Quick Tips For Efficient Outreach
Quick Tips For Efficient Outreach
Even though you want to take the time to personalize your emails, there are a few good tools that you can use to speed up your process without compromising on quality.BoomerangI mentioned Boomerang earlier, saying how it can be a great tool for making sure you follow up with people using this nice little feature:
It also has another great feature that allows you to schedule when an email is sent. This is very handy if you’re doing outreach across different time zones. A good example being if you’re in Seattle and you’re outreaching to UK based bloggers, when you get into the office and start emailing at 9am, it is nearly the end of the working day in the UK. This may not be the ideal time to email someone.
So, Boomerang allows you to schedule when an email is sent. Once you’ve installed the app, a little button appears in Gmail:When you compose an email and click on this, you get this dropdown:
From here you can schedule the email and make sure it reaches someone at the right time.
Canned ResponsesCanned responses is a Gmail Labs feature (read how to enable Labs here) and allows you to quickly insert pre-written templates into an email. This is super-handy for a number of reasons, one of which being that you don’t need to worry about copying and pasting into your emails every time. Instead, you can just select the canned responses option and insert the relevant text:
This is extra-useful if you combine it with Boomerang and use it to follow up with people. You can create a canned response that follows up with people you’ve already emailed. Using our example from earlier, it may look something like this:All of this information can help me to find out a little bit more about him and help to further personalize my email to him. For example, if he has recently tweeted a news story that I know about, I can comment on it, too. This shows I’ve taken the time to do my research on him, rather than just sending a blanket email to lots of people.There is a bunch of information including:Rand’s locationHis position at MozHis Twitter accountHis LinkedIn profileNote that the bits highlighted in yellow are the parts that you personalize to the person you’re contacting. You still need to personalize it, otherwise you’re not likely to get a response.
RapportiveRapportive is a great plug-in for Gmail and Outlook which gives you quite a bit of information about the person you’re emailing. Here is an example of how Rapportive looks when I try to send an email to Rand:
All of this information can help me to find out a little bit more about him and help to further personalize my email to him. For example, if he has recently tweeted a news story that I know about, I can comment on it, too. This shows I’ve taken the time to do my research on him, rather than just sending a blanket email to lots of people.
Outreach Pitfalls to Avoid
There are a few common mistakes that can happen when you’re link building. Mistakes happen; this is fine as long as you learn from them. Hopefully, this section will help you learn from other people’s mistakes and avoid some of these pitfalls.Using Mass Emailing SoftwareThere are many providers of software which allow you to email lots and lots of people at once. This is a legitimate practice as long as people have opted into hearing from you and are expecting the email. Lots of companies do this all the time with their mailing lists. However, when it comes to link building, it is generally a bad idea to use any kind of software like this.
Here Are a Few Reasons:•It is much harder to personalize mass emails like this•If you make a mistake, it isn’t just one recipient that sees it; all of them do•You can get yourself blacklisted if people start reporting you as spam•You are possibly breaking the law if you’re mass emailing people who have not opted into being emailed in this manner
Add to this the fact that you’re jeopardizing not only your own reputation, but that of the website you’re representing, ruining any chance of the website owner working with the email recipients in the future.Not Customising Your Template Earlier, you saw an email template that I could use for follow up:Imagine sending this email to someone without editing the yellow bits? It is VERY unlikely to get a positive response! This is why in this particular example, I’ve chosen to highlight the sections in yellow so that I’m less likely to forget about them.If this does happen, the undo send feature of Gmail Labs can sometimes rescue the situation if you’re quick enough.