What is the best wording you have seen in an outreach email?
-
We all get them and most of them are rubbish, very few of them have taken the effort to find out who they are emailing. So making it personal and doing some research first is essential but what about the wording of the email... can you share examples you like & that have had more success for you than others?
-
My most successful emails have consisted of the following
- Ego-Stroking: Make them feel like they are important and valuable
- WIFM: People want to know what are they getting first before you can really grab their attention and negotiate a link/social mention/interview/ etc.
- Personalized: Obviously don't be a robot and try to be genuine.
Also when contacting other webmasters/bloggers try to find out what kind of person they are, meaning are they humorous, boring, academic, liberal, etc. The reason why is because people enjoy like minded individuals, so if you find a webmaster/blogger that tries to be funny in their blog posts than try to add some kind of humor in your email outreach.
This might sound like a sketchy method, but I have seen some good results out of trying to personalize my emails to match the webmasters/bloggers personality.
-
They were laughing last week because I yelled the F word at some weasel who called me on the phone.
I am usually a nice and helpful person but when someone interrupts me, tries to use me and doesn't take "no" gracefully, I get really mad.
-
Haha excellent... if we had forum sigs in here, mine would be:
"If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background." - EGOL, 2011
-
Get to the point FAST with WIFM.
One sentence of yada yada yada text and I hit "mark as spam" or ban all future emails from your domain from my inbox.
If I don't reply to your email don't call me on the phone... I will not be nice to you and you will hear my employees laughing in the background.
-
Something that meets all of the following criteria:
- Transparent/Honest/Genuine (not insulting my intelligence with obvious blags)
- WIIFM (Offers me something of value, clearly defined and not a load of baloney)
- Personalized enough that research has obviously been carried out about our company (so not generic)
- An apology for contacting out of the blue along with an unsubscribe/removal from list option for is I'm unhappy about it
- Something simple, clear, straight to the point immediately as I don't have time to read lots of rubbish
- Nothing with offers or sales pitches of any kind of products or services
- Nothing from a throw-away email address, spoofed domain, or a domain that has an unfinished template site
- Nothing with an irrelevant subject purposely trying to deceive me into opening it
With that lot covered it wouldn't get deleted instantly
Got a burning SEO question?
Subscribe to Moz Pro to gain full access to Q&A, answer questions, and ask your own.
Browse Questions
Explore more categories
-
Moz Tools
Chat with the community about the Moz tools.
-
SEO Tactics
Discuss the SEO process with fellow marketers
-
Community
Discuss industry events, jobs, and news!
-
Digital Marketing
Chat about tactics outside of SEO
-
Research & Trends
Dive into research and trends in the search industry.
-
Support
Connect on product support and feature requests.
Related Questions
-
Need Help with Link Building Outreach Program
Hello Follks, We are a B2B company, and we are planning for a link building outreach program with Tier-2 and Tier-3 tech publication sites. Are there any SEO agencies who can help us only with the Link Building service? Please let me know. I can provide more details once we catch up. Thanks!
Link Building | | Rajesh.Nair0 -
Should I create new content or outreach for links for a specific KW?
A few keywords my company would like to go after are: Mobile homes for sale Manufactured homes Mobile Home Dealers. The question is should we create unique content around these keywords then market it heavily in hopes to rank that new individual page / post OR should we just be doing outreach for back links and anchored text to link to our primary domain that is already much stronger with a 38 DA? Thoughts?
Link Building | | Cfarcher0 -
Non-profit link outreach with limited resources
Our competitive metrics are good but we need to increase our linking root domains to beat our competitors and climb a few critical positions in the SERPs. We have drawn up a link-building strategy based on Moz's very helpful guide, and begun trying outreach. We're a non-profit and the content we are pushing is blog content like this, in-depth articles like this (which, incidentally, do well in search), and we're also going to start creating more infographics and other types of content to try to generate some traction that way. However, based on the success of the campaign so far, it seems unlikely we'll acquire links at the rate we need to in order to keep up with our competitors, particularly given that we only have three people who can spend time on this (at a total of around 1.5 days per week). Clearly this is something we need to persevere with and integrate into our normal content cycle, but I can't see us picking up more than a dozen or so links a year unless something unexpectedly goes viral! It seems like link outreach is so common that it's very hard even to get link targets to engage with you on social media. People just see it as spam. It would be interesting to hear what other people have done successfully to help us figure our what a realistic approach to link building looks like.
Link Building | | SOS_Children0 -
What is the best way to optimize website for more than one city?
This is my first post in the Moz Community and I have to say, it looks like an amazing place to learn - I am excited to be here. My question is this. I have a client who would like to optimize his local business website so that is shows up in several different cities. For example, he has an office in Ottawa, London and Woodstock. What would the best way to complete the on-page optimization so that Google knows this site is relevant for his service in any of these cities? Is it just a matter of including each of these terms in the title, content and headings? Should I create additional website for each location? Create a resource page for each city on the main site? Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated. Thanks,
Link Building | | KickItDigital
Nathan0 -
Which are the best directory submission sites: UBL.org, localeeze.com, web-listings.net, other?
Manual sumbissions are a PAIN IN THE B, why good directory submission management sites are great. However, which ones are the best ones?
Link Building | | yvonneq0 -
Pagerank sculpting best practices for e-commerce websites
What is currently the best practice to not let pagerank flow to policy, contact and other less important pages on an e-commerce website? Pages have to be visible on the home page, (currently in the footer) so unfortunately they cannot be moved to a "single" url. How likely is that a PR5 home page can sculpt PR4 first category pages if the # of outgoing links are at a reasonable number and structured well? Currently the home page is PR5, but category pages are only PR3 - and not structured properly...
Link Building | | DancingWebmasters0 -
What Are the Best Practices for Ranking for Synonyms?
This topic has me entirely confused, and unsure if we should keep a website focused on one keyword group, and using synonym contextual links to rank it for other keyword synonyms. We simply have not seen enough data or run enough tests to find our answer, and wanted to reach out to the community to see if anyone has. I have seen Google rank a synonym to my search query on the first page, and is why we are confused. Let's use an example: We'll use "Industry" as the main keyword for our page. "Company" or "Companies" is viewed as a synonym by Google of this keyword. When we query "Industry", "Company" and "Companies" are also found in bold. 1.) Is it best practice to also create a unique page targeting synonyms? Our thinking is that it would be best to try and target exactly what the user is looking for rather than having a synonym to their search for better conversions, but as mentioned above we feel it's best to hit exactly what they query because that's their way of thinking. That they're looking for that exact match. 2.) Have the page "Industry", but do some link building using contextual links "Company" or "Companies" pointing back at our "Industry" page. Would this help rank our "Industry" page for "Company" or "Companies" even though the main page is "Industry"? Just not sure we want to do this as the reasoning explained in #1. Thanks for your help!
Link Building | | cyberlicious0 -
How best to optomise a .co.uk to rank on google.com.au
We currently sell our products to Australia customers via Google Adwords marketing and are keen to achieve good organic serps. What steps do you recommend taking? Are any of you working down under and interested in helping on this project? Thanks
Link Building | | seanmccauley0