Write better emails. Seriously. Once I learned how to do this, my response rate for emails jumped substantially and thankfully, it's not hard. The two areas th

Write better emails. Seriously. Once I learned how to do this, my response rate for emails jumped substantially and thankfully, it's not hard. The two areas that are the fastest to focus on optimizing are the subject line and the organization of the message body. Subject lines need to be informative and explain exactly what you're getting when you open the message. "Hi, I'm a big fan!" (email about how you'd like to meet them for coffee) vs. "Hi, I'd like to buy a cup of coffee and meet you on <date>" Second, make the email as short as possible and communicate exactly what you want up front, as quickly as possible (talking first 2-3 sentences). People have limited time to process email and many hate spending their days chained to their mail client to the point we try to get it done ASAP. Save them time and tell the recipient what you'd like the outcome to be within the first 2-3 sentences. "I'd like to meet you for coffee on DATE/TIME and discuss X, my treat. Are you available?" or "I enjoyed your work on Y and would like to interview you for an article. Are you available to chat DATE/TIME on the phone?" etc. Maximize your ask and minimize the amount of thinking they need to undertake to process it. Sometimes emails do require longer explanations for context or the reason for contacting, but that still needs to go below the initial CTA. Putting a ton of context before the CTA forces people to spend a lot of time reading your email to figure out what you want and they're more likely to just delete it. Even if you get writing emails figured out, there's no guarantee people will respond. I've sent hundreds of cold contact emails before to individuals, businesses, and other organizations and watched them disappear into the ether regardless. Ultimately, people are busy, they might not be interested in your email or what you're talking about, their spam filters might have eaten your message, they want to respond and forget to do it and you get buried under the next hundred messages, the dog chewed the ethernet cable to the SMTP server just as your email was on the wire and your message got corrupted in transit, the list of reasons is endless. Ultimately, email is asynchronous communication by design and people will handle it differently. It's frustrating when you don't get a timely response and you can choose to either send them another message or accept it as the cost of communication and move on.