One of the most effective ways to build links today is digital PR.
No other tactic gives you the opportunity to earn links from authority top-tier publications, at scale.
So long as you develop a process for coming up with great ideas and concepts for campaigns, it isn’t unusual to earn significant numbers of quality links from trusted publishers.
Often links which money couldn’t buy, however hard you tried, and it’s these links which drive real, measurable, organic growth.
Yet, I repeatedly see the same mistakes being made in outreach:
Terrible subject lines.
Subject Lines Are Killing Your Campaign’s Chance of Success
Think about it this way:
Email opens lead to reads of your outreach email. In turn, this leads to clicks to your campaign and, hopefully, coverage and links.
If your subject line doesn’t encourage the recipient to open your email, there’s a good chance you’ve lost the chance of a link from that publication.
Writing a great subject line is hard. It takes time and thought to get it right.
However, over the past few years, I’ve seen a few common mistakes made which result in bad subject lines.
Let me share with you, based on my experience of launching more than 100 campaigns each year for the past three years, how to write an excellent subject line for your outreach emails to help you improve your open rates and maximize the links earned through digital PR and content marketing.
What’s an Average Open Rate?
Hopefully, you’re already tracking the open rate of your outreach emails. But, if you’re not doing so, you need to be.
You can easily track this through platforms such as BuzzStream, Pitchbox, Outreach.io, and many more.
Open rate data is one of the most valuable pieces of insight which you can have on a campaign for the simple reason is that it gives you an accurate figure as to how many of the people you reached out to have actually seen your email.
This is so insightful as it means, quite simply, that you can change up your subject line and resend to these people.
They’ve not read your email or clicked through to your campaign, so you can have the confidence that you aren’t resending prospects the same thing twice. (This, assuming that your list has been put together properly and you’re not just blind targeting anyone without consideration as to whether your campaign is relevant.)
But, what’s an average open rate?
According to data from my own campaigns over the past six months, the average open rate on outreach emails is 41%.
That means that, even after extensive testing of what does and doesn’t work for subject lines, only 4 in 10 of the prospects reached out to actually open the email.
However, analyzing data from older campaigns which I’d now happily claim have terrible subject lines, the open rate was around 23%; only an average of 2 in every 10 prospects opening.
See why it’s so important to get your subject line right? – Read more
