by Venchito Tampon Jr | Last Updated on October 24, 2021
One of the crucial skills when it comes to link building is the ability to write outreach emails that convert into links. If you can craft a pitch that gets your recipients’ attention and let them take action — like promoting your content or giving your links, you’ll experience success with your campaigns.
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The first mistake is:
Exaggerating emails with too much personalization
Personalizing emails means that you include details of the person you’re reaching out to. So things like name, website, where you even found them (the source), the topic of their content, so on and so forth.
The idea of personalization has been overly used by marketers today. To think that when they personalize their emails, they would instantly have an edge over other people trying to get into the box of the recipient.
When done right, personalization is okay.
Doing it in extreme, over personalizing like including details that are not true in the first place will only do more harm than good.
Avoid the mistake of staying you’re a fan of the blog if you only have read their articles. It is inauthentic.
So rather than saying you’re a fan, why not simply admire their works. Saying “Impressive work on content” is better than “I’m a fan” – if you’re not really a fan.
Not clearly showing the offer and value of a pitch
What does it mean?
Typically, there is an intention behind every outreach email. One outreach email is written to get a link from a blogger, another email is to build a partnership with a publisher to collaborate for a content piece, let’s say.
With this intention, there is value involved to offer to the prospect.
Either that is including the person as part of a round-up post, which is an exposure in itself. Or offering a free visual version of text-based content like an article.
If the value of the pitch is not clearly stated in the outreach email, you’re less likely to get a response, and therefore, get the promotion or links that you want.
You must understand that every prospect has this question in mind when reading emails, “what’s in it for me?”.
If you can answer that in your outreach email, you would avoid the mistake that other marketers do which is aggressively asking for a link, when they haven’t even shown what they can offer in value.
One of the challenges in sending outreach emails is the ability to scale sending them off.
Scalability is a big challenge, that’s the reason why other marketers resort to using fake accounts – which is our third common mistake.
Using fake accounts to have more inbox capacity
They are using fake accounts to have more inbox capacity in place, and at the same, if they have made some mistakes with emails, there would be fewer damages to experience.
The thing is: using fake accounts would probably hurt your brand.
Indirectly when you promote content from a brand, it depicts that the account has something to do with the brand — either the person is working for the company, or is simply just sharing it.
There is an indirect perceived value about your brand. So using fake accounts would hurt you.
If you really want to improve results from your outreach campaign, you start using either a corporate domain account or an agency account.
By using a real person, you don’t have to think of ways to prove the authenticity of your outreach email. You simply craft an email and send it.
Authenticity will be revealed sooner or later in your outreach email, so why not use real outreach accounts.
Using blocks when writing outreach emails
These are blocks of paragraphs composed of 5 to 10 sentences for each paragraph.
That itself affects the readability of your outreach email.
Imagine having to read a long-form outreach email from a person you didn’t know?
It is not enticing, isn’t it?
Readability matters in outreach emails. Make your emails concise as much as possible.
Do not fall into this idea of the “curse of knowledge” where you want to put all information in one single email.
Remember the goal of the initial pitch is to capture the interest of the prospect, let them know of the value you are offering, and take even a micro action.
Giving the person the embed code of the infographic to be promoted on the blog or attaching a word doc file of your guest blog article in the first email is too many details.
So the next time you write your initial outreach email, make it simple.
Do not complicate things by adding details and make your email like they’re reading a book.
And one of the most common mistake marketers that you should be avoided at all costs is not proofreading your emails before sending them.
Not proofreading your emails before sending them
Most marketers and SEOs use email templates to scale their outreach efforts. They have this template ready and available, and all they have to do is to copy and paste or use the insert option in their outreach platform, like the one in Gmail account.
If you are careless when using outreach emails, you can make the mistake of not inserting the right inputs in the right fields in your email, such that, it’ll look like it’s an automated email.
Mistakes like field names like [Name], or [BlogName] that are not replaced by the actual name of the recipient and the exact name of the Blog.
So a quick solution to this to avoid this common outreach mistake is to have a quick glance or proofreading of the email before you schedule it or send it quickly.
Have someone in the outreach team who is detail-oriented to make sure this mistake wouldn’t happen, or if it happens, it would be only a few percentages.
The Author
Venchito Tampon Jr
Venchito Tampon is a Filipino Motivational Speaker, Corporate Trainer, and a Leadership Speaker in the Philippines. He is the CEO and Co-Founder of SharpRocket, a link building agency. With a decade of experience, Venchito has a proven track record of leading hundreds of successful SEO (link builidng) campaigns across competitive industries like finance, B2B, legal, and SaaS. His expert advice as a link building expert has been featured in renowned publications such as Semrush, Ahrefs, Huffington Post and Forbes. He is also an international SEO spoken and has delivered talks in SEO Zraz, Asia Pacific Affiliate Summit in Singapore, and Search Marketing Summit in Sydney, Australia. Check out his other businesses, Hills & Valleys Cafe, Blend N Sips and Saas Pursuit.
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