What does every website owner with an online business hope to achieve? The answer is pretty straightforward. Every online business owner wants to see their website in the top 10 of Google results.

It is a real challenge to achieve this goal. Yet it’s not impossible.

When we talk about top positions on Google, we should clearly understand that everything depends on your website’s traffic. And the best way to acquire traffic is via attracting backlinks.

But how to get backlinks with minimal effort?

With the help of a robust strategy called personalized email outreach.

4 Steps to Get Instant Results with Personalized Email Outreach

This guide reveals a step-by-step method on how to do personalized email outreach. The end result? You get more backlinks, more traffic, and most importantly, more customers.

Shall we begin?

1. “Do I Know You?” or How to Increase Your Chances That Your Email Will Be Opened and Read

Your business might offer various services, products, or tools. It can be anything that’s valuable to a potential target audience.

And despite the fact that you understand the importance and uniqueness of the product you produce, you might not be seeing any paying customers.

Why does this happen to your online business?

It happens due to one simple reason - nobody knows you. And here’s what happens when your potential customer gets your email but he knows nothing about you.

We’ve got this very message in our community on Facebook. (It's called “Ahrefs Insider.” BTW, you will find a lots of SEO related information over there.) As you can see, if a recipient of your message doesn’t know you, your message might end up in a block list.

Furthermore, even if a particular person decides to open and read your message, it might also be deleted if it lacks the following elements:

- A signature

- Your social links

- Personalization, it's a “Cold” style of an email template

Make sure you don’t miss these small but important elements in each email you send. Otherwise, you won’t succeed in outreach.

If you represent a company, your name is associated with a brand. This is a good reason for the recipient to take your message more seriously.

Plus, adding links to your social media accounts along with a signature will make your persona look more reliable.

If you evoke trust, there are more chances that you will get a reply to your message.

Now you’re ready to create a list of potential customers to whom you’re going to reach out.

2. How and Where to Search for Your Target Audience

There is nothing complicated in searching for a target audience. Your competitors focus on the same customers as you do. So, don’t go to work with the wind in your face. Borrow these clients from your competitors.

Let’s move on with an example of how to do this.

Assume that you’re an owner of a website that represents a legal service agency in the UK. You want to attract more clients and make your business lucrative.

Let’s go to Google and find your major competitors.

The first inquiry that comes to mind is “legal service agency in the UK.” I think your potential customers will use terms like that while searching for a solution for their needs. 

I marked the competitors that might spark our interest with arrows. Now I want to see how many backlinks a certain competitor has.

You might wonder why do we need the backlinks? The backlinks are the opportunities for your future outreach. If they link to your competitor, or are customers of your competitor, they could be the same for you. 

And here I am going to use Ahrefs Site Explorer tool.

Wow, this competitor has 141M backlinks - it's a tremendous result.

Of course, it will take ages to explore all these links. Thus, I recommend narrowing down the results by filtering the date. Let’s see how many backlinks we will get by the past month.

The results are trimmed to 23,700, also a significant number. Nevertheless, now you can get deeper into searching tons of outreach opportunities.

As you see, there is nothing difficult in searching for your target audience and building your contact list.

But the next question is how to reach out to potential customers if you don’t have their email addresses?

You will have to find those email addresses. And I will show you a couple of tricks to do it.

3. How to Find Personal Email Addresses Hassle-Free

The only way to reach out your target by email is having a correct email address of this person. If the email address no longer exists, you’ll see a notification like this in your mailbox.

As a result, all your outreach efforts will be in vain, and you waste precious time.

I recommend you verify each email address with the help of LinkedIn Sales Navigator Chrome extension in order to avoid failures. 

By the way, LinkedIn could be used for searching personal email addresses as well. Just browse your prospect’s profile attentively, and you might find it.

Unfortunately, not everyone is willing to disclose a personal email address on LinkedIn. So, you ask, “How do we find the emails then?”

Here are a couple of excellent email outreach tools that will help.

A Chrome extension called ContactOut will help you get email addresses right from profiles on LinkedIn.

Findthat.email and Voilanorbert are also helpful if you have trouble finding an email address.

I think that using these three tools, you won’t have any issues finding valid email addresses of your outreach targets.

Finally, we’ve come to the process of outreach!

4. Personalized Email Outreach

What does outreach include?

- Writing and sending an email template

- Follow-up email

- Tracking the results

a) Writing an email template and mailing it

As a recipient, I notice a lot of foolish mistakes in outreach emails. These mistakes make the sender appear careless and unprofessional as hell.

Let’s review the most common ones.

- No recipient’s name

Yes, there are cases when email senders don’t state a person’s first name in the messages they send.

- Terrible subject line

The first thing that catches a recipient’s attention is the subject line of your message. If your subject line sucks and isn’t eye-catching, your message won’t be viewed. Don’t reinvent the wheel - make your subject line short and make sure it informs the main idea of your message.

For example, here is a sweet subject line we use at our company.

However, nobody says that you can’t personalize subject lines as well. Check it out.

Talking about personalization of email templates, I would like to stress one thing - research your target’s background information properly. If you know what hobbies, interests, achievements your target has, you will have more chances to craft a unique and personalized email template.

It might be a bit challenging to make a full personalization of each email template. But it’s not necessary. You should focus primarily on the introduction.

I believe the following example will make it clearer.

When the recipient reviews a personalized email, he or she might reply with something like this.

Impressive, isn’t it? I bet you want to hear the same kind words in return. Don’t be afraid to switch on your creativity when you reach out to your target audience.

b) Follow-up email

If you see that your first pitch to some recipients didn’t bring any results, you should send a follow-up email.

For your information, follow-ups get 30% higher response rate in comparison to the first pitch. Thus, it makes sense to remind them about you and your first message once again.

It should be written in a friendly and straightforward tone.

BUT!

Please, send only ONE follow-up email. Don’t be too intrusive. People don’t like when you bother them with your endless messages.

c) Track the results

Of course, you want to ensure your outreach efforts aren’t in vain. Thus, you must keep each outreach campaign you run under control. My recommendation is to use a tool called Buzzstream. 

Buzzstream is an all-in-one service that allows you to:

Craft email outreach templates without any problems.

See each email template’s success rate.

Check the status of the messages you’ve sent.

Well, I believe have convinced you that Buzzstream is worth using when you deal with outreach!

Conclusion

In summary, cold email outreach has never been a simple strategy to apply. Yes, it is time-consuming. It takes lots of effort. It is almost impossible to get a hundred percent positive result. Nevertheless, this strategy is compelling, effective, and actionable.

I have just presented you a detailed guide on carrying out a personalized email outreach campaign from A to Z. You shouldn’t have any difficulties in applying this technique.

If you found this post useful, please, don’t forget to comment and share it on social media.

Sergey Aliokhin a Community Outreach Manager at Visme. In his spare time, Sergey likes spending his time with family, studying martial arts, and plucking fat bass guitar strings. Don’t hesitate to contact him.