Every digital marketer doing business online has surely heard about email outreach as a viable strategy for generating leads, building relationships, and promoting an offer.
But did you know it can also be used for search engine optimization (SEO) purposes?
In this article, we’ll explore why email outreach is important in helping you achieve your SEO goals, as well as some best practices to keep your emails out of the spam folder.
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In the SEO industry, email outreach is one of the many link-building strategies you can use to build website authority. With this method, you send emails to webmasters, journalists, authors, and other people of influence to request high-quality links back to your website. You can use email outreach tools to make things easier.
Some of the goals you can target for an outreach email include:
Done right, an email outreach campaign strategy has a high ROI for your business, making it an integral part of your marketing strategy.
There are generally two types of strategies you can employ when doing email outreach or any other type of sales outreach:
While sending emails to cold and warm prospects might seem straightforward, there is a right way to do things. Otherwise, you risk having your emails labeled as spam, affecting your reputation and future email deliverability.
Check out the following best practices for email outreach campaigns to guide you:
How do you make sure you’re sending emails to the right people? By doing in-depth research about them, of course!
The more effort you put into researching your email outreach contacts, the more likely you’ll get positive responses for whatever goal you’re trying to achieve.
Find out about their:
Take time also to analyze the backlink profiles of your main competitors to see their link-building efforts and who’s linking back to their websites.
Getting your emails opened is the first step to ensuring your prospects read what you have to say. And to achieve that, you need to formulate an interesting subject line worth opening.
According to Hubspot, you have to make your subject line…
Focus on attention-grabbing subject lines that stand out in a busy inbox.
Adding a personalized touch to your emails spells the difference between generic email outreach templates that could have been sent to 100 other people versus an email explicitly intended for your prospect.
Focus on creating an engaging outreach email to increase your chances of getting positive responses. You can do this by:
All of these bits of personalization show your prospect that you’ve done your research, instantly establishing trust, likeability, and a sense of connection.
The people you’re contacting are usually busy and have their inboxes full of cold emails.
If you want a positive response, be concise and get straight to the point. Avoid rambling on and on — your recipient probably won’t read all of that, anyway.
To ensure you’re as concise as can be, use the inverted pyramid approach — place all the essential details at the beginning, then keep it as short as possible after that.
Make sure to add a call to action at the end — what exactly do you want your recipient to do after they’ve read your email? Don’t leave them guessing.
No matter what kind of outreach strategy you employ, your prospect will always ask, “What’s in it for me?”
And you can answer that question in your email outreach by providing relevant value to your recipient. It’s apparent that you’re already going to ask a favor from them to link back to your website, but what will they get out of it?
It can be as simple as making sure that your blog post is of high quality so that they know they’re linking back to a reputable website. You can also provide other incentives like helpful resources or case studies.
Email outreach certainly works, but only if you follow the aforementioned outreach strategies. Take some time to research your prospect, work on your subject line and personalized email content, and provide value in a concise manner. Otherwise, your outreach emails will just end up as one of the many unread ones floating in your prospects’ inboxes.
