How To Increase Reply Rate Link Building Outreach

Link Building Outreach is Essential for Any Content Marketing Campaign, Learn How To Increase Your Reply Rate for More Links.

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Link building is a crucial part of SEO promotion. There are a few ways to gather links: 

– make valuable content and wait for the links;

– hire an agency to obtain links to your pages;

– build your own team to write content and gather links.

 

Just FYI, waiting for links is certainly an option, but it NEVER works! Given that bit of info, you’re going to need to actively build links and to do that you’re going to need to know how to create an effective link building outreach strategy.

In this article, we’re going to outline the issues you will encounter with link building outreach and provide the best work-arounds to increase your reply rate.

 

On the surface, the link building process is pretty simple:

You find a relevant site and send an email requesting a link back to your content. Alternatively, you can reach them through social media accounts. The primary purpose is to ask the chosen site to link to your page, and I can guarantee that 0% will get back to you.

You’re going to have to learn how to earn a response with a cold outreach like this. Simply reaching out and asking for something that will really only benefit you is a waste of time. If you’re link building outreach isn’t getting much response — this is probably why.

Reasons why you don’t have many replies

 

1. Invalid emails

 

You can receive messages like this:

What can you do to solve this issue? Make sure to use special tools like Neverbounce, Hunter, and similar ones to validate the email addresses. 

The valuable tools allow you to identify invalid email addresses. Consequently, you can remove them from your outreach campaign. The validated list makes you look reputable and increases the chance that your recipient will receive the email in their inbox, not spam folder.

 

2. General emails like info

Try to identify the person in charge of editorial or advertising requests. We ignore general emails like support@domain.com because the support team sometimes isn’t familiar with the guest post or link exchange practice.

 

In case you haven’t found personnel email we offer you the following letter template, where we ask the team to forward this letter to the person responsible for the guest posts.

 

“Hello, guys! Could you please forward this email to your director of Marketing? Or maybe any other appropriate person responsible for Content Distribution and Link Building? Thanks in advance!”

 

3. You’ve sent non-personal emails

 

Including the recipient’s name to craft a personal email is a good practice. We prepare a list of email addresses where most recipients are persons with names and positions. Including the person’s name significantly increases the chance of receiving a positive reply.

 

4. Wrong subject line for the email

 

We advise you to include a proper email subject that clearly explains your intention. If you reach out to get information about the guest post guidelines, add a relevant subject line like “Guest post request” or “Link exchange request.”

 

5. Lack of follow-ups

 

Continue with at least two follow-ups in sequence. You can set up several days between emails, preferable hours when receiving messages. Also, exclude weekends in your sequences.

 

6. Ignore contact forms

 

Filling contact forms manually might seem like a daunting task for many. However, you can use tools like Roboform to insert your name, email, and subject line automatically.

In this case, we advise you to use different subject lines in your emails. This step will help you distinguish the email responses from bulk send campaigns and the other outreach campaigns.

 

7. You send a lot of emails to one address

 

When we talk about outreach, you will have to deal with hundreds and even thousands of domains for your campaign. To avoid duplicate emails, you can use a CRM system like Buzzstream or Buzzsumo. 

 

8. Wrong target audience

If you don’t receive replies, you likely reached the wrong target audience. If you reach well-known blogs 70 DR but have a commerce site with low DR, you are less likely to receive a response. Instead, try to outreach similar sites and increase the metrics of sites that you want to outreach gradually.

 

The best practice is to outreach relevant sites. Your reply rate will be significantly lower if you have an auto site and send letters to fashion sites. Instead, pick a suitable site and appropriate subject + body massage to increase your reply rate drastically.

 

How to find the relevant email?

 

The first step is to perform competitor analysis and select the most relevant sites. Open each site individually and copy the email address. We don’t recommend using the Data Scraping tools in this case because some sites use emails like xxx at sitename dot com or image of the email to avoid receiving spam.

How to conduct your link building outreach?

The key to a successful outreach campaign is a good email template.

If you are doing guest post outreach at scale, you don’t want to pitch your guest post idea straight away. Instead, you should send an engaging, friendly, but generic message. The template should be short and to the point. In no more than five sentences you want to:

• Explain who you are
• What you want
• Why they should care

Click here for a master tutorial on setting up your outreach campaign.

How to calculate the reply rate?

 

We recommend using special software to track the number of replies you have received.

Calculating the reply rate is a continuous process. Monitor your rate and try to implement improvement regularly. The process looks like a loop. Every time, you will be pushed back, but with the next jump, you will receive higher results.

 

When are high reply rates irrelevant?

 

High reply rates are irrelevant when you have a lot of responses like “not interested.” It means that you have reached the wrong persons or sent an email to general email addresses like info and contact. Maybe they have published posts earlier but now stop accepting posts. In this case, the best approach is to change requirements. 

 

Why does a high reply rate save your money?

You can scale your current process with a 3% reply rate. But every time you need to gather a lot of new sites. How about 30% reply rate? It significantly decreases research work, so improve the process to save the time that you would waste on manual work.  

 

Final thoughts

 

Nowadays, there are a lot of software tools that promise to gather and send emails automatically. But your receivers might hide emails, use contact forms with captcha, and filter your emails. The best way is to reach out to fewer email addresses and make letters more personal with direct/clear subject lines. It allows you to increase the reply rate and achieve your link building goals.