We shouldn’t diminish the importance of communication in our life. It is a part of our daily routine that follows us wherever we go.
Communication helps us solve different issues, build new relationships, and move a business forward.
The era of digitalization brought various innovations that made the process of communication much easier. We can use smartphones to call each other, send SMS, and to chat on social media channels.
Back in the day we had to spend hours on the phone trying to persuade a potential customer to buy a product. But those days are gone. Now everything depends on your outreach skills.
Thus, this guide will reveal to you how to do email outreach like a professional.
Let’s get this started!
1. “I Have Never Heard of You Before – Goodbye!”
When a startup gets into the game, it faces many difficulties. And one of the most painful things is the existence of competitors.
Just imagine that you want to reach out to your potential customers to sell them your service. However, all your attempts to impress them with your product have failed.
You can’t understand why your prospect doesn’t want to review a super useful product that you’ve created?
The answer to the question is simple – your brand isn’t well-known yet!
People are more likely to trust big names that have a solid reputation among consumers. That’s why your messages stay unreplied or end up in the trash bin.
There is the technical aspect of this issue as well. People don’t want to reply to your messages due to the following reasons:
- Your signature looks unprofessionally.
- You forgot to add links to your social channels (or other contact resources).
- You are not using a corporate email address – this tends to be the most important one.
Here is an example for you to better understand how all these aspects should be considered:
When your signature section has all these elements included, people will see that you are a legitimate business.
Bear in mind that you should make your target audience trust you. Once people see that you are credible, they will buy your product.
How do you find a target audience?
2. Search for Your Target Audience in the Right Place
If you want to find your target audience, you should refer yourself to the main competitors in your niche. Keep in mind that winning over your target audience from the competitors is the most actionable strategy you can use.
However, you can choose another, less aggressive way to find your target audience. By browsing Google and typing niche-related queries that your potential customers might use. Let’s dig deeper into the option:
Find all the resources that have a direct bearing on “banner maker software.” From the screenshot, you can see that the highlighted websites are niche-related to the query.
Before we cover the next step in this process, you should understand that the better part of outreach campaigns aims to build backlinks. That’s why you should be interested in exploring those outreach opportunities that could bring you more links..
So, “How do you find these referring domains?”
3. Unveil Outreach Targets from Referring Domains
You can find referring domains with the help of Site Explorer tool from Ahrefs. Just grab the link from Google top 10 results and analyze it with Ahrefs. The report you obtain is called “Referring domains”:
When you open this report, you will see a list of unique domains that have at least one link to the target website. Filter the results by the strength of domain rating each website has. Now, you will have an opportunity to explore some outreach opportunities among the most powerful websites that have linked to the requested domain:
Afterwards, look through the links for promising outreach opportunities. Pay attention to those that direct you to high-quality content that includes backlinks to other external resources. These links will be your outreach targets.
4. Find Contact Information for Outreach
Did you know that your outreach can fail from the start due to one reason only?
You used the wrong email addresses of the recipients.
From the experience, the wrong emails can cast a long shadow on your current outreach project. Hence, you should focus on searching for personal email addresses promptly.
To speed up the process you can use tools such as ContactOut.
ContactOut is a Chrome extension that extracts email addresses from people’s LinkedIn profiles. It is super convenient.
Once you find all the correct email addresses, you can finally start the outreach itself.
5. A Few Words About Outreach Mistakes You Should Avoid
If you have no experience in email outreach, you might face a couple of common mistakes along the way.
“I forgot to write a recipient’s name!”
There are cases when people forget to add the recipient’s name.
As you can see, the author of this message didn’t use my first name.
Yes, this is a “cold” type of outreach. And it is not always necessary to use the recipient’s name. But if you want to perform a high-quality outreach, it should be super-personalized.
Subject line that looks too salesy
Keep in mind that any businessman knows the value of time. That means that nobody is going to read your message until he or she knows what’s inside. This means that any subject line of any message you send must have a call to action.
However, don’t try to create a subject line that is a direct sale pitch or hides a “sale” intent:
From this subject line, you can see the message offers a list of blogs for paid guest posting.
The above mistakes might seem obvious, but people still keep making them. It’s a good idea to double-check your addresses are correct and your subject line isn’t too salesy.
6. Outreach
When all the preparation is done, you can start the process of outreach which can be e divided into three main stages.
Crafting email templates
Start with a personalized subject line, make it clear and eye-catchy. From experience, when people see their name in the subject line, they open the email and read it.
Simple psychology – we like it when someone mentions our name.
Hence, try something like this:
Believe it or not but this way of crafting subject lines will work for you.
The next part that should be personalized is the introduction section of the email template. Try to build a kind of informal communication at the beginning of the message. Share your impressions or thoughts on the post of the person you’re reaching out to. Or you can strike up a conversation related to the general idea of your message.
Write extra-personalized emails that resonate with your outreach targets.
Follow-up
Be prepared for the fact that even personalized emails might be left unreplied. It’s not your fault. You are reaching out to people who are constantly busy.
Send a quick reminder to your outreach targets.
Sending one follow-up message increases your chances to get a reply by 30%. Hence, don’t forget to do this.
Simplify, automate, and control your outreach
You can’t always predict how your email templates will perform. That’s why you should automate the outreach process and track the results.
Buzzstream can help you with this.
This tool offers:
- Option for creating templates
- Option for creating sequences
- Option for tracking template’s open rate
By using these awesome features you can make your outreach look professional.
Final Words
Outreach is not a science and doesn’t require any special knowledge. It is a set of steps that help you build business connections online.
You have just read a detailed guide on how to do outreach correctly with maximum output.
By following these recommendations you will become a real pro of outreach!