Email Outreach – Email Outreach: The Ultimate Guide
Disclaimer: In this email outreach guide, there aren’t any magic tricks, quick fixes, or undiscovered methods that will generate thousands of links for you. This guide’s main goal is to show you how to start obtaining links more quickly and easily, but not automatically. You probably won’t get any links at all from email outreach in the first month, but don’t let that deter you. It is comparable to the sales process, which does not produce results right away. But if you follow the appropriate procedures, you’ll receive more links each month than you did the month before.
If you haven’t previously built links using email outreach, you need to make every effort to get ready for it and study as much as you can to avoid the most common blunders.
First and foremost, you must become more resilient and prepare yourself for rejection, as there will be plenty of it, especially in the beginning.
I’ll tell you straight up: email outreach is a challenging and time-consuming procedure. It cannot be emphasized enough that when people advocate using this strategy, they often neglect to explain the time, energy, and emotional commitment it requires. But the result is wholly worthwhile. Building relationships pays off in the long run, and links obtained through email outreach are of the best quality.
Why then should you bother with email outreach if getting links through it is so difficult and time-consuming?
- It’s unpaid (except for the cost of your time)
- Within well-written content articles, links are placed on the pertinent websites.
Link Purchasing
Finding chances for link building is the art of link prospecting. It is the primary talent of a link builder, and the future success of a campaign depends entirely on it.
Although they are undoubtedly widespread, traditional methods of link prospecting don’t seem to be very efficient. The quantity of outreach emails that arrive in my inbox every day simply serves to reinforce that. They must have fairly satisfying outcomes, or else people wouldn’t frequently use them. Even we occasionally go back to these tactics to locate fresh opportunities for link development for clients who have previously created thousands of connections.
Additionally, I strongly advise comparing old approaches to “the smart link prospecting methods” in order to feel the difference; the latter enables you to collect connections more quickly and easily.
conventional techniques
One time, I got a copy of an outreach email encouraging me to join a group of wedding planners. Despite the fact that I had just a short while earlier planned my own wedding, this email was immediately flagged as spam. You must thus send emails ONLY to the pertinent websites that provide content similar to what you are about to pitch in order to avoid being branded a spammer.
Since “capture ’em all” wasn’t on my radar, the approaches that are outlined here are not the only ones that exist. I merely want to offer you an outline of the most widely used tactics and, more importantly, how you may use them to your advantage.
Traditional technique No. cleaning up the SERPs (with the help of free and paid tools)
With the correct set of search phrases, anything may be found in the vast library of resources that is Google SERPs. If you know the correct search operator, you can even locate gated content, which websites only let you download after providing your email address.
This is how it goes. Users can download research from this page by completing a somewhat involved contact form. The link to the.pdf file will, however, appear in the top search result if you use this search operator.
Finding all content pages from which you might be able to obtain a link is your first chore since link building is obtaining a link from one piece of content to another. Scraping the SERPs is the quickest approach to locating it. Furthermore, you won’t unintentionally capture deindexed pages if you do this. Penalized websites, for instance, can still be included in roundups and lists, but pitching to them is pointless. It’s best to have no links there at all because they not only receive no organic traffic but are also harmful to your backlink profile.
Step 1. The process of compiling the search operators
Creating a list of search operators is the first step in scraping the SERPs. A search operator is a line of text that contains your target search phrases and instructs the search engine to only return results that meet your criteria.
Let’s imagine that “email outreach” is your intended search keyword. So, the appropriate search operators to employ are:
Inurl:email-outreach. When you apply this operator, Google will display the webpages whose URL addresses include the word “email-outreach.”
Email outreach, in title. You can view the pages with “email outreach” in their titles by using this operator.
You can use the following kind of operator to look for possibilities to guest blog in your particular niche:
(intitle “[write for us]” OR “write for me” OR “guest contributor”) “[your keyword]”
Here is one instance. Say you’re seeking for possibilities to guest blog on sites that discuss SEO:
‘SEO’ (intitle: ‘write for us,’ ‘write for myself,’ ‘become a contributor,’ etc.)
You can find a list of pages with the word “SEO” in their title and a mention of offering a guest blogging opportunity in any way by typing it into the search field.
Try using these words as page titles instead:
criteria for guest posts
author post
blogging best practices
criteria for guest posts
guest post
send a guest posting
allowing guest posting
donate to this website
Examining websites where other subject-matter experts post is another approach to discovering ones that permit guest blogging.
Step 2. Collecting data.
It’s time to scrape the SERPs once you’ve created a list of keywords and search operators. The hard part comes at this point. In a spreadsheet, you can technically copy and paste each of the generated URLs, but that doesn’t sound like much fun, does it? The alternatives are as follows.
scraping using tools that are FREE
Despite their allure, free tools have one significant drawback: they frequently don’t function. That’s the situation we have to deal with, therefore let’s leave it up to the software provider’s judgment.
The tools I’ve included here have all been thoroughly reviewed by me, so I can attest to their dependability and the fact that they are completely free.
URL Profiler’s SERPs Scaper
Like any free tool, it has a considerable deal of drawbacks. Mandatory desktop installation is one of them. This alternative might not be the best one for you if, like me, you prefer to employ cloud-based solutions.
You can start scraping the SERPs after installing this software. The tool’s primary restriction is that it only presents 100 URLs in response to each search request.
You can receive results tailored to your country by using the SERPs Scraper tool, which supports a number of nations including Canada, Australia, the UK, and a few others.
You will receive a.csv file containing all the information that the tool extracts from Google.
Toolbar SEOquake
I personally prefer this one. It also displays a number of other page metrics, such as the number of backlinks and the volume of organic traffic for each scraped page, in addition to the URLs. Both stats were obtained from SEMrush.
Setting up your browser to serve 100 search results on each page is the only thing you need to do before beginning the procedure. Go to Search Settings by clicking Settings and then selecting that option.
After that, pick “Results per page” and set it to 100 by tapping it.
Finally, you may use the tool’s Export CSV button to see the kinds of pages it offers you:
Hint: You can limit your view to pages generated in the last day, week, month, etc. by choosing the page creation time period. You can select to just evaluate recent content in this manner.
scavenging using paid tools
One significant advantage of paid tools is that the creator maintains them and they are typically more dependable. I tested a number of these and found them to be quite helpful, so I feel like recommending them in this manual.
ScreamingFrog
Although I’m not a huge fan of desktop installable tools, this one is relatively inexpensive and has strong features. For those who formerly fell in love with DOS and enjoy the command line interface, this might be the ideal match.
You can essentially generate as many requests in it as you like.
Info for SEO
If you know how to code or have a developer on hand, this is a good alternative for you. You have access to the SERPs using the tool provider’s API, therefore you may use it to collect virtually any data from the SERP.
It’s important to note that this program is incredibly cost-effective when compared to others because you just pay $1 USD for each Google request, meaning that for $100 USD you can evaluate 100 keywords.
Recycle Box
This gadget is an excellent substitute for Screaming Frog and is even less expensive.
It’s a terrific offer to obtain lifetime access for only $67 USD. You can use this program to scrape websites in addition to the SERPs to find particular content pages on industry blogs.
Pitchbox
Pitchbox is a full-cycle email outreach program. The associated content pages’ contact details, including email addresses, are also discovered in addition to the SERPs. Additionally, it enables you to organize the returned pages, create outreach templates, plan follow-up emails, and manage your entire outreach campaign in one location.
Pitchbox’s only drawback is that it’s fairly expensive; as a result, a beginner will likely find it difficult to use. On the other hand, large agencies would greatly profit from it.
Conventional technique No2. Trying to find broken links
Another well-liked link-building tactic involves looking for broken links on websites with material related to your pitch.
A broken link is one that, to put it simply, “doesn’t work.” It either doesn’t open or generates a 404 error.
Since links are a type of digital currency in online marketing, I honestly don’t think this method can help you get a ton of links. People only intentionally link to other websites; they never do it at random. This means that if a link is broken and you notify the website owner, they have no incentive to connect back to your site.
Additionally, your content must truly merit their attention since, believe me, the vast majority of online information isn’t even worth a quick glance.
Last but not least, always verify the nature of the content on the “broken” page. Use the Wayback Machine to view the contents it featured to accomplish this. The page that linked to it can then be added to your list of prospects.
Tools like Ahrefs or Majestic can assist you in quickly gathering all the broken pages for any chosen domain if you don’t like doing human labor. The greatest drawback of this strategy is that you have to create a list of websites for analysis because these tools don’t let you detect broken links by just browsing through SERPs for your field.
However, there is one tool that can be useful. You can choose the keywords that ought to appear on the pages that have broken links using Broken Link Builder. This reasoning is much more logical because you can retrieve a list of pages that are pertinent to your pitch instead of having to individually check each domain.
Tip: Always confirm that a broken link is actually broken. Countless links that Ahrefs and other programs claimed to be broken but which were actually working perfectly were discovered by me.
The final choice is to use Broken Link Checker, a free Chrome plugin that scans an active page for broken links. Like any “brute force” strategy, this one takes a lot of time.
But if you’re looking into a listing, resource page, roundup, or other website with a lot of outbound connections, it might be helpful.
Typical technique in examining the links of rivals
A excellent link building target is very likely to be a site that links to your competitors. You may examine the backlink profile for any domain using tools like Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, SEMrush, CognitiveSEO, and LinkResearchTools, and you can compile a list of potential customers.
But now comes the hard part. It’s just impossible to assess every single backlink in some domains’ massive backlink profiles, which contain thousands of backlinks. Here is a solution to this problem:
To find the best pages based on the quantity of referring domains, use the Ahrefs report “Best by links.” Moving on, you can use the export function or conduct a direct search for pertinent pages in this report.
The next step is to use filters to choose the websites that are pertinent to your pitch topic, and then among those websites, pick the pages that link to the websites of your rivals. In this case, I searched mangools.com for all the pages that link to a specific page:
The benefits and drawbacks of conventional link prospecting techniques
These are the conventional link prospecting techniques that are most in demand.
Since the devil is in the details and what didn’t work for one company can perform well for your site thanks to your own efforts and the nuances of your niche, I’ll leave the judgment about their effectiveness up to you.
Let’s just list their advantages and disadvantages.
On the plus side, thousands of marketers have long used classic link prospecting techniques, so their results may be accurately forecasted. If you have endless time resources and are willing to devote them to your campaign, there’s a good probability that you’ll pick up a few high-quality connections.
That isn’t always the case, though, particularly for freelancers and tiny businesses. Since you’ll be contacting people who have never heard of you or your website while doing traditional link prospecting, you’re almost certainly going to get rejected most of the time.
clever link prospecting techniques
Let’s now examine what else is available. As I’ve said before, I don’t think traditional link prospecting is very productive because it takes a lot of time and offers few chances of success.
Broken link creation, SERP scraping, and similar tactics have a serious drawback: they are incredibly impersonal. These methods concentrate on locating pertinent websites but leave open the possibility of connection. Even if you believe your pitch is the best fit for the site, the owner can disagree.
Why should they communicate with you or, even worse, link back to you if they have never heard of you?
In a recent study, Brian Dean found that an outreach email’s average response rate is only 8.8%. Can you estimate how many of those emails you’ll need to send in order to create just a few links, given that not every response results in a link? I’d venture thousands. What then is the fix?
Simple is the response (but not easy). You should concentrate on two things in your link prospecting strategy:
Relevancy. Your content should be specifically tailored to the readers of your link prospects’ blogs and should flow naturally from their editorial schedule.
Trust. People are more likely to respond if they have heard of your company, and this likelihood increases if they follow you on social media. Additionally, it would be fantastic if they had a good experience working with your business.
When these two things come together, people are incredibly receptive and eager to work with you to establish links. Let me give you an example: with prospects like these, we can establish links quickly and without any hassle.
So, are you interested in learning how to compile a list of such prospects? Don’t worry; they are right here.
Examine your circles.
Your brand must have a network of partners and customers as a result of your marketing and sales activities, so why not look for link prospects among them? An other location to look for chances is within your social media followers.
Review your partners, customers, and subscribers.
You need to compile a list of prospects first. Simply export your client’s contacts from your CRM system if you have one. If you don’t want to collect their names from their website, a lot of their emails are business-related, so you may verify the domain there.
In MS Excel, determining the domain name from the email address is rather straightforward. Choose Split to columns from the menu after selecting the email addresses column. Select the Other option to separate the portion that follows @.
You must organize the domains list once your column has been divided into two. Remove all duplicates and free email addresses like Gmail, Yahoo, etc. first.
Apply the Vlookup formula to the list of free email domains as follows:
=VLOOKUP(B2;Sheet2!A:A;1;FALSE)
The next step is to pick every one of the generated cells, run the Vlookup formula on them, and then paste the values as seen in the screenshot below. All that is left to do is filter the column and remove every line that was detected.
On social media
The people that follow you on social media are typically lot more receptive than random people. If people follow you, it’s obvious that they are interested in your brand, therefore you don’t need to go into great detail when you get in touch.
However, there are a few challenging situations, as it always does in online marketing. LinkedIn and Facebook don’t completely reveal the list of users who have liked your page. That is formally attributable to their privacy policy, which makes sense.
Rumor has claimed that this is only done to hide the fact that the majority of pages, even those that are highly popular, have a bot army among their followers.
Facebook still has a workaround where you may view who has liked your page over a specific time period. Visit the page for your brand and select the Notifications tab to view it. Then click the notification that says “X liked your page.”
Finally, you can see on both social networking sites who has liked or shared your posts. Although it does involve some manual labor, the outcome is well worthwhile because those who engage with your content are among the most receptive people.
Connecting with people on LinkedIn is also quite convenient if you realize that their firm or job description is pertinent to your presentation. I discovered Laura from the Verve Search liked our LinkedIn article through this, so I’m going to request a connection with her now.
Find out more about the people who have previously referenced your brand.
Another intriguing audience group consists of those who have ever mentioned your company in a guest post. You must begin regularly monitoring brand references if you want to find them. Use of Google Alerts is the simplest and least expensive method. You can also use paid tools like Ahrefs, Brand24, SEMrush, and Mention. You must take action as soon as you see that a guest writer has mentioned something.
Search for the author’s name on BuzzSumo:
There is a good likelihood that they will mention you again if you ask them to if they mentioned you the first time without any further effort on your part. People frequently write for many sites, so if you can connect with 10–20 of these writers, links will start to pour in quickly.
Communities and business organizations
Your affiliation with several industry organizations can be a further source of connection opportunities. Facebook closed groups are my favorite due of their enhanced capabilities. There, you can see a list of the group’s participants, join a lively debate, and then get in touch with other participants. I participate in a number of private Facebook groups, some of which are incredibly interesting. Your aim should be to join a group that often has interesting debates because it’s the kind of setting where you can meet potential link partners.
Next, what?
Marketing professionals frequently overlook the value of connections when beginning an outreach campaign.
They entirely overlook their already established network, including partners, clients, and social media followers, in search of outreach prospects. However, that is actually one of the most valuable resources for link building.
However, it must not be overlooked that in order for an outreach campaign to generate links, the targets must be correctly assessed and filtered so that only the opportunities with the greatest chance of success remain.
Remove pointless websites
Not every website deserves to be on your list of prospects. You certainly don’t anticipate your link prospecting targets being blocked by Google the following day. But the sad reality is that a lot of websites employ dubious marketing strategies, so it would be pointless to try and obtain links from them.
Furthermore, it’s not always about how poisonous their practices are. Due to the type of information, they publish or the agreements they have with their authors, some websites merely don’t permit the possibility of getting a link there.
Let’s examine the main categories of websites that, in terms of outreach, are not deserving of your time.
DA lower than XX domains
Since each analytics tool employs a distinct set of metrics and computation techniques, the real amount varies depending on the tool. For instance, the four most popular tools each have a separate domain authority on digitalolympus.net:
Moz – 37
49 Ahrefs – 49
Elegant – 38
SEMrush – 40
Domains and phrases with no organic traffic
If you work with domains that have a DA of more than 30 according to Ahrefs, they most likely already have some organic traffic or at the very least rank in the top 20 for a significant number of keywords.
However, if you want to increase your profit margins, make sure the website you are targeting receives at least a few organic views. With the use of Ahrefs, Majestic, or SEMrush’s bulk checker, you can examine up to 200 URLs at once.
Websites with unnatural link profiles
In order to perform a rapid audit of a website, I often open the list of all referring domains and arrange them according to domain authority. After that, I can quickly determine whether or not the backlink profile is appropriate for my niche.
We’ve seen white-label companies buy niche domains and point all of those sites back to their own pages on a few occasions. Generally speaking, I don’t think this is a safe strategy, thus websites with backlink profiles that aren’t 100% identical to yours should also be taken off the list of your prospects.
Visitor posts (since their authors rarely have any control over the content after the publication)
I occasionally get emails asking me to provide a link to a guest post that has already been published. This is just ridiculous, guys. After a publication is created, the author has no control over it; we simply can’t modify the writing, even if we wanted to. Even sillier, I occasionally get pitches for guest blogs from some of the outreach rock stars.
There is a minor exception in this situation that merits mentioning. Guest authors shouldn’t be entirely disregarded if you choose to use a clever link prospecting strategy. Because the majority of them write for numerous websites, these people are true gems. It makes sense to use BuzzSumo to look up the websites to which they contribute and classify them as your top prospects.
Websites of competitors
You shouldn’t be shocked when I tell you that websites frequently attempt to obtain links from their rivals. Our link-building partner previously got an email with a similar request from one of their direct rivals. Mailchimp was the business that issued the outreach email. So a Mailchimp employee inquired as to whether one of our partner’s articles might include a link back to them from one of their competitors. By the way, they were offering their branded socks in exchange for a link.
Even though the typical cost of a link on a high-quality website is between $200 and $300 USD, this could not have been a bad value. Do I need to mention that the socks cost around $5?
sites that have previously linked to you
For many marketers, this may not seem as evident as other no-nos, but it is true. The likelihood of a website getting into problems for adding a link to your website again after the first time is very low.
Simply export all of your referring domains from Google Search Console and use the VLOOKUP technique to compare it to your prospecting list to eliminate those websites.
That’s the very beginning, not the end.
One of the most crucial phases of email outreach is link prospecting. Your future efforts and your prospects of success are significantly impacted by the caliber of the materials you choose for your campaign.
Spend enough time examining the website’s appropriateness, quality, and all the other aspects I’ve discussed in this chapter. Not simply obtaining as many links as you can is your objective. It aims to improve the backlink profile of your website with useful links that will drive more visitors to it.
Recently, one of our clients who received our assistance in creating even 20 new connections experienced an increase in traffic to his commercial pages.
You should get ready for the following chapters now that I’ve revealed a few link prospecting tips.
Your email outreach campaign is just getting started, so we still have a lot of work to do!
Locating the appropriate contacts
I frequently get the question, “Which part of link development takes the most time?
“, and I usually respond by talking about link prospecting. It is, in my opinion, one of the hardest and time-consuming operations of any email outreach program.
If you’ve ever done it, you are well aware that it requires an absurdly large amount of time and is also an extremely monotonous process. And you can’t wait to start sending emails and constructing links once the link prospecting step is over and you have a list of websites. Next, you don’t want to waste any time personalizing your messages or making sure your pitch lands in the appropriate inbox; you just want your eagerly expected links, and you want them now.
And one of the worst things you could possibly do is this. You should put just as much time and effort into identifying the proper contact and tailoring your pitch just because you spent a lot of time on link prospecting. Non-personalized emails sent to the incorrect recipients will provide no links at all. According to my personal experience, one of the main reasons your email outreach campaign will fail miserably is sending generic emails to recipients who may not be suitable ones.
Let me offer you a simple analogy to help you understand. Have you ever accidentally sent a message or made a phone call to the wrong person? Was this person genuinely motivated to assist you? I’m going to guess that this person wasn’t really eager to talk to you.
To cut a long tale short, email outreach is similar. Consider that you are attempting to convince someone who isn’t in charge of this subject to devote their time to improving the life of a total stranger. The majority of individuals won’t be overly thrilled about the added labor and will pretend they never got your message—this is common knowledge.
After all, I’ll show you how to make sure your email lands in the proper mailbox and what sort of prequalification you need to carry out to assure high possibilities that your email won’t go undetected in order to boost your chances of receiving a response.
Three tried-and-true methods for selecting the contacts you should connect with
You will probably come across those absurdly lengthy lists of ways to search for contacts if you simply conduct a Google search. I won’t include every method because many of them are no longer effective; instead, I’ll simply offer the ones I’ve personally tried, tested, and used on a daily basis for my own outreach and link building. Here are the top 3 strategies to make sure the wrong individual doesn’t obviously dismiss your outreach email.
Applying the strategies listed below will ensure that you are contacting those who can genuinely assist you in your link-building efforts.
Visit the business’s LinkedIn page to see all of the staff members. You only need to click “See all 16 employees on LinkedIn” in the aforementioned example to open a new window with all the company’s associates shown. The next step is to identify any staff who have experience with link building, SEO, or content marketing. Additionally, those in professions related to growth marketing will be a perfect fit. I typically submit a request to connect with those that seem like the proper people to contact about links after examining their profiles. Another thing I always do is include a brief message in which I explain my motivation for wanting to connect with them:
Asking who would be the best person to talk to about link building is another strategy I use when I’m unsure whether a person I’m attempting to connect with is 100% relevant to my campaign. This works really well because all you’re asking for is a name, unlike many other similar circumstances when you’re asking a total stranger for a random favor. People are frequently willing to assist you since it makes them feel as though they are somehow contributing to their own business.
As you can see in the screenshot up there, Rita is completely aware of who I am and what I require from the very beginning.
The likelihood that she will reply is great if she accepts the offer. You’ve undoubtedly figured out by now that I just adore utilizing LinkedIn to connect with interesting individuals! However, blogs rank as my second preferred source of contact details after LinkedIn. Learn how to easily scout them for contacts by reading on.
Examine blog commentators. Although LinkedIn is a fantastic resource for locating and connecting with email outreach contacts, it does have a number of drawbacks. One of the greatest drawbacks is that in order to see all contacts, you need to have quite a few connections in your niche. Another restriction is that LinkedIn automatically caps your actions whenever you begin performing too many searches each day. For this reason, you should use LinkedIn in conjunction with other contact resources, such as checking company blogs for contributor information. The benefit of this tactic is that it teaches you about a blog’s audience’s preferences for content as you browse it. Additionally, I’ve found that mentioning a specific post in your initial outreach email acts as a wonderful trigger and encourages more responses. However, keep in mind that you need to look for article authors who have some connection to SEO and content promotion. Reaching out to a guest contributor who has no influence over the material is another thing you need to avoid at all costs.
More frequently than you’d expect, I’ve seen link builders attempt to interact with guest authors yet fail terribly. There’s a quick trick that I don’t often see marketers use: get in touch with guest bloggers and ask them for the name of the blog editor. They are the finest source to direct you because they have obviously been in contact with this person since their article was published. After all, if you can’t receive directions from others, it’s time to rely on technologies designed to make it easier for you to look up contact information.
Utilize email search tools. The simplicity of email finder tools is what I appreciate most about them; you simply input the information you already know (domain, first and last name, etc.), and they work their magic to produce the results you need (email address).
There are numerous tools available that may provide a list of the email addresses of the employees connected to a specific domain name. Since I’d rather spend this time writing some helpful content to explain HOW EXACTLY you can start establishing links, I’m sorry, but I don’t have time to review each and every one. But if you’re looking for the ideal email finder tool, Robbie Richards’ post asking 80+ professionals to identify their favorite contact information-finding tools is a great place to start.
At the moment, Hunter.io is my go-to tool of choice because it displays job titles as well as the most typical pattern based on how emails are created in a specific organization. For instance, as you can see in the picture below, the people behind Hunter.io provide their staff email addresses based on their first names.
In addition to Hunter.io, there is another service called Pitchbox that provides you with a list of emails connected to a specific website. For individuals who are serious about cold email outreach, this tool is the ideal answer. Along with assisting you in finding emails, it streamlines other aspects of email outreach, including administering campaigns, monitoring outcomes, and updating clients on your progress. I’ll give you a quick example. We just launched a massive effort to reach bloggers in related categories, such as travel, parenting, food, and cooking, with our client’s survey. Thanks to Pitchbox, we spent 10X less time looking for the emails of those blogs because, for the most part, the system was displaying them to us and sending the email sequences automatically.
Recapitulating this chapter
Imagine finding a terrific opportunity for link building but failing to contact the individual who can assist you with link placement.
The truth is that you’ve been contacting the wrong contact constantly while spending weeks sending follow-up emails in the hopes that the individual will simply not respond. Doesn’t that sound like the worst nightmare for a link builder? In order to help you locate the ideal people to pitch to, I’ve included the best strategies that I’ve personally used and still use today. You can therefore be much more certain that you will be sending your pitch to someone who can actually assist you with your link request if you use the company’s LinkedIn profile to find relevant people, review blog contributors, and use email finder tools (while applying some of the tips that I’ve shared).
Contacting the recipients of your email outreach
Everyone is aware of how annoying and uncomfortable unexpected calls can be. But it’s also true that emails regularly go unanswered and get deleted, despite the fact that they are less intrusive and bothersome than unsolicited calls. Email is the main communication channel between you and your prospects, so use it creatively. We conducted several studies at Digital Olympus, which gave us some fascinating insights into what makes email outreach effective.
This chapter will teach you:
ways to identify potential partners who share your interests
why starting outreach with emails isn’t always a good idea
How to master the tailoring of your email outreach
How to elicit responses from the prospects in your pitch
Let’s start now.
Shared interests encourage more responses from potential customers
The likelihood of receiving a response increases dramatically when you send a pitch to someone who is familiar with you and with whom you share a common interest.
Years of experience at Digital Olympus have demonstrated that the more interest you have in potential customers, the more opportunities you have to establish a deep connection. We’re primarily discussing social media profiles here. To give you an illustration, you can determine whether you and someone have similar professional interests by looking through their LinkedIn profile. For instance, if someone works for a business in your field, that individual may be an excellent candidate for outreach. By the way, the reason why agencies fabricate profiles is to give the impression that the person who contacts the prospect is also in the prospect’s field of expertise.
Using social media to reach out increases the likelihood of receiving a response.
Despite the fact that we are discussing email marketing, our tests have shown that emails aren’t the greatest way to initiate contact with prospects.
Emails tend to be more private spaces, so if you suddenly enter one, it’s probable that your message may go ignored or be deleted.
We advise starting the outreach approach from social media instead. Our tests have demonstrated that this strategy generates more responses. Additionally, you can connect with people in charge of link building, digital marketing, or SEO by visiting any company’s page on LinkedIn.
When drafting your message if you choose to begin the outreach through social media, don’t forget to include the reason you are interacting with the person. It will raise the likelihood that this potential client will add you to their network. If no one from a company comes up who fits your qualifications and profile, consider connecting with someone who is involved in social media marketing. Ask for the contact information of a person who handles content promotion when you get in touch with them.
Of course, LinkedIn is not a panacea for all problems. Response rates will be quite low if your profile doesn’t meet the specialty of the prospect you’re contacting. Because of this, it’s preferable to think of this social media platform as a tool to find the perfect contact. You can utilize Twitter in addition to LinkedIn to aid in your outreach efforts. Since Twitter users are typically more active, your message is more likely to receive a response.
The king of personalization
The response rate and the total number of links you’ll receive are directly impacted by a personal approach, which is not just crucial but also important. We just conducted an intriguing experiment using customized mail-outs and email templates.
Out of a hundred emails we sent, we only received two replies and one link in the case of template mail-outs, where the only personalized element was the name of each addressee. However, we received twice as many replies and links from an outreach campaign that was personalized for each addressee based on their city and state.
Here is an illustration of a customized email we sent that mentioned the prospect’s hometown. To establish the connection right away, we briefly discussed how much we enjoyed traveling to London before moving right into talking about a potential link-building opportunity:
You must make sure that your subject line is consistently succinct and relevant in addition to providing a significant amount of customization. Your best bet will be to come up with a few different subject lines and test them all thoroughly to determine which one performs the best.
The key takeaway from this is to never undervalue personalization. Additionally, only saying a person’s name is insufficient for customization. You might also note that you read their most recent post and the specific passage you found interesting.
Avoid making generalizations in your message because doing so will reveal that it is a typical outreach template.
Give potential customers a reason to respond to your pitch.
Have you ever attempted to approach someone and immediately begin asking them for something? Of course not; it’s strange and improper. In addition, the likelihood that you will be granted your request is essentially negligible.
The same is true of links; if you request them in your opening statement, you are unlikely to receive a favorable response. Except when you provide something in exchange.
What can you guarantee a potential customer in return for a link? The simplest solution is to provide a link back. I’m not referring to link exchanges here because Google will punish you for doing this. Instead, use a more natural approach, such as authoring a guest post with a link to your prospect’s website or page.
In the following illustration, we’re offering a link exchange through either a fresh guest post or through previously written blog posts:
Insist that the links come from business blogs if you want the prospect to truly respond to your email. Such links carry more weight and are very important for your SERP position. Offering the prospect a mention in your newsletter is another smart move. Additionally, if you have a sizable following on social media, you may post on your profile about the prospect’s business or website.
Sending the potential link recipient some of your stuff is a special and unusual way to say thanks for the link. Offer the prospect the special giveaways you have as a thank-you for the relationship if they would be difficult to obtain otherwise. Focusing on something that would actually benefit a prospect is generally preferable. For instance, they might need to fix a faulty link. Therefore, carefully examine the prospect’s firm profile to identify any deficiencies and present a fix for them.
Connecting with Potential Clients: Chapter Summary
Emails are the apparent method of reaching out to prospects in email outreach, but it’s not the best one. Keep in mind that emails are a more private space into which you cannot trespass without first getting permission.
Instead, start out subtly by contacting people on social networking sites like Twitter and LinkedIn. There, you can look at a prospect’s profile and discover who to contact within a company.
But if your message is not tailored, it makes little difference where you connect with a prospect. It should ideally include the person’s interests, touch on their most recent post and what you found most compelling about it, and provide motivation for them to respond. Also, keep in mind that personalization does not mean using someone’s name.
Find something in common with someone, something you have in common that will help you connect with them and develop a relationship with them.
Your email outreach campaign is just getting started, so we still have a lot of work to do!
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