The Best Email Outreach Practices for Link Building

Email Outreach: A Guide For Link Building

Link building has been proven essential for search engine optimization, but getting links can be challenging. You can use some strategies to get website owners and influencers to include your resources in their posts and articles. Stellar results come from stellar strategies, and outreach email is one of them!

Email outreach aims to reach out to website owners interested in your offer and get them to link to your site. This strategy will help you achieve a greater online presence, whether you are looking for backlinks to improve your search rankings, drive sales, or increase user traffic. But with proper practices, your outreach efforts might be fruitful. This article will give you some proven tips to generate spectacular results.

Why Is Email Outreach Important For Link Building Strategy?

Outreach email strikes a balance between speedy results and high-quality links. It can be used as a standalone link-building strategy or an enhancement to your existing inbound marketing campaign. So what are the main reasons for using it?

• To get links from authority websites: Outreach email is about getting in touch with people who are likely to respond and give you that quality backlink, blog mention, or guest post opportunity you were looking for. Quality links boost your credibility and visibility, thereby increasing inbound traffic. They also help to earn trust and authority with search engines.
• To build links from topically relevant publications: The more relevant links you point to your site and its pages, the higher you'll climb in SERPs, which results in better SEO. Topically relevant publications within your niche can also be instrumental in identifying key influencers within your community.
• To close a link gap with competitors: Looking at the backlink profiles of your competitors' websites will help you understand how they achieve their link-building success and identify new link-building opportunities. After exploring competitors’ link profiles, email outreach is an excellent approach to ensure you haven't missed out on any top-quality opportunities your competitors have seized.
• Drive brand awareness with top-tier PR coverage: Through proper execution, outreach emails can help you build backlinks, drive sales, and get your brand awareness in front of top-tier media outlets. Email outreach will get your brand and message through the right channels, reaching top-tier blogs and PR companies that can help you build high-quality links.

Source: Prowly

Worthy Link-Building Strategies to Try Before Email Outreach

First and foremost, you should check your competitors’ backlink profiles to determine how they build links to their websites. You can do that with SE Ranking’s backlink checker that gathers actionable SEO data on domain and page trust, the total number of referring domains, backlinks, and the ratio between dofollow and nofollow backlinks. 

After comparing your backlink profile with competitors, you can determine what methods worked for them and get a base of authority links for guest blogging, spot broken links, find high-traffic listicles, etc.

Source: SE Ranking dashboard

• Guest Blogging: This involves writing content for another website’s blog. It allows you to show off what you know, share new ideas, and let people know about your company or product. You can start a guest blog by finding sites in the way mentioned above that allow guest posting and submitting your article for review.
• Unlinked Mentions: Unlinked mentions are one of the easiest ways to gather a list of sites and blogs that could be interested in linking to your content if you wrote something for them. Unlinked mentions can also be used to grow inbound links from articles you didn’t write but have been featured in or mentioned in.
• Broken Link Building: Broken link building is a strategy where you obtain links by finding broken links on websites that you want to get links from and then sending messages to webmasters to replace those broken links with working links to relevant pages on your website.
  To initiate and manage this unique tactic, most SEOs will use a broken link checker like Screaming Frog SEO Spider, which helps to detect all broken external links.

Source: Screaming Frog

• Listicles Insertions: Listicle insertions are a form of information composition in which information of more than one piece is collected and listed in a sequence by categories. This strategy involves creating a list of items and writing a paragraph about each of them.
  The materials used in listicles include images, videos, and other media that complement the text. Linking to a listicle article can instantly increase your website’s authority and help to establish you as an industry expert.
• Influencer Marketing: This can be used to get more exposure, drive more traffic, and increase conversion rates. It works by getting advocates of your brand to share it with their audience, which can spread further than with email outreach.
  Besides, you can find people unfamiliar with your brand with a large following and align your business’s product or service with their audiences’ needs. This way, you will build relationships and links with people who have an existing audience and can encourage their followers to check out your website.
• Digital PR: This focuses on coverage through traditional online media. You can use your expertise in a given industry to reach out to journalists, spread the word about your brand or project, keep your company in the spotlight, and reach new clients. PR works best when you have a product launch or event on the horizon, and you’re trying to reach out to relevant reporters to write about your latest newsworthy announcement. 

6 Best Email Outreach Practices For Link Building

1. Automate email outreach campaigns

Many will use a spreadsheet of email addresses and send personalized emails to each person, whether it be contacting journalists, bloggers, or other influencers. If you have ever done this, you know that this process can be extremely labour-intensive and time-consuming. Automating your email outreach campaigns with an email marketing tool can be a game changer for your marketing campaigns.

On the other hand, if you have a copy/paste email template, there's a huge chance you'll lose half the people in your target audience. Whenever you use a tool to automate your outreach campaigns, you should always personalize cold emails as much as possible.

2. Find the right decision-makers and create an email list of prospects

Knowing how and where to email is very important to succeed. Sure, you could just download a huge list of emails from somewhere, but that’s risky because many emails would be invalid or time-expired. Since you will be dealing with many real people and organizations, finding their contact information pays off.

Yet, most corporate websites keep a form for public inquiries, which means you won't be able to reach the decision-makers directly. Apart from contacting them through official contact forms (which is tedious, unproductive, and rarely leads to a successful outreach link-building campaign), you could also try their socials: look for them on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, or other social networks that belong to your target website. Using an email finder Chrome extension is another great way to easily find their email addresses on LinkedIn and build your list of prospects.

3. Build a clear email structure

Your success or failure with outreach depends on the email structure, followed by the content you provide. The structure serves as a direct path to the reader's mind, while the content ignites their interest. For this reason, the format of your email must be easily readable and understandable.

Source: Get Mail Bird

Developing an email outreach structure is not rocket science. The entire process can be boiled down to three steps: a friendly introduction, a highlighted reason and suggestion, and a thank-you statement. Another essential thing to remember is to be polite and not insult anyone, while being straightforward about what kind of help they can provide. 

4. Personalize your outreach sequence

Every marketer knows the value of personalized email outreach. The subject line is the most crucial part of any email, where you can introduce yourself and make an excellent first impression. It’s the first thing your prospect will see, so if it doesn't capture their attention, you'll lose them.

Persuasive emails with personalized subject lines get clicked more frequently and have higher open rates.

Make an effort to use their name in your sentences. It helps build trust and establishes a relationship for future warm connections. You're sending out hundreds of emails; the best thing you can do is make that original email professional and personal by using their name.
If your prospect were in front of you, you'd know their name. But they aren’t, so you have to be a master at finding contacts on LinkedIn and connections from the company's employees, where you can learn more about your recipient.

Source: GMass

5. Write reminder follow-ups

Most marketers know the importance of sending out follow-up emails. Even if your initial email is written nicely and with a good call-to-action, prospects can still let it slide, particularly when they receive many emails daily.

A follow-up email is a concise but professional note that links back to the previous email you sent to the recipient. The purpose of this follow-up email is to remind prospects about your business.

This allows you to send valuable content, products, or information regularly while reminding people about your brand and streamlining your marketing efforts at the same time. Follow-ups can be sent as text emails or through email outreach tools like MailChimp in 4-10 day intervals. If you are still waiting for a reply after a month, consider the prospect as not interested.

6. Look through email analytics

Email pitches are great because they don't require much effort, but you need to be careful about spamming people. Knowing what works and what doesn’t for email pitches is crucial in getting results. You can improve your performance only when you have an idea about your success rate.

A great way to see what's working and what isn't is to look at the stats attached to your email campaigns. How many managers clicked on the links you sent out? Which emails had the highest open rates? Did you get a backlink as a result of using your emails as a tool? The answers to these questions can help you tweak your future emails and fine-tune your marketing. Sometimes, what may seem like a good decision to shoot off another email pitch can turn sour on you fast.

Conclusion

Inviting influencers to link to your website greatly increases its authority and drives new traffic. However, it's pretty challenging. That's why you need to have a solid process in place, one that will simplify your efforts and help you earn links from relevant websites. That’s where email outreach comes into play!

However, remember to personalize your email outreach since it is the key to successful link building. Ensure you keep your target audience's interests and needs in mind, so the message you send resonates with them. Be pleasant and reach out to them like real humans, not robots. In addition, get acquainted with the other link prospecting methods mentioned above to boost the chances of getting replies!

If you have any questions about digital marketing, don’t hesitate to reach out to TechWyse Internet Marketing today. Call 866-208-3095 or contact us here.