Email outreach is a crucial component of any SEO plan, and it's a skill you'll need to master if you want to outrank your competition.
It's a tried-and-true method for gaining backlinks and publicity from bloggers and journalists, all of which will help you establish authority for your business.
An outreach email is like an ice-breaker for many businesses. But it's more complicated than just putting together a cold email and sending it out.
In this blog, we will be sharing a detailed guide on outreach email and how to pitch a cold outreach email.
What is Email Outreach?
Email Outreach is the process of sending out emails to potential customers or clients. It can be used to promote a product or service, announce changes or updates to a company, or introduce new members to a group. It can also be used to collect leads or contact information.
In a nutshell, it's identifying relevant prospects to whom you can promote your content (or your company and its people) and convincing them to connect to your website.
While it may appear straightforward, there is more to outreach than a simple pitch.
Email outreach is often regarded as spam because so many marketers fail to put this strong method in place and send emails blindly to as many individuals as they can, regardless of whether or not they are likely to be interested.
And that is a very wrong approach.
Email outreach isn't the same as spamming. It all comes down to carefully prospecting people who would find your information valuable and to whom it might bring real value, sharing it, and asking them to take action if they like what they see.
Does Cold Email Outreach Work?
The short answer is yes.
Email is the primary lead-generating medium for over 88% of marketers who vouch for its effectiveness, cost, and scalability.
Companies that perform cold emailing correctly have a response rate of 15 to 20%.
Cold email outreach, when done correctly, can help you develop a robust pipeline of sales leads that you can nurture and convert into paying clients.
Why is Email Outreach Important?
Email outreach is relevant and important for the business as it poses various benefits like:
- Helps in link building: One of the most effective ways to build links is through email outreach. In fact, the majority of link-building strategies include sending outreach emails.
- Relationship building: Email outreach helps develop relationships with others in your industry. These connections can lead to collaborations, interviews, and guest blogging opportunities, among other things.
- Press releases coverage: You can also use the cold email outreach campaign to get press coverage and reach out to the journalists.
Understanding the Anatomy of Cold Email Outreach
Cold emails are mostly the same as the other typical emails, but there might be differences in style and structure.
A perfect cold email outreach template is as follows:
- Subject Line
- Introduction
- Opening Line
- Email Body
- Call to Action
- Signature
Let's understand each of these elements of a cold email. We will try to keep it short but explanatory enough.
- Subject Line
The subject line of your email is likely the most crucial element. The subject line significantly contributes to your open rate.
If your receiver doesn't open it, there's no point in spending all that effort creating your email pitch.
Email subject lines can be written in a variety of ways, but the most effective ones are those that either:
- Arouse the reader's interest
- Ascertain that you are acquainted with the receiver in some way.
- Demonstrate a sense of urgency.
For example, if you are sending out your first email, you should start with a quick question or just an introduction.
- Email Introduction
E-mail introductions establish the tone for the conversation, allowing the sender and recipient to build trust.
For example, a salutation like "Dear sir" is a common cold email introduction, but it's bad. It implies that the sender is sending a generic email to many people and has no idea who this person is. They might delete the email if they open it and read only one sentence.
Introductions should be quick and offer personalization, just like non-cold emails.
- Opening lines
The opening line of your email does not need to be a long paragraph, but it must provide an introduction.
You could use this sentence: "Hi {first name}, my name is {name} from {company name}, and I have read about you in several places, including the note attached at the bottom." This might get a quick response like, “OMG WHAT DO YOU KNOW ABOUT ME?”
You can try to be creative or funny or start with the stats. It is also better to give a personal touch to your email opening lines.
- Email Body
A long-winded pitch isn't required. In fact, the longer your pitch, the more likely your receiver will close the email due to a wall of content.
The goal is to keep your points concise and organized. Each paragraph in your email should have a specific objective or purpose.
When it comes to body paragraphs, you can introduce the content with an example or situation related to what you are writing about. This makes it more digestible for the receiver and shows they are not just being read a list of bullet points without any context or explanation on what this relates to.
You can provide social proof or give something of value. Never promote your product or service directly in the first email.
- Create a Call-To-Action
Calls-to-action (also known as CTAs) are an important part of cold email outreach.
A CTA is a piece of text that prompts the reader to take some sort of action, which is mostly linked to making a purchase or signing up for a newsletter. CTAs generally involve hyperlinks.
There should only be one CTA per email. Multiple CTAs can confuse the recipient since there are too many options to choose from such as various discount offers.
- Email Signature
An email signature proves that the sender is a human and not a robot spammer.
Make sure your email signature is complete and easy to read. Include your company's name, the name of the person you are writing to, and a brief mention of what you wrote in your email.
Now that you know the email outreach structure, here are the best practices to write a cold email pitch.
The Step By Step Guide To Outreach Email Strategy
- Find the Right Prospect
The first step to writing a successful cold email is finding the right people.
Think about your target market and who you want to reach. You can narrow down your prospects by looking at what stage they are in their business, industry, or countries they operate in.
Once you have identified your ideal customer, it is time to create a list of contacts that match those characteristics. If you don't have any direct connections to those prospects, you have to find a connection who does.
Referrals are the easiest way to obtain results this way.
With these factors in mind, narrow down your prospects as much as feasible. The more detailed you can be, the more likely you are to achieve a high open-rate.
- Find their Email Addresses
After identifying your ideal customer, it is time to find their email addresses.
You can search for contact information on social media, company websites or even LinkedIn profiles. However, be careful not to spam your prospects and respect their privacy.
You can also use some email address generator tools for this purpose.
Snov.io: This is one of the easiest to use email address generators. Install their chrome extension and head to the website you want to reach. It will give you a list of all the emails associated with the website.
Hunter.io: It is one of the most popular email-finding tools used by marketers. First, it verifies the email addresses. Then, you can search for emails using your browser.
Once you have found the right contacts, it is time to start building relationships with them. You can do this by sending engaging emails to get them interested in what you have to offer. To help you with the success of your email marketing campaign, there are different types of generic email templates that you can pick and use.
- Create an Email Template
Email marketing is a form of direct marketing done through emails. It allows marketers to find more information about what the recipient likes, who they are and which products interest them.
Though your recipients should always opt-in before you can send any kind of email, there's nothing wrong with relying on permission nonetheless.
While your main goal should always be to win over readers, you can also use email templates to simplify the process.
People assume "template" is a spammy word when it comes to cold email outreach. They believe it entails mass-mailing spammy "Dear Sir or Madam" notes to a million people (which is not the case). However, if you use templates correctly, they can save you a lot of time.
In fact, if you want to scale your email marketing, you'll need to employ customizable templates.
You can find some great email templates online and customize them. It is a good idea to use emails that seem brandable. You can design your own email template to stand out from others and maintain consistency even after cold emailing.
- Personalize the Email Outreach
Personalizing your emails means just talking about what's on their mind with a little bit of warm-up before heading into business stuff.
It's important to address subscribers by name and reference the specific content they've subscribed you for.
Be sure to personalize your emails further with images, text or links that pertain specifically to them.
Even before sending them a mail, you can try getting noticed by them. If you're reaching out to an influencer, leave thoughtful comments on their blog entries, follow them on social media, and tell your audience about their work.
Even if you are reaching out for the guest post, it is still a better way to warm up before pitching them.
The one-sentence email, which typically requests a phone conversation or a meeting link, is just as awful as the super-long email. Because the person you're emailing has no notion what you want, these emails have a very low reply rate.
Giving someone a concise description of your proposal in your first mail is significantly better.
Here is an example of the personalized email:
- Send Follow-up Emails
After you send your initial email, it is good to send another email or two to make sure they received it and are interested in hearing more.
You can either keep the same subject line as your original mail or change the content, but the email you send must be more engaging.
The follow-up goal is to get their attention in their inbox and get them to read your initial email.
Your follow-up email will most likely be nested alongside your initial email in their inbox, so they should understand what you're referring to.
There's no need to spend time rewriting your first email.
Don't be concerned if your follow-up email is no longer active. Act as if they've opened your email but haven't had a chance to respond. It should come across as natural.
- Use Cold Email Outreach Tools
To improve your chances of getting a response, use the cold email outreach tool. It will analyze your email and automate your email campaigns.
Some of the best recommendations for email outreach tools are:
- Mailshake: Mailshake is a great email automation tool. It analyses your email to determine what works and what doesn't, which will help you improve your overall outreach.
- Ninja Outreach: It is one of the best tools for blogger outreach campaigns and sending emails as a part of SEO efforts.
- BuzzStream: BuzzStream is a great tool for content marketing and can help you grow your email list. It offers great automation tools that make it easy to create and send newsletters, targeted ads, or cold emails.
Is Email Outreach an Important Part of Your Link Building Strategy?
Yes. Cold emails can help you with backlinks as well as lead generation. Even Google has indirectly suggested that:
“The best way to get other sites to create high-quality, relevant links to yours is to create unique, relevant content that can naturally gain popularity in the Internet community. Creating good content pays off. Links are usually editorial votes given by choice, and the more useful content you have, the greater the chances someone else will find that content valuable for their readers and link to it.”
Only a few brands and businesses can publish content and have it linked to by others. They must promote it, and outreach is one way to do so — getting your content in front of those who can amplify it and giving them the option to do so.
The best way is to reach out to a prospect and share your content that gives them the option of linking to it or not.
However, the process should be continuous, and you should find different ways to reach the prospects.
Here are some quick benefits of email outreach:
- The links obtained through outreach will be entirely editorial, which means they will not violate Google's webmaster guidelines.
- It is an excellent method for proactively acquiring links from topically relevant publications.
- It has the potential to scale up and assist you in closing a link gap with competitors.
- You can also reach out to other blogs that have linked to your competitors by creating better and more valuable content.
Email Outreach Rules To Remember
Here are some of the things that you should keep in mind while creating the cold email outreach campaigns:
- Put Quality Over Quantity: Rather than sending out emails to irrelevant and unqualified prospects, reach out only to those you think may be interested and will notice your email.
- Be Clear: If a recipient does not clearly understand what you want them to do after receiving your email, you must improve your communication skills. Always be clear about the action you expect the recipient to take.
- Provide Value: Your approach should demonstrate how your piece of content benefits the individual you're contacting and their audience. If you can't do it, don't bother sending it in the first place.
- Avoid spamming: Do not spam your prospects. Only send emails that are relevant to the prospect's interests and can be easily actioned. Be clear about what you want and how it will benefit them and the audience of your recipients.
FAQs
Q. Which type of outreach emails are the most effective: broadcast, transactional, or personalized?
Ans: Transactional and personalized emails are the most effective email types. They have a higher chance of success due to the personal connection between sender and recipient.
Q. How can I send outreach emails in Gmail?
Ans: Various email outreach tools integrate with Gmail. You can use the chrome extension to integrate with Gmail and set up email campaigns.
Q. Are there any good tools to write cold email content?
Ans: There are some good tools that you can use, such as Scalenut AI writer, Hubspot and Hemingway. However, Scalenut stands out from others as it generates various email variations and customizes them for the audience. You can use enter the input context of email, description, brand name and sender’s name and this email generator will create an email based on the context.
Q. Should You Send Personalized Emails?
Ans: Yes, of course! Use every personalization nugget you can if you want to achieve tremendous outcomes and are prepared to put in the effort to establish relationships.
Even if you use templates to send emails, you may add personalized features to make them more human and natural-sounding, demonstrating to the receiver that you know who they are and have a pitch that is relevant to them.
Q. How long should the email subject line be?
Ans: A typical email subject line should be 60 characters long or 9 words long.
Conclusion
Email outreach is one of the most successful strategies for gaining quality links from relevant websites and competitive SEO advantage.
You'll need a well-defined strategy that can be readily followed and scaled up. In the end, all that matters is how good your content and subject line are.
Thus, the email subject line and email writer tool like Scalenut is the perfect solution for your email outreach campaigns. The best part is that the tool is absolutely free to use.
Scalenut Email Writer generates various outputs depending on your brand style and audience. Try Scalenut for free.
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