Simple Outreach Guide (That You Can Follow Immediately)

What is one of the key factors that help people run their business successfully? (In your opinion).

This key factor is nothing more but an ordinary communication. In other words, the way you can use your diplomatic talent to persuade a person to become your customer and buy whatever you offer.

You should realize that it is quite challenging to grow your customer base from the start. If you have just launched your website that offers some service or product, your chances to succeed are dim.

However, if you know an effective outreach strategy, you can turn the tables!

In this guide, I will show you how to perform email outreach correctly step-by-step.

Let’s get started!

SIDENOTE: If you are curious about writing outreach emails that won’t be ignored, you should watch this video.

1. Introduce Your Brand Firstly

Practice shows that not so many new service solutions appear on the market. As a rule, people tend to start a business that offers some products or services that we already know. Thus, it won’t be hard to guess that any market is under the sway of a few “beast” brands.

And you are another one enthusiast who decided to challenge those big-fish for the leadership.

Unfortunately, people won’t pay attention to your brand. You won’t succeed even if your product can kick your competitors’ ass!

You even try to apply all possible marketing strategies and reach out to people with top-notch messages. Nothing works. Your marketing doesn’t work. Your messages are ignored.

You don’t understand the essence of all these fails.

Why does it happen?

Here is a short answer to this question.

Nobody knows your brand!

Here is how one person described the process of his decision making as to reading and responding the message or not.

“If I don’t know who the sender is…” - this argument is exhaustive. If I personally have never heard of the person pitching me or of the service he introduces, I won’t reply. Even if this person sends me a few follow-up messages.

Furthermore, I would like to stress a couple of the most common omissions that might turn off your potential customers to reply to your message:

• Unincorporated email address
• No proper signature
• No social links

Try to include all of the attributes mentioned above. Thus, your signature section should look like this one:

As you can see from the example above, you must be in a limelight across social media channels. Thus, make sure you’ve created accounts on such platforms as Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn (Instagram, Pinterest if your business needs it.)

Your main purpose is to find ways to approach your target audience at this stage. Show them that you are a pretty down-to-earth business owner who knows how to resolve the customers’ issues.

But how to find the places where your target audience might dwell?

2. How to Find Your Target Audience

Outreach is a complex strategy that includes different preparatory stages. And your initial stage is to find a target audience.

There are two ways to find your target audience. The first one is by surfing the web and social channels trying to figure out the potential blogs, communities, groups, and channels where your audience might be found. And the second one is by enticing customers from your competitors.

I believe you realize that it is too time-consuming and counterproductive to build your outreach strategy following the first way of finding potential customers. While the second approach is more straightforward and resultative.

Thus, let’s see how to acquire the targets for your outreach using the “borrow-customer-from-competitor” method.

I think the best option here is to proceed with an example to cover the entire process of this stage.

As for the example, I would like to take the niche I don’t have any expertise in. Let it be fitness and yoga stuff.

What’s next?

Find the main competitors with the help of Google search and a query related to this niche. For instance, let’s see what competitors I’ll get by typing “yoga instructor”:

I have already detected a few interesting opportunities for myself. I don’t want to say that the websites/blogs I highlighted are my primal competitors. But I can say for sure that these blogs cover the topic related to my niche. Thus, I can find some people who are interested in yoga and try to convert them into my customers.

Ok, you might ask me “why do I need these blogs? How are they related to outreach?”

Good questions indeed! I won’t deny the fact that you must understand each and every aspect of outreach. And I am going to answer these questions in the next blog post section.

3. The Essence of Outreach

The core principle of outreach is
to let people build business relationships with each other.

The final goal of the outreach doesn’t matter. The point is that people find a way to connect.

Basically, outreach via email can be divided into the following types.

• Link building
• Content/blog promotion
• Quiz
• Any other business/marketing activities

But what is the link in the chain “competitor - content - customer”?

The thing is that people always search for some information on Google. They click on the sources that rank in Google top10, get familiar with the content, become loyal visitors of the blogs, and convert into customers eventually. Moreover, if the visitors like what they read on some particular blog, they might reward it with a link back to this piece of content. These links are a kind of leads that help you find targets for your outreach.

Now, let’s see how to find the backlinks for your email outreach.

4. Search the Backlinks and Find the Outreach Targets

Now, let’s get back to the list of Google top10 results and see how many backlinks some of them have.

You can use different tools to find the backlinks but I prefer to stick to the backlink checker from Ahrefs:

This post has gained 12 new backlinks for the past 60 days. However, the number of links may vary and you’ll have to review these links one by one to find the most promising one.

Since the backlinks give the opportunity to explore some content, it is a good chance to reach out the authors as well.

You can either reach out this author and promote your own content or build some kind of business relationships based on a win-win basis. It depends on your overall marketing strategy.

However, the question is “how to find one’s contact information?”

5. How to Find Contact Details

I’ve sent lots of emails in my practice and I know for sure how it is important to utilize a correct email address of the recipients.

If the email address you use is incorrect, you might get some of these two notifications:

Or this one

It doesn’t matter what type of notification you received. It means that your message didn’t get to the target.

How to prevent from getting to this dead-end?

Simply by finding correct email addresses using tools like ContactOut, Findthat.Email, or Voilanorbert.

Furthermore, I advise you to verify each email address with the extension called LinkedIn Sales Navigator. It shows you whether the exact email address is stored in LinkedIn database:

I can confirm that if you use these techniques to find email addresses, you won’t goof up during the outreach!

6. Outreach Itself

I have illustrated the preparation steps that would help you gather the information for the process of outreach. And now it is time to show you how to do email outreach systematically.

You should know that outreach involves three stages of performance.

1) Creating + personalization of email templates

I am pretty sure that “cold” type of emails don’t ring the bell among people who get them. Have you ever thought why does it happen?

“Cold” emails have a generic subject line, no personal approach, and they are focused on pushing the product forward but not on interacting with the customers.

As the rule, a subject line of a mediocre “cold” email always reflects an idea of what you’ll find opening the message.

This subject line tells me that I’ll find a list of the websites for guest posting. I can decide whether to open and read this message or not by reading the subject line. It is not a good way for your outreach to draw people into conversation with you. I would say, it is a kind of a zero-sum game where your chances to succeed are miserable.

Nevertheless, it is not always bad to be straightforward in the subject line of the message. It allows you to “say” what you are going to offer to your potential customer within the email. We are writing such subject lines at Ahrefs as well.

However, the highest open rate belongs to those emails that have a personalized subject line (and an introduction section.)

Keep in mind that personalized emails show your attitude towards the person you want to reach out to. In other words, the recipients of the messages will see that you sacrificed your time to raise the chances to contact them. They will appreciate it!

2) Don’t forget to send a follow-up message

Even well-personalized messages may stay without reply. Why? There are various reasons for this. Likely, it doesn’t mean that you won’t have another chance to draw the attention of the person you had sent a message before.

I advise you to send at least one follow-up message. It will increase your chance to reach out to the person because follow-ups have 30% higher response rate (compared to the first message you send.)

3) Outreach monitoring

If you want to find out the reason why your messages end up unread, you should track each outreach campaign.

The tool I recommend you to use is BuzzStream.

This service provides with the range of different options, like:

• Crafting email templates

• Email template success rate

• Explore message history

Don’t hesitate to utilize this tool for your outreach needs!

Wrapping Up

Outreach is a complex process that includes different stages. It takes lots of your time and efforts. What’s more important, you can’t predict the results you’ll get after an email blast you did.

Fortunately, this step-by-step guide on outreach will help you keep going with your outreach campaigns!

If you found this piece of content useful, please, feel free to share it across your socials.

Sergey Aliokhin

Sergey Aliokhin is the Marketing Manager at Ahrefs. Apart from working at Ahrefs, he likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts, and plucking fat bass guitar strings.