I’m a big believer that honesty opens doors, particularly when it comes to building long-term relationships with people you are reaching out to.
It always takes countless hours to come up with a list of possible contacts.
So it won’t do you any good if you send overused emails to your outreach prospects.
Always keep in mind that you’ll never get a second chance to make a great first impression.
Today those outreach prospects are strangers, but tomorrow you might want to partner with them.
By then, it would be too late because they will already think that your company sends spam.
Your first outreach email is critical.
It should get your foot in the door and allow you to start building relationships with the people of interest.
In this post, you will learn why the majority of email templates aren’t worth being used or even taken into consideration.
Plus, I’ll share how to make your next email outreach template truly catch people’s attention.
Typical Mistakes in Email Outreach Templates
I receive tons of email outreach pitches.
Some of them make me cringe.
It’s obvious that all those templates were found on the web, slightly modified, and then sent to dozens of link prospects without any thought behind it.
Using mass emailing in email outreach is a bad idea.
However, this doesn’t mean that you don’t need a template.
You can take some time to develop a truly personalized template that you can slightly update later to fit the profile of the recipient you are sending it to.
But how do you know if the template you are currently using is not working and needs to be fixed urgently?
Here are five key things you should look for.
1. Non-Personalized Egobait
When you receive an email that tells how great, insightful, inspiring and so on and so forth your post on XYZ blog was, you know 100% that this email was sent out automatically.
Here’s an excellent example of what I’m talking about:
As you can see, all the adjectives are quite generic and nothing points out that this person really had a chance to review my guide.
Those red flags make me not care about this person’s opinion because I know for a fact that this email was received not only by me but also by thousands of other bloggers.
So obviously email blasting this message to hundreds of people does not help them get links at all.
Additionally, it creates a negative attitude toward their brand in my mind as they clearly don’t care about what I do.
So how do you make your ego-bait personalized?
Easy-breezy!
You need to add one short sentence where you need to tell why exactly you enjoyed the post.
For instance, you could tell that you’ve faced similar problems with email outreach or that you are also a big fan of a particular tool or approach that the author was talking about in their post.
This screenshot shows an example of the sentence I used in one of my emails that did the trick.
You can see how my email outreach stands out in comparison with spam looking messages. Here, nobody can say that I sent the same exact email to other people.
2. Asking for Favors in Your First Email
Everybody wants the results right here right now but nobody is willing to spend time proving that they are trustworthy.
People ask for links simply because they consider their content good.
Recently Ryan Robinson tweeted just about that.
Why should you give links to unknown sites only because the content is allegedly decent?
The problem is that the person you are asking for a favor does not owe you anything and simply does not know who you are.
Additionally, the argument about interesting content is a bit wishy-washy.
For example, let’s take a look at some guests’ posts on the Moz blog mostly of good quality.
This screenshot shows posts that were published in the last six months and filtered by the number of referring domains: – Read more
