It is not a secret that email outreach is one of the most proven methods for business communication online.
Literally, email correspondence provides you with information swapping in a blink of an eye. It saves your time and keeps the data all in one place. Pretty convenient for those who are busy round-the-clock, isn’t it?
Moreover, outreach is widely used for different co-marketing initiatives. One of the most common is link-building.
Hence, to build more backlinks with the help of email outreach you must be a true professional in the implementation of this strategy and you need to create a solid link building strategy in order to succeed.
In this guide, I am going to reveal to you a step-by-step process of running email outreach properly.
1. Explore Your Target Audience First
Any outreach starts with collecting the data around your target audience.
The first question that might appear on this stage is how to find your potential outreach targets?
The answer is simple – you can do it with the help of Google search. Just type a query related to your niche and explore the results you’ll get. For example, I am interested in finding outreach opportunities by typing a query “competitor analysis tools”:
The sources you see, introduce the information around competitor analysis tools. It could be the tools or some content on this topic. Regardless, you can be sure that these resources can bring you lots of outreach opportunities.
How?
By exploring all the domains that refer to these Top 10 searches. To find these referring domains I recommend you to play with Site Explorer tool. Just grab the most promising link from the SERP and analyze it with this tool:
The report you need is called “Referring domains”, which lists the domains referring to this particular URL:
Each domain contains a certain number of backlinks that point to the URL in question. These backlinks redirect to a particular piece of content that has a direct relation to your outreach campaign. It gives you a great chance to earn a good number of authoritative backlinks.
Almost every article has the author. It means that you could reach out to this person and discuss some backlink opportunities. However, if you want to do it right, you must find one’s personal email address.
2. Hunt for Personal Emails
Using specific tools will save you some time during the process of finding email addresses.
I prefer to rely on ContactOut and Find.that Email. These tools show the best results in terms of email validity among the other similar services I tested before.
ContactOut is a Chrome extension that extracts email addresses right from one’s profile on LinkedIn. If it doesn’t find the email, use Find.that Email tool. It requires you to input the person’s full name and a URL of a current company he or she works at.
To double-check the email addresses I use LinkedIn Sales Navigator extension, which has one of the options that verifies email validity:
These two tools and a small trick with email verification will help you collect only correct email addresses. There are also other tools for verifying email lists in bulk.
3. Move to Outreach
Data collecting is one of the most time-consuming aspects of the entire outreach process. Likely, when you have the list with outreach targets, you can start an email blast promptly.
Outreach can be split into a few stages:
- Customize email templates
- Send follow-up messages
- Analyze the progress
1. Templates customization
This is the stage that lots of people ignore. Moreover, some marketers make silly mistakes. For instance, when one doesn’t include the recipient’s first name in the introduction part of the message:
It is so unprofessional! I bet neither you nor I won’t read such kind of a message at all.
The other thing that turns people off is when your pitch is too salesy. Keep in mind that a well-personalized email template must not have a sales intent. It aims to build the relationships between you and the people you’re reaching out to.
When you receive the email, the first thing you pay attention to is the subject of the message. It triggers you to either open the message or not.
Hence, you have to create a subject line that would force people to read your pitch.
Firstly, I recommend you to write a personalized subject line where you put a straight question or suggestion to the person you’re contacting:
Secondly, your subject line should reflect the whole idea of your message:
If your subject line bait worked, you should personalize an introduction of the message as well.
Try to make it friendly and informal. I suggest you focus more on the person you’re pitching. Break the ice by discussing some professional aspects of the niche you both revolve in. Plus, I advise you to use a customer feedback app to gather people’s feedback on whatever topic of the message. Remember that all people love to communicate with their tribe.
Furthermore, if you want to add some visuals to your email templates, you can use an email header design tool. It allows you to create a fantastic email template where you can use your imagination to the full extent:
Just imagine how your email pitch would look awesome with this creative approach.
A nice addition to personalization in email outreach would be a responsive signature. An email signature generator can help you create one with social media icons and call-to-action buttons. All these elements increase CTR by 2%.
2. Follow-up
Due to different circumstances, your messages might stay without review. Likely, it doesn’t mean that your outreach campaign is doomed to failure. You always have another chance to remind your recipients of the first pitch.
Just send a follow-up message.
According to a case study from Woodpecker, even a single follow-up message has about 40% higher response rate in contrast to your initial pitch.
3. Analyze outreach progress
If you want to be a real outreach professional, you must track the results that each template gives you.
Buzzstream is what you need.
This tool works perfectly if you want to keep outreach efforts under control. It helps you do the following:
- Create personalized template
- Track email templates efficiency
- Create email sequence
- See the message status
To Sum Up
Don’t hesitate to follow this step-by-step tutorial if you want to succeed in email outreach.
It isn’t hard though, especially when you have a good email marketing automation software on hand.
You will become a true professional in this strategy, trust me!
Also, try this software for social-proofing application that can be used by product or service-based digital marketing websites that want to boost their conversion rates.
Great read: 10 Ways to Come Up with Creative Blog Names You’ll Love.
Author bio: Sergey Aliokhin is a Marketing specialist who works with different projects. Now he does marketing things for Bannersnack. In his spare time, he likes to study martial arts, playing the bass, and reading.