Email outreach is a powerful way to establish email connections with potential clients and leads.
It’s also an important part of email marketing, which makes it vital for any business or blogger that relies on email as their main form of communication.
But cold emailing can be tricky.
You want to make sure that your email is engaging and relevant but not come off too pushy or spammy.
At first glance, cold outreach can seem quite daunting- and you’d be right to assume so.
The average response rate for cold email campaigns (those sent by strangers) hovers around 5%. However, with the right tactics, a ladle of patience (and a dash of luck), people can see response rates of up to 40%.
In this article, we’ll go through what email outreach is, the different methods, important tactics, and successful templates that you can use to ease the whole process significantly and increase your chance of success.
What is Email Outreach?
Cold email outreach, also known as email prospecting, is an effective and affordable outbound sales tactic used in many different fields.
It works by sending personalized messages to people that you had never previously contacted. This could include anyone from a potential customer or vendor to someone in your industry that might have a platform that is relevant and valuable to you.
While outreach email is tricky – it can also be very rewarding when done correctly: You get to start conversations on your own terms, develop meaningful relationships, gain exposure to your business, and convert prospects into long-lasting clients or generate sales from them.
Many businesses and bloggers do email outreach campaigns through guest posts and link building.
The Different Methods
There are two main email outreach methods – personalized and mass-send approaches. They are also widely known as the Sniper vs. Shotgun outreach.
The metaphor is actually very accurate – with a sniper, you concentrate on a single target, and the chances of hitting it successfully are a lot higher. On the other hand, shotguns are hard to aim with, they shoot many smaller bullets in one go, and you mostly just shoot randomly and hope for the best.
So, how does this translate to email outreach?
Let’s take a look!
The Sniper Approach in Email Outreach
With the sniper approach, you carefully choose and research your prospective client. What this means is that you’re focusing on individual prospects and emailing them one-on-one with your message for link building or guest posting opportunities. The goal is to send a hyper-personalized email that will get their attention and create a significant business relationship that will last.
The email that you send will apply to this person only, and you can’t use it as a template to reach out to other people.
Here is an example of a personalized outreach email:
As you can see, the overall tone of the email is like writing to an old friend while still being respectful. However, none of that matters if you don’t do your research on the prospect. Send an article that you liked from them or mention a mutual interest. Anything that will show the potential client that you care and are willing to put in the effort in this business relationship.
Let’s quickly see what the pros and cons of the sniper approach in email outreach are:
| Advantages of sniper outreach | Disadvantages of sniper outreach |
|---|---|
| – You’ll be more successful outreaching famous bloggers, influencers, and authoritative figures in your respective field. | – It’s a manual process. Personalizing emails requires you to spend time researching potential clients, and there are no shortcuts to this. |
| -You’ll have a higher response rate. | – It’s a lengthy process. Creating a personalized email takes roughly 10 minutes, which means that the maximum number you can send per day is 48. And that is if you’re able to dedicate a full 8-hour day to this task. |
| – You’ll create longer-lasting relationships that are based on trust. | – It’s a technique that requires a more complicated follow-up process. Since all of the prospects are targeted individually, you can’t measure the success of a specific template. It’s also easy to get lost in all the different information if you don’t pay enough attention. |
The shotgun approach in email outreach
The second most popular method is the mass-send approach, also known as the shotgun technique. It is the textbook definition for “quantity over quality” and focuses on automation since it’s typically done through special outreach tools such as HubSpot, SmartReach, and Yesware.
Most of those tools create an outreach campaign through a sequence of emails with templates you can write yourself or use the ones available. Depending on the tool, you can contact X number of prospects and automatically send follow-up emails when they don’t respond.
The automated mass-send approach is popular amongst people who want to get their links fast and don’t really care about the quality. There is the option for optimization of the template, but the personalization is still only done to a degree in which it can be templated and relevant for many prospects.
Here is what a typical mass-send email template looks like:
Unfortunately, this shotgun approach is a prevalent practice in link building and blogger outreach for purposes like guest posts.
A bland email with no character and no attempt to communicate with the receiver is a pretty good indicator that that person will not deliver good content and will not be a genuine person you would want to develop a business relationship with.
Then why is it still preferred by so many people?
Well simply, because it’s easy and requires less effort. However, there are merits to this shotgun approach in email outreach. Let’s take a look at the pros and cons:
| Advantages of shotgun outreach | Disadvantages of sho |
|---|