3 Strategies to Use Outreach Emails for Effective Content Marketing

It is always said that quality content is the most important asset of any blogger, writer or content creator. But any good piece of content is not enough to give good rewards unless it is promoted properly through various channels such as various social media and online platforms. 

All you need to do is proper content marketing.

Now, the obvious question is - What is exactly the content marketing?

If we go by the standard definition stated by 'The Content Marketing Institute' . It tells us that -> 

Content marketing is a strategic marketing approach focused on creating and distributing valuable, relevant, and consistent content to attract and retain a clearly defined audience — and, ultimately, to drive profitable customer action.

Content Promotion Using Email Outreach 

The objective of content marketing is promoting the content written or owned by you which could help you further in link building. This could also be done by doing a collaboration with person or people who are big influencers in the field which you need.  

Email outreach is one of the most appropriate channel to carry out content marketing. Email outreach is nothing but a way of initiating communication with different people via sending emails.

Link Building and Content Promotion Using Email Outreach

The basic questions arising here are, 

1. Is there a proper way to use 'outreach' for promoting the content?
2. What is the proper way to find hundreds of quality outreach prospects?
3. How to formulate very impressive outreach emails?

1.Using 'Outreach' to promote your content

It is quite clear that when we talk about outreach, we think of digital marketing strategy. But you have to understand that 'outreach' is far from a digital marketing strategy. 

Then what are the core examples of the digital marketing strategy?

• Guest Blogging 
• Building Broken Backlinks
• Influencer Marketing 

These are some of the popular strategies in digital marketing. We use 'outreach' as a tool of execution to be implemented on such strategies. 

Examples : 

- If you think that other popular bloggers should publish your guest article then you have to reach out to them. { by outreach }

- If you need to fix broken back-links associated with your blog site, you have to contact the respective blog owners of those links. { by outreach }

- If you wish that influencers should promote your content then you have to approach them specifically or reach out to them.  { by outreach }

This indicates that there are so many examples where you have to implement the 'outreach' process. So instead of looking at all such 'outreach' applications, 

• We have to think from a network building and business development perspective. 
• It would be better focusing to use 'outreach'  as an awareness and promotional tool for your content. 
• This could help to generate high-quality back-links. 

The most general 'outreach' issues faced by bloggers are,

1. Finding 'outreach' prospects

1. Way to write an 'outreach' email

Most people have 3 common misinterpretations/confusion in content promotion via 'outreach'.

A] Many people do not understand that 'Outreach' itself is the content promotion method.

Suppose you email 50 people, and that email consist of a link of your written article. About 70 % of them open your email and 25 % of them click your link to read your article. 10 % of those emails back to you with their feedback. Yet none of them has tweeted or linked to it anywhere.

This could give an indication that the 'outreach' attempt is not successful here. Nobody would try to do it again thinking that it does not work. But is it really like this?

If you think the other way, 

• with a 70% open rate you have associated yourself with 35 people(70%) selected by you from your industry. 
• 25 % (13 people) of those have actually visited your website and read the content written by you. 
• 10 %(5 people) of those replied back means you are connected with 5 amazing people from your industry. 

This can be beneficial to you in different ways.

Just because you have not received any tweets or back-links does not mean your 'outreach' attempt is not successful. Your emails are being opened, your links are being clicked and you are getting a reply to those. 

All this clearly suggests that 'Outreach' is nothing but content promotion.

Still, 13 people visiting your website is a not great deal of traffic. But you have got this by sending just 50 emails. If you send 500 or almost 5000 emails then it could convert into 130 or 1300 visits to your website. 

Assuming that finding the email addresses of that many people will not be a problem for you. 

You will definitely get tweets and backlinks from many of those visits. Now, this indeed is a great benefit. But the obvious question is, Could sending 5000 emails be spam?  

Let's see this in detail.

2. A narrow difference separating 'Outreach' and 'Spam' 

Sending 5000 emails in a week,15 days, or in a month could be spam. 

The reason is, it is highly impossible because, 

• Finding emails and researching this many people in such a short duration is not achievable on your own
• Then sending personalized emails to the email addresses of those people by you is not practically within reach.

Now sending 5000 emails is possible when you adopt a long-term action plan. This action plan should have to be carried out for a duration of a year or two. This will give you enough time to do it correctly without looking like spam.

So Sending 5000 emails in a course of 1 to 2 years could not be spam.

We can see 'outreach' and spam as two ends of the same scale. The scale indicates the amount of effort put in by you to send each email which includes,

• Searching the person
• Researching
• Crafting an email

One end of this scale consists,  

• An auto-generated list of people that you get online
• No manual review of this list from your side
• Standard outreach email template obtained from the web which is non-customized

 This is what you call a spam side of the scale.

 Another end of this scale consists, 

• A small list of people identified by you over a sufficient time period
• Closely researched and analyzed from your side
• Uniquely customized outreach email written by you to each individual

Now, this is an ideal outreach side of the scale.

But both these ends of the scale are too much difficult to follow. As it is not advisable to send 5000 random people a very generic email template. 

Also, it is not feasible to spend a long time researching and crafting unique outreach emails for a small group of people.

The correct approach is almost in the middle of the scale but slightly towards the ideal outreach end.

This is also variable and depends upon your topic, niche, and subject area. You have to test this with the efforts you give to send each outreach email. It would give you an indication of where you stand on this scale.

But does this mean that the quality and perfection are enough to give the desired results? Let's see,

3. Perfect approach in email outreach does not assure the results

Consider a scenario where you are putting efforts to research a group of people for weeks and send them the best quality of outreach emails. But you hardly get any reply from them as they might be busy to read and reply back. 

This could be the most common situation which you might have seen earlier too. 

Your perfect strategy of sending outreach emails could suffer due to numerous reasons which are just not in your control. 

Some of these might be,

• The time of the day the person sees your email
• Opening the email on mobile or tab or desktop 
• The daily schedule of the person to whom you have sent the email
• Number of emails the person receives per day

So perfect email outreach strategy does not guarantee any results.

Keeping this in mind, you should not be discouraged when people do not reply back to your emails. 

1. If your email open rate is too low then, 

• Check if you are sending emails to the correct email addresses. { It means that find the email address that is correct if using automated software }  
• Make changes with your email subjects as using a very generic email subject { e.g. Something you might like } would hardly make people open it.
• Your email subject line should reflect your outreach excuse.

2. If the link click rate in your email is too low then, 

• In-depth investigation of your email outreach candidates. 

A low link click rate means you are sending emails to the wrong people or they are no longer interested in the subject. 

• Clearly mention the uniqueness of your article in the email which would force the person to click and check it. 

3. If the reply rate to your emails is too low then, 

• You could request feedback from those people.

e.g. You could request something like ' Let me know your thoughts about this'. It actually works well in terms of getting responses back.

• You should not be asking for favors from the people.

The majority of the people do not want to say 'no' so they don't reply to the emails.

These are some of the common tips based on the general observations which could surely help to be successful in content marketing using outreach emails.

You can also check other important posts written by me such as,

• How to rank on the first page of Google!
• How to increase organic traffic using 7 effective steps!
• Keyword difficulty factors co-related to Google ranking

More such articles are available at - Digital Marketing 

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