Building a website’s authority takes time. With search engines like Google modifying their algorithms frequently, it becomes hard to establish your credibility and build your brand from the ground up. A practical method to increase your SERP rankings and brand visibility is to build high-authority and relevant backlinks.
According to statistics from Codeless, an average white-collar employee spends 150 minutes checking their email inboxes. Thus, it makes for an effective way to reach the people who might lend backlinks to your website.
Cold outreach emails strive to let all recipients know about your business and what it can do for them. You can utilize such emails to let organizations with authoritative domains know about your brand and request backlinks from their website.
So, dive in and learn a few valuable ways to use cold email outreach to increase your brand visibility.
Reasons to use cold email outreach in building your brand
When you consider cold email outreach as the means to obtain backlinks, you give way to several benefits over other forms of communication. These include, but don’t limit to:
Ease of automation and tracking
Brands use cold emails as they are easier to track and personalize. You can determine where your emails go and whether the recipients have a positive response to them. You can also apply a few automation methods to personalize them according to each prospect.
High Accuracy
Cold emails can reach specific professionals to whom you want to send the relevant backlink requests. This helps increase conversion and filter out non-functional leads that you often obtain through ad campaigns or social media.
Wider scope
There is a limited time that you can invest in phone calls and social media posts daily. With cold email outreach, you can reach thousands of potential web admins with a single click. All of that comes within a short budget while fetching you multiple links within a limited time.
6 Ways to Use Cold Email Outreach to Boost Your Brand Visibility
You can expect a higher ROI of your cold outreach campaigns only if you put in the time in research and personalization. You can’t expect that sending generic emails to random people will yield results. Here are a few tips that will help you utilize cold email outreach to boost your brand visibility through higher ranking in SERPs.
Finding the right opportunities
The first step in building backlinks through cold email outreach is finding the relevant opportunities. You have to understand the content on your main website thoroughly and approach only those brands that have a similar audience to you, but at the same time, not competing.
For example, if your business is selling fashion products, it might be tempting to approach giants such as H & M and Gucci to build backlinks. But, they might not be interested in promoting any competition. So, you can instead contact the New York Times for a link to an article about responsible supply chains to highlight your products.
Identifying key decision-makers
The emails you send through the “Contact Us” section of a website often line up with other information queries. These will most likely never make it to the eyes of key decision-makers. Therefore, you need to put some effort into finding the right people who have the authority to grant permissions for backlinks. It is recommended to aim for positions such as Head of Marketing, Head of Content, Editors, or Senior Content Writers.
The company’s official website may only have limited information on the people responsible for a brand. A better alternative is to use the LinkedIn page and look for people in charge of digital marketing. They may get you in touch with the relevant person and even help convince them to allow you the links you requested.
Finding & verifying the contact information of key decision-makers
Once you identify the key individuals, it is time to verify their identity and contact information. Since people change their positions, it can happen that email that once was working isn’t valid anymore. If you send emails to invalid addresses, you are facing a risk of getting your domain blacklisted due to high bounce rates.
The safest way to ensure yourself that your emails will be delivered is to check if your emails are valid before sending them. There are multiple tools you can use, but our favorite is Hunter Email Verifier. You add an email address you are looking to verify, and Hunter will return the verification result in seconds.
Writing a personalized outreach sequence
Now that you know who to outreach and you have a valid email address, it is time to write a personalized email sequence. Make your intentions clear through the cold email subject lines and personalize the email to appeal to each recipient. Include all the relevant information regarding your brand and ask precisely for the links you need.
It is important to let you know that cold outreach is a number game, so be prepared for rejection. Anyways, if you want to stand out from the crowd, here are a few tips you can do to improve your emails:
- Write personalized subject lines
- Include a personalized email opener using the information from previous prospect research
- Keep your emails short
- Don’t just ask for a backlink without providing a value
- Have strong email sign-offs
- Include a professional email signature
In case you don’t hear from your prospects, it is always good to create a follow-up sequence. For instance, you can send a first follow-up email a week after sending the initial email. If you still don’t get an answer, you can continue sending a few more follow-ups.
Automating cold outreach campaign
The previous step may cause eye strain for your team, especially if you’re looking to build links from several different sites. Instead, you can use automation tools to keep things less stressful.
Scheduling emails is a critical factor for success. You don’t want an executive missing out on emails just because they were busy with a meeting. Try to schedule your requests just before a working day, early in the morning or late in the evening. Cold email outreach tools like SmartReach.io help to automate your entire email sequence without any manual intervention.
Negotiation & building backlinks
Now that you have their attention, you might offer something so that they see it as a marketing opportunity. Direct promotions would be challenging to pull off. Instead, you can offer to deliver a few guest blogs for their official website.
This way, you can post some original content on a much more authoritative domain. It is an excellent practice to cycle some traffic to your website. If all goes well, the executive may grant you access to more backlinks in the future.
Conclusion
Search engine rankings are hard to master, and efforts on your own can only get you so far. If you want results within a reasonable timeframe, you need some creative ways to lend your website a hand in SEO. Using cold email outreach for backlinks is a quick way to get more for less. We hope this piece helped you gain new insight and guided you to boost your website’s SERP ratings.
