Even if you’re the best, it’s not going to get you anywhere if your email isn’t as professional as you state you are.
With the upcoming ELIA event in mind, “Together”, Elia’s Freelancer and Language Company Event, set to kick off this month in Barcelona Spain from February 21-22 we wanted to give you a few tips that would help you get picked up by an LSP as a partnering freelancer. We receive hundreds of emails from professional translators every month. But guess what? Even if you’re the best it’s not going to get you anywhere if your email isn’t as professional as you state you are. So we went through our inbox and here are a few tips that’ ll get you on track in the right direction if you’re a freelancer looking to work with an LSP.
1. Don’t make it look like SPAM
It’s always one and the same. Statements like, “TOP quality translation”, “Best in the profession”, “Highly qualified” these are things you find in each and every email you get from freelancers. The same list of qualities are listed and nothing more. At times, it can feel like you’re reading the same email over and over again.
2. Be original
Get out of the box! Whenever we see the same old predictable type email from a freelancer, we stop reading it because we know what follows. So why don’t you try something new or different?
Add value to your email. Show us what you have up your sleeve. We want to know what you can do for us and why we should choose you. Are you fast? Do you work with CAT tools? Talk about these sorts of things. Show us the benefit of working with you. These are the things that we need to know and want to hear about.
3. Send to real potential vendors, not everyone
When we see an email from a Dutch to English translator and we’re not even offering this language pair, all it says is that you haven’t bothered to check if we are a potential customer of yours. That is simply not going to get you picked up. You are wasting your time as well as ours.
So, do your research first. Check out the company you are sending your CV to. Does it have the languages you offer? If not, then the chances of them picking you are pretty slim.
4. Don’t send to a generic email – the chances of getting noticed are close to zero
You know that in most of the big companies there are special people called Vendor Managers, right? Well, in today’s digital era, you can easily find their emails and go directly for them instead of writing to the generic email. Find their name and write to them personally. It does make a big difference and the chances of your email getting lost among all those SPAM messages is much smaller. Additionally, you avoid the possibility of meeting the first barrier in a company – a gatekeeper, who will most likely just skip your email.
5. Check the CV formatting and adapt it to the relevant market
There are plenty of well-structured CV templates that you can use out there. The most important information that you need to share should be in the email. The rest can be neatly structured in a CV format. This makes it a lot easier for all of us.