 20-person business there is no inbound team. The inbox on the website is checked by the owner, the founder, the office manager, or whoever signs off on purchases, and often that is one person. A message there lands with someone who can say yes.
The numbers
We learned this running campaigns at our agency, cold.email. Across those campaigns, roughly 90% of the opportunities from unique companies come from emails found on company websites rather than from our named decision-maker data alone. Using both kinds of email gives us about 10× the opportunities of decision-maker data on its own.
Coverage explains most of it. In our 1,000-company test, ListMiner found a named decision maker at 144 companies. Adding the emails published on the companies’ own sites took that to 570.
How to write to a shared inbox
- Write to the business, not a title. “I’m writing to whoever handles the website at Acme Paving” reads better than a guessed first name.
- Make it easy to forward. Whoever opens it is usually the person, and if not, they will pass it on. One sentence on why, one ask.
- Keep it short. These inboxes get quotes, invoices and spam. Four lines beat fourteen.
- Use the specific inbox when there is one. A site that publishes
estimating@orsales@is telling you which desk buys.
How ListMiner finds them
ListMiner opens the site the way a visitor would and collects the inboxes it publishes: info@, sales@, contact@, and the specific ones like estimating@. Each address is verified live before it ships, and a generic email costs one token where a named decision maker costs two.
Ask for both. The named contact is the one you want; the shared inbox is the one that answers.