With their permission, I am going to share two highly effective emails sent out by two Rassak clients. These weren’t mass-emails, mind you. They were just the opposite — sent just to a relative handful of close people.

The first came from Matt Trifiro, SVP Marketing at  Assistly. Assislty makes an awesome SaaS customer service tool. (BTW they were acquired this week by Salesforce which had an existing investment in the company — so big congrats to Matt, Alex Bard and the team!).

Assistly saw a sweet spike in social media mentions on the 28th -- two days after the news articles came out and Matt sent his mail. Evidence that the mail worked. Stats from Visible Technologies (we're giving it a trial run here at Rassak).

The day Matt sent his e-mail, Assistly had launched a new pricing and rewards program and a PR effort to get attention for the new approach. Matt’s email is pasted below in it’s entirety. He sent it to some very connected and social-media-active people — and they clearly responded, per the data. What I particularly love about Matt’s email is how specific his requests are and how easy they are to do for him — he took the time to create easy-to-follow directions and asked in a nice way.

Asking for help of the right people in the right way really helps as the chart I generated above (via social media monitoring tool Visible Technologies) shows. The data compares Assistly’s “share of voice” with that of competitor Zendesk. Note how the two run even all month until the general timing of Matt’s email. Interestingly the news articles Matt is asking people to share posted on July 26, the day of his email — and the big spike in mentions on the social web happened on the 28th … evidence that the email worked. BTW, Matt gave this template to others at Assistly and they sent similar versions to their networks of friends.

Susan Moody Prieto, Director of Marketing and Communications at Worldreader.org took a a more open-ended approach in her email. This was aimed at her internal team so her first bullet point request was really appropriate — and I like it a lot.

In many ways this was as much a team research project about who to create social media connections with as it was a call to just shout-out the good word about Worldreader. It prompted some great follow-on team mails. I’ll share a couple, again, with permission.

And from one of Susan’s team members, Jennifer Baljko, a lovely risotto analogy.

Conclusion. Networking is great online and off. And asking people to spread the word for you — when you have a good word to spread– is very powerful stuff.