Ultimate Guide on How To Run Email Outreach Without Any Questions

I am sure you’ve heard the term outreach numerous times. Moreover, you’ve seen dozens of articles that cover this topic. Different experts share their opinion on how to follow this strategy in a more resultative way.

The internet is overflowed with the information regarding outreach. So, it would be fair to ask why should you read this very post on outreach? Is it worth your attention?

Let me tell you something: I’ve read many articles that give various tips about outreach. I arrived at the conclusion that the basic idea of outreach is the same - reaching out to people to offer them something.

Nevertheless, I would like to represent you a step-by-step guide that I follow during my outreach campaigns. I am going to make emphasis on other essential elements of this process that most of experts don’t highlight .

Shall we begin?

As I’ve already mentioned above, outreach is the process of building business relationships between people aimed at the mutual benefit. However, I believe every marketer, businessman or entrepreneur has faced the situation when an email message stays without any reply at least once in a lifetime.

Why does it happen?

You might think something like “I’ve crafted an email template, written an awesome subject line...I tried to catch recipient’s attention.” Yes, all your preparations won’t be in vain under sole condition. I’m talking about your name.

If you want to see the results that your outreach gives you, you should make your name well-known in the niche you revolve.

The first thing you must do is create accounts on the most popular social media channels like Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, and Google+

Try to fill up your profile with all necessary elements like professional achievements (publications, collaborations, project participation's) and background information (interests, hobbies.)

The more information you reveal about yourself, the more trust you will get from your future outreach targets.

By the way, I recommend you to visit FirstSiteGuide - An educational website with informative resources for web beginners, where you can find useful in-depth guides followed by PDFs, Video Tutorials and other helpful web development tools that can help everyone who is new in to the web world.

Now let’s see how to find prospects for your outreach.

I would like to cut to the chase from the start. In this section I am going to cover two aspects:

#Niche Question
#How and where to search for a target audience

There is no difference in a niche you move when it comes to the process of outreach. However, when we talk about a target audience, it makes sense to know all sub-directions a particular niche has.

I would like to give you an example based on the niche I work in. Let’s say you are a marketing expert who has just launched a marketing agency. Your agency offers a few Internet marketing tools & services. One of them is content marketing. It will be an excellent starting point for identifying your target audience regarding this sub-direction of Internet marketing.

Now let me show you how to find potential prospects following ‘content marketing’ sub-direction.

I recommend you to take a run through three leading social media platforms like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook. The only thing that you will have to do is to put an inquiry related to your niche. In this case, I want to proceed with ‘content marketing’ example.

LinkedIn is a platform for business people mostly; thus, it is a perfect place to find the right people to reach out to.

The fact is that this inquiry leads to people who do content marketing on their own and they won’t be interested in your service. In other words, they are not the exact outreach targets for you. From the other hand, you can explore more opportunities by discovering websites these experts work on.

You can see that this expert works at Content Marketing Institute. This well-known web-resource is a wonderful opportunity for you to stumble upon lots of people who would be interested in a content marketing service from your agency.

Twitter is another one platform where you can find the right people related to your inquiry. Please note that they are influencers in most cases. Thus, they won’t be interested in your service as well. Nevertheless, these influencers can be like a magnet for casual consumers who need a content marketing service for sure. Go ahead and reach out the consumers you need.

Facebook is a good option for you alternatively. But I recommend you to check out groups related to your inquiry. There are thousands of people who will be a good fit for your outreach purposes.

Despite the fact that searching for outreach opportunities via social media platform is a helpful method, I stick to “borrowing” customers from the main competitors.

This method will help you boost more traffic to your website, get backlinks, and get new customers. The main trick here is to find the best competitors’ content and see what backlinks it has. These backlinks are a chance to reach out different marketers and bloggers to spread a word or two about your content that you want to promote.

First of all, go to Google and put an inquiry “content marketing” and choose those articles that are in top 10 results. I filtered the results for the past year to see relatively fresh content.

You can see two strong posts. Let’s see how many backlinks do they have. I use backlink checker from Ahrefs for this purpose.

This single link contains 1.41K in general. The result is impressive, isn’t it? Likely, there is no need for checking all these links. You can filter down the results to see the freshest backlinks for the few past months.

You can see that the results have decreased and now there are 128 new backlinks only. Don’t think that the number won’t be enough for your outreach. If you craft an outstanding and personalized email template, you’ll get a good response rate from this outreach campaign.

Since you know how to get the backlinks, I would like to move ahead. The next step of the entire process is to collect further necessary information that you’ll need for your outreach.

Extra data that you’ll need to collect are email addresses of your outreach targets and their background information. But before I start, I would like to draw your attention to this screenshot.

I am sure you have the experience of receiving this notification. The address couldn’t be found. Why? Because the person you wanted to reach out has changed a current working place. So, this email address is no longer valid.

What to do then?

Go to LinkedIn and take a look at the “experience” section.

It shows you if a person has changed his or her place of work, so it would be easier to identify if the email address still works.

Furthermore, LinkedIn works great regarding finding one’s email address. Just view “contact & personal Info” section.​

However, there are cases when a person doesn’t leave the information about a personal email address. Likely, I would like to suggest you test a few tools for “email hunt.” Let me tell you about a couple of them that I use.

ContactOut is an awesome tool that allows you to get email addresses right from LinkedIn. It works as a Chrome extension, and extracts email addresses in a single click.

If I can’t find an email address using ContactOut, I move to Findthat.email or Voilanorbet tools.

Now I believe there won’t be any troubles with finding email addresses of the people you want to reach out. Let’s go ahead.

This section reveals the core aspects of the outreach process. Here I will tell you how to craft well-personalized email templates and how to track each outreach campaign you run.

Talking about creating personalized email templates, here are some of the common mistakes to avoid.

You might be surprised but yes - some outreachers don’t state the recipient’s name during an email blast.

You can see that this outreacher didn’t call me by name sending me a message. It is a kind of disrespect towards the one you are reaching out. Don’t repeat this mistake.

I think this is a common mistake that “green” marketers tend to make. I don’t know why but some of them believe that they can impress with a catchy subject line using different ways of writing it. For example:

You can see that this subject line was written with the capital letters. It seems a bit aggressive as for me. I would have doubts as to reading it. Don’t confuse your recipients with such subject lines as well. Remember, that any subject line should be straight to the point of the main message idea. And don’t write too long and over-complicated subject lines - they don’t work.

Now it is time to see what you should do to optimize your email templates from scratch.

Time is precious. Thus, your recipient must see from the subject line what is awaiting for him or her within your message. Here is an example of how we craft subject lines at Ahrefs.

You noticed that this subject line reflects the idea of the message and nothing more. However, you can add some creativity as well. Try to combine something irrelevant to business with the primary purpose of your email pitch. Have a look:

I found the information that this “target” likes quality cigars and history. And what is more critical for SEO than the niche this person revolves in. It was enough for me to make up a catchy subject line.

The following section that deserves your attention is an introduction one. It needs to be personalized promptly. I would like you to keep an eye on politeness, constructive feedback, and operating with some additional information you could find regarding the person you’re reaching out.

Let’s see how I could find an approach in the example above. I read the entire post carefully, and I found common ground. The author used different pictures of the creatures from horror movies throughout the post. I stumbled upon one image that seemed to be unfamiliar. Thus, a desire to find out the name of the movie where this creature appears was a perfect basis for my introduction part of the message. You can see that this person kindly replied me sharing the information about this movie.

If you want to keep away from failures, you must track the progress of each outreach campaign you run. Having an opportunity to see how each template performs will help you make the right choice - which template to use and which one to throw away.

I recommend you to use Buzzstream for your outreach purposes. It allows you to see a success rate of the email templates with the help of such metrics as open/reply rate and clicks.

The next cool feature this tool offers is a “green eye” indicator that shows you how many times (and when) the messages have been opened.

If you want to move your outreach ahead, use Buzzstream without any doubts!

Yes, outreach is a complicated process involving different additional preparations that take your time. Must warn that your first results won’t be too impressive. Outreach demands endless practice of sending multiple personalized emails. Likely, your efforts won’t stay without any reward.

Keep calm and do outreach just like I described in this post. You’ll achieve excellent results!

If you think that I might lose something, please, let me know in the comments.

P.S. Don’t forget to share it on social media channels:)