Framework for high converting outreach emails
1. Pre-outreach
This is the most time-consuming
step, but it’s by far, the most fruitful. Before you even think about sending
an email, you need to get on the blogger’s radar.
At a basic level, this could include:
- Commenting
on their blog
- Sharing
their content on social media and tagging them
- Replying
to their social media updates
- Help
them out with something – e.g. an error on their site they may have missed
It’s also worth having set up to display your profile
picture. This should be the same profile picture on your social
networks
– it will make you more recognizable when you eventually email them.
2.
Personalization
At a bare minimum, you should be
including the name of the person
you’re trying to reach . If you
don’t know it – go and find it because people will be far more likely to reply.
If you’re emailing a generic email address, look for a contact who works at
that company – a little bit of personalization goes a long way.
A good example is an outreach email I received a while back;
where the marketer referenced something personal from my Twitter account (my
love of Chinese food and watching re-runs of Firefly).
3.
Help the recipient
Many outreach emails are just poorly
written pitches that mostly ask people to give up their time for free and by
doing something to help the blogger out, before you’ve even asked them for
anything – you’re far more likely to grab their attention. But, to be clear –
you need to do something to help them.
I get a lot of pitches from startups
that want me to write reviews
of their tools, and they make out they’re giving
me a super exclusive free trial. Then I discover that it’s the same free trial
that everyone gets.
You could give them a heads up on a
bug on their site, or it could be something as basic as sharing one of their
posts with your audience.
4.
What do you want them to do for you?
Be absolutely crystal clear with
what you’re asking from the blogger. The key here is to make the call-to-action
sound like it’s beneficial to both of you.
5.
What’s in it for them?
By this point, you’ll have already
done something to help the blogger you’re trying to connect with. That’s
usually enough, but not always so I recommend going a step further.
The idea here is to tell them what
you’ll do if they agree to your call-to-action. I particularly like to focus on
the challenges that bloggers face when agreeing to someone else’s request.
A lot of bloggers will publish guest
posts and then realize that the contributor has no interest in sharing the post
with their audience
or replying to comments.
6.
Let them know who you are
A lot of outreach emails come from
random Gmail accounts with no way of finding out that that person really is. No
links to their website, social profiles or anything.
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