Not satisfied on how your email outreach campaign is performing?

Email outreach is perhaps one of the most important parts of doing online promotions. It allows you to connect to your target influencers, grab people’s attention and puts you on the right path to success ultimately.

But it’s never easy! Like this gal who emailed us for a tweet, she is probably lost or didn’t have enough training to do an email outreach properly:

This gal emailed me at a generic “hello” email, even if its not that difficult to find my personal email. She called me a “friend” which is so generic, the email looks like a template and it uses a tracked link which is shortened into a not so friendly looking link.

For people who do outreach, the biggest hurdle is to send out emails and get low returns, much worse get negative to zero response on your inbox. It’s painful – you had to collect a list and setup everything only to fail.

So here are seven awesome ways to hack your email outreach and increase productivity.

1. Outreach Requires Connection

The connection is the most important part of getting email outreach read by your targets. This is why outreach requires profile research and subject know-how for it to become successful. Here are things you can use when researching for connection.

Buzzsumo is a good tool that allows you to see your target’s most shared content. One of our technique in outreach is to identify a blog post wherein you can commend the author for his or her work. Which is a very good start if you don’t really know or follow the target influencer.

It is also a good tool to identify the influencers in your topic, again it’s all about finding the most shared content in <insert keyword here>. If you want to see what’s being shared on your topic, use the tool.

Followerwonk – Twitter research and analytics at it’s finest! Followerwonk was of course now part of the SEO software giant MOZ. The tool is good in finding influencers on their related subjects, with recently integrated Social Authority score.

BrandMentions.com – Another power tool amongst the listening tool available out there. If you want to see mentions about a topic, a person or a brand – not just mentions, it also includes the latest blog posts, content coverage and so on. If you are doing research, brandmentions is definitely handy.

Else you can also manually look for – Popular posts on the sidebar (most blogs has this widget), look for Social shares and comments wherein you can share your thoughts and start conversing.

2. Target the Right Email

Having the right email and contact person is important. This is hit or miss, making sure that you are connecting with the right point person is important when doing email outreach. Sending your email to sales, support, technical support, CEO, and inquiry is down-right offensive when your target person has his or her own email.

Most email outreach fails because they are sent to wrong inbox folders. Researching for the right email to add on your list can help increase your success when doing outreach.

Can’t find the email? Try to connect on their social profiles – and ask for an email. Do not be rude and ask directly about something on twitter or facebook. Just politely ask for an email address and from there connect.

3. Timing is Essential

Nothing beats precision when doing outreach. Shooting the email at the right time can make or break you when reaching out to target prospects, influencers, and bloggers. Always look for the timings of your targets, if they are located in New York, London, Australia or any location, be aware of their time zones.

Some of the tools that we are using on scheduling emails are boomerang for Gmail (free), yesware (paid/free) and buzzstream (paid). You can test these tools and determine the right timings for your outreach.

Here’s a schedule that we believe effective for people who are doing outreach.

Monday and Tuesday are always the best time to send emails, simply because people are more focused on reading work related stuff at the start of the working week. While Thursday and Friday are the days to collect outreach prospects, validate your list and have a clean list for next week’s batch.

4. Stay Away from Templates

What you send is important, if you are using templates, that is fine, but if you are relying heavy on a single template, that is bad. One of the many reasons why emails go straight to the junk or trash folder is that because it indicates spam and triggers spam filters, subject lines, content and formatting play’s a huge part of it.

The best thing to do is

[mkdf_unordered_list style=”circle” animate=”no” font_weight=”normal” padding_left=”20″]

• Create several templates that incorporate the same idea but written differently.
• Don’t include links that use link shortening services, email clients often assume that shortened links are deceiving and spam.
• Whenever possible, do not add a link on your first email. You can start your conversation by asking questions, asking for the right contact details and so on.
• Test your templates and see how you can improve its performance. Start with 2 different templates, sees who gets the replies and improve it.

[/mkdf_unordered_list]

5. Install Gmail Plugins to Track Emails

Add plugins to your Gmail to track email opens, the device used, location and timings. When you are doing outreach, you don’t send and forget. Tracking your email is important to your success, here are some of the best tool out there:

Mailtrack – A very good free / paid tool that lets you track email opens, including how many times your target opened your email, first open and email client used to open your email.

Yesware – Yesware is free for 30 days with some limited function, just like Mailtrack, Yesware allows you to track email opens, timings, location, and device used to open your email. The paid yesware allows you to setup multiple templates, reminders and it gives you data that you can analyze moving further.

Sidekick – Powered by Hubspot, sidekick allows you to track email opens and clicks. What we love about sidekick is that it provides you real-time desktop notification.

Streak CRM – Is a very good tool that can help you segment your emails into a pipeline. And it also has free up to 200 email tracking actions per month. If you want to work with more organization, Streak CRM is the best tool that lets you sort your email campaigns and be on the right track when doing outreach.

6. Reply With Creativity and Be Human

Humanizing your outreach is very important, based on our own tests – whenever we push extra miles on outreach and try to engage our targets on a personal level, it’s more effective.

See some of our emails.

“The Darth Vader email”

The target is an avid fan of the star wars movie series, we got her attention by throwing some darth vader memes.

“The Cat Lover email”

The target is cat lover as stated from her about me page. Sending a witty furry cat hooked her.

7. Always Follow Up Emails

The most underrated part of email outreach are follow-ups. We are emailing hundreds of contacts every week, not everyone will get to read your email or reply back to your question or request – following up emails can help you increase your success rate.

Sending or saying a thank you email is always nice also. It can lead to good relationships and soon content partnership, in case you are pitching co-authoring contents with the influencers, you can always pitch an idea to the owner or webmaster.