Hard Baits and Attractive Lures
Your outreach cold emails are not only the vehicle for lead generation or a meeting request, they have the potential to increase your organic traffic, social shares and links. You want to lure visitors to your site with emails that have a bit of movement, some vibration and a vibrant flash of color so you’ll rank higher on Google.
“Email is a push channel, so we need to push it to work harder.” ~Kath Pay
Why Cold Emails Are Hot!
As Pharell Williams says, “cold, cold, cold but leaving me hot, hot, hot!”
The Radicati Report for 2016-2020 states there are currently 2.6 billion email users worldwide and will top 3 billion by 2020. (half the worlds population) and email continues to be the leading form of business communication.
It also says that an email address is required for nearly all forms of communication as well as for online e-Commerce.
The report mentions that in 2016, the number of business and consumer emails sent and received per day totaled over 215.3 billion. These were used primarily for notifications (e.g. for online sales) rather than for interpersonal communication.
Response Time
Beyoncé sums it up: “Waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting ooh, waiting, waiting, waiting, waiting…”
There is a smorgasbord of great advice around on how to craft the perfect email but the new challenge is to figure out how to actually get a response.
Your average business individual is processing around 91 emails per day. You not only want them to read your content but share it, link to it and visit your site. Tall order?
The Content Marketing Institute says, “73% of content creators plan to prioritize creating more engaging content, and 55% plan to prioritize creating visual content.”
Looking for Links
Your company website has just published a new article or as a blogger you’ve just uploaded a new post. The next step is to promote your work to draw more traffic to your site and encourage other influencers to link to your article. You’re about to send out a few cold emails but first relook at your content.
You need to avoid:
- Generic subject lines
- Using raw URL’s in your content –it says the email was generated by outreach software and will land in the trash.
- Referencing very old articles of the influencer. It must be their latest work. (Use Content Explorer tool by Ahrefs to search for latest articles)
- Reaching out to people not interested in your service
- Using poor grammar and having too many typo’s
- Old, tired, bad templates
- Asking for shares or links: let the recipient make the decision if they are inspired to share your work.
- Don’t stretch the truth
How to Hook Extremely Busy Influencers
“Bait without a hook is just food.” John Hayes
- Know your target: research them, look at their social media presence and how they “speak” so you can create meaningful, specific content
- Instill curiosity: simple, potent subject lines that show that you know what motivates your recipient.
- Ensure relevance: why are you reaching out to them specifically?
- Show you care: build a connection by showing that you are invested in growing the relationship. Shared mutual interest or unique commonalities.
- Be likeable: banish the superficial, master your interpersonal skills, express empathy, show you care.
- Give and take: are you providing value? Are you doing something meaningful for the recipient? Have you linked to, commented on or tweeted their work?
- Highlighting your authority: Mention relevant accomplishments. We all aggregate around authority figures.
- Right tone: resonate with your recipients tone they use on social platforms.
- What are you asking for? Be clear about your “ask”. Use a specific standalone sentence that sums up what you need from them.
- Express your thanks: show appreciation for their time.
- Back up your claims: If you say you’re a huge fan of the recipient, prove it. Mention how you shared and applied their advice.
- Make it easy for the recipient to help you: give them the shortest route, with the least amount of time and effort on their part to assist you.
- Personalize, personalize, personalize!
“Tell me and I will forget, show me and I may remember, involve me and I will understand.” Confucius (450BC)
A Social Shares Story
Ideally you would like your cold email to encourage the recipient to share your work on social media to improve your business results.
Neil Patel, one of Forbes Top 10 marketers, and 25 marketing influencers to watch in 2017 discusses how to leverage social shares with a great case study of Sony Vaio.
When they launched their new VAIO summer line-up, they included “Pin It” buttons in their promotional emails. This is a perfect example of how you can generate social shares from a marketing cold email.
The results of this particular campaign saw them beating their “revenue by email” goal by 172%. They received an additional 3,000 clicks. They had a 70% open rate and 18% click through rate.
Jeff Bullas found that, “Pins on Pinterest have viral potential: Over 80% of pins are re-pins compared to 1.4% of tweets retweeted.”
When Social Media and Email Marketing Hold Hands
You want these two platforms to be cozy.
With all of the social media platforms you are able to upload your list of contacts. When your contacts are uploaded to the microblogging network you can easily run retargeting advertising campaigns. You now have faces to the names on your contact list. It’s the perfect opportunity for sending personalized promotions.
Buffer mentions that, “Visual content is more than 40X more likely to get shared on social media than other types of content.”
Creating Retargeting Campaigns
According to a Statista survey, 93.2 percent of respondents promoted their blog posts via social media.
On sites like Twitter you can go to their ad section, create a new campaign, scroll down to “add tailored audiences” and then simply upload your mailing list. Tracking your activity is easy using a tracking code.
The best part is that you can retarget your ads just to the people who clicked through for newsletter for example.
There is a similar process for Facebook through their Ads Manager function.
Then you can track how many people are responding to your content with Google Analytics URL builder
Invitation to Like
You can easily ask your current email subscribers to like your Facebook Page. You simply push the “invite Email Contacts” from your FB page and you can do this from a range of places like Vertical Response, Outlook, Mailchimp etc. Note: You can only upload 5,000 contacts per day using this function. Every click you get is a wish – so fulfill it!
Creating your Own Audience
On Facebook you can go to Adverts Manager and select the “Create Audience” button and you simply choose the type you want from MailChimp. Every time you log into MailChimp in the future it will automatically sync with Facebook and add any new subscribers into your specific audience group.
You can watch this tutorial on the easy steps to creating a targeting list.
Capture Social Media Fans for Your Email Family
When your social media followers are fans you must collect their email addresses.
Email has a higher customer lifetime value than social media.
On Twitter you can create a lead generation card with a short description of 50 characters and a strong image (on Facebook it’s an email sign up tab), so people can let you know they are expressing an interest in your business.
Then you will give them a great free gift like an eBook, webinar or free trial.
LifeLearn discovered that “When people hear information, they're likely to remember only 10% of that information three days later. However, if a relevant image is paired with that same information, people retained 65% of the information three days later.”
Social Sharing inside your Emails
You will generate more traffic to your website with an HTML webpage version of your email so that your content can easily be shared from within the email.
You want to include your social media icons. Your social share code button can be custom developed or your can use a pre-developed widget from LoginRadius or similar.
You’ve seen these buttons like “Click to Tweet”. There can also be incentives to those people who share your email content.
Syndacast’s latest findings state, “Using the word “video” in an email subject line boosts open rates by 19%, click-through rates by 65% and reduces unsubscribes by 26%.”
Skyscraper Back Links
Having brilliant content is not enough. People are not going to link to you because it’s good. High quality links will only come from promoting your content strategically.
The Skyscraper Technique is a solution for effective link building.
This technique has a conversion rate of around 5-10%. So for every 1,000 emails sent you’ll get 50 -100 links. That’s totally awesome.
The 3 Step Skyscraper Cha Cha:
- Search for content that’s link worthy
- Transform other content so its even more captivating: make it longer, more up to date and with very cool design elements
- Cold Email the right people with your outreach campaign:
Search for the tallest “building” in your space and add 20 floors to it.
Buzzsumo says, “Articles with an image once every 75-100 words got double the number of social shares than articles with fewer images.”
Links, Shares and Traffic Updates
Email outreach is still the definitive way to expand your business. Utilizing more effective SEO, effective back links and creating unforgettable copy you will see a rise in organic traffic to your welcome mat. Collect emails, keep visitors coming back to your site, constantly remind people about your brand, remember returning visitors are the most engaged, improve all link backs to your site and always email about a new blog post to drive further traffic to your site.
Use tools like podcasts, video and astounding visuals to enhance traffic flow from your email outreach initiatives to your social media platforms and onwards to your website. Google analyzes every feature attached to your website to determine your rank in the SERPS. The better your offerings, the higher you will rank at the beginning of each day.
The Social Media Examiner found that, “34% of marketers selected visual assets as their most important content, behind blogging (45%) and before videos (19%).”
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