Cold email outreach is still widely used for link building. However, the conversion rates have decreased drastically as many link builders utilized cold outreach the wrong way. Spending time on prospecting, finding email addresses, crafting email copy, and sending emails just to receive a couple of responses is very frustrating. So, what can you do to increase response rates, and get those high DR links? Below, you’ll find out the cold email outreach strategy that landed us more than 1,500 backlinks with an average domain rating (DR) of 68. Discover the tactics you can replicate and get featured in HubSpot, Ahrefs, G2, Zapier, and many other high-authority websites. The goal of this case study is to share tips that you can use in your cold email campaigns to get higher conversion rates. You’ll learn how to: Before you jump into the details, it’s important to understand a bit of context about the goals, approach, and tools used. Cold Email Is a Powerful Tool for Building Backlinks & Growing Organic Traffic (If Used Correctly) Creating good content that delivers value to the audience helps attracting backlinks, but it is not enough. Competing in a cold email software niche is extremely difficult, and most competitors publish a lot of fresh and quality content that is supported with backlinks from high-authority websites. The solution was to start actively building backlinks through cold outreach. The biggest issue with cold outreach is that everyone is doing it, and to build backlinks at scale, you need to be creative with your approach. Given the fact that Hunter is a tool that helps you with cold outreach, it was a no-brainer to use Hunter for all aspects of cold outreach — from finding valid email addresses to automating cold email campaigns. You can go crazy and spend quite a lot of budget on tools, but in nutshell, you only need Ahrefs and a system for tracking backlinks (Google Sheets does the work). This is how it looked before starting with active link building. The domain had quite a strong backlink profile, but the organic traffic and rankings plateaued, which wasn’t enough to keep up with the competition. We started actively building backlinks through cold outreach in January 2021. This is how it looks today. In just a year and a half, more than 6,000 relevant backlinks were built, and organic traffic increased by 2.3x. All that in an extremely competitive industry (it’s hard to find any keyword with a keyword difficulty lower than 25). Below, you’ll find out the key takeaways learned along the way and how you can apply them to your link building strategy. Takeaway 1: Guest Posting and Claiming Unlinked Mentions Have 13.7% Conversion Rates Key takeaway: When starting with guest blogging, getting featured in high-authority publications in your industry will be tough without a strong writing portfolio. Most editors ask that you share a couple of writing samples published under your name. The best approach here is to start writing for smaller but relevant blogs in your niche with positive traffic and authority growth trends. Slowly build up your writing portfolio and start pitching to higher authority websites. We’ll cover how to pitch to these higher authority sites shortly… Key takeaway: Before starting with tracking mentions, it is essential to mention that this tactic doesn’t work for everyone. Hunter is an established brand, and it was known before we started with this tactic, so for this tactic to yield results, you need to have an established brand to start with. Here is what you can do instead… Create image link bait content and reclaim unlinked attributions. The simplified process looks like this – create custom images and upload them to stock image sites such as Pixabay. Make sure to include all the details for attribution, so if people use your images, they can adequately attribute them to your website. The biggest challenge is that many people will use your stock images, but the link will often lead to the stock image website instead of yours. That’s where tracking the mentions come in handy. By setting up mention alerts, you can reach out to the sites that have used your image but linked to the stock image website. You can ask them to link to your website instead. Additionally, you can periodically use the reverse image tool to find where your images have been used without proper attribution. Tips on implementing this strategy: Key takeaway: Although the open rate was good and the highest response rate compared to other campaigns, the conversion rate is noticeably the lowest. The main reason is that many prospects respond with unrealistic paid options. Extra tip: How to achieve a 40% response rate for your guest blogging campaign Another good tactic that works well is collaborating with link-building partners and introducing each other to editors with whom you previously published guest posts. This is how you can get into a conversation with high-quality websites such as Zapier and G2 (and publish a guest post there). Here’s a template you can try. In the email opener, mention a shared connection and compliment their blog post. Also, if they have already published a guest post before, there is a high chance that they are interested in publishing another guest post. Key takeaway: The skyscraper tactic was popularized by Brian Dean from Backlinko almost 10 years ago. People tend to scrape lists and use the shotgun method — send as many generic emails as possible with minimal personalization. It worked before, but now it will likely hurt your email deliverability and sender reputation. What you can do, however, is try to send fewer emails and put your time into personalization. We do this, but over time noticed that open rates were slowly declining as well as conversions. This is, so far, the lowest-performing campaign we have run. Takeaway 2: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% Crafting a winning subject line can be tricky. It really depends on the industry and context. At Hunter, we tried generic, one-word subject lines, as well as longer and personalized ones. Here’s what you can take away from the results: While reaching out to high authority websites and asking for a guest post opportunity, the more personalized your subject lines are, the better. Our best-performing subject line for guest post pitching is: {{company:”your company”}} x Hunter.io collab idea? Our worst-performing subject line for guest post outreach was: Content collaboration 🤝 For doing a skyscraper method (it still works, but the performance is decreasing), short, but personalized subject lines prove to work the best: {{first_name:”Hey”}}, collaboration? Longer, but personalized subject lines don’t work that well: {{first_name:”Hello”}}, I think you may find it useful. Key takeaways: Subject lines that worked best for us: Takeaway 3: Follow-Ups Can Increase Response Rates by 66% According to Backlinko, follow-ups are an essential part of cold outreach. Sending multiple follow-ups can increase replies by 66%. Here’s how it works for us: Roughly 65% of all replies come from follow-ups. Here’s another campaign where we sent emails to 600 recipients: Roughly 47% of all replies are coming from follow-ups. It’s safe to say that follow-ups are mandatory in any cold outreach campaign. Maybe the person you’re reaching out to is getting hundreds of emails per day and simply skipping your email. Or maybe they skimmed through their inbox quickly and forgot to open your emails. There can be many reasons why someone doesn’t get back to you. We tested multiple sequences, and what works for us is the following sequence: In case you didn’t get a reply at all, you can snooze the conversation and reach out again in a couple of months. Alternatively, you can find other potential decision-makers and try reaching them. Takeaway 4: Find the Right Decision-Maker & Don’t Quit After the First Sequence One of the most challenging parts of cold outreach (apart from crafting a personalized email) is reaching out to the right decision-maker. Cold outreach is not a one-size-fits-all approach, and it depends on the context. For instance, if your outreach goal is to score a backlink from a specific website, then the right decision-maker would be someone who manages content at the company. There are cases when you can’t find the contact information of a decision maker because the company is too small or their only available email address is a generic one such as info@company.com. In these instances, it’s fine to reach out to the CEO or the founder or simply to any available email address. The open and response rates will be lower, of course, but many times, they will refer you to the right person. Or, you can ask for the right person to contact. Here is an example of a follow-up email used: And here you can see the results this email achieved: As you can see, 20.5% of all replies come from the second follow-up, where you ask for an alternative contact. Most of these replies are helpful and point you Read More Read More
The post How to Grow Organic Traffic by 131% With Cold Email (Case Study) first appeared on Diggity Marketing.