Ever been stuck in front of your PC for hours, doing cold email prospecting, but received almost no replies in the end? This is the harsh reality of every other email marketer.
At first glance, the whole process seems quick and easy. Log in to your backlink checker, find domains linking to your competitors, click “Export,” and voila – the list of your cold email prospects is ready.
Nothing difficult.
But here comes the problem. Since pretty much everyone follows the same pattern, the same people get lots of similar pitches from strangers. And when they get tired of that never-ending email flow in their inboxes, many recipients stop replying or, even worse, start reporting spam on emails that sound like a broken record.
In this reality, you should come up with more creative outreach excuses than asking people to link to you because they already link to your competitor or your content will be more useful for their readership.
Before you open your desktop email client and launch another campaign, let’s explore alternative email prospecting ideas. With their help, your pitch will stand out among other emails that bring nothing but the feeling of deja vu to recipients.
Table of Contents
1. Blogs that link to expired domains
This is basically a new form of the well-known strategy called broken link building in SEO circles. In its original form, it suggests that you check if your competitors’ domains still have live backlinks coming to their dead pages from third-party blogs.
If they do, you should ask those bloggers to replace that link to non-existent content with a link to the live page on your site. It’s a win for both parties – they fix a technical SEO issue on their domain, you get a new link.
But the truth is many outreach specialists have been complaining lately that broken links do get replaced, just not with their links. Instead, bloggers find another live URL on that domain with a dead page they link to and use it as a replacement.
To improve your outreach efficiency, you should refocus your targeting from dead pages on live domains to expired domains, where all the pages are dead by default.
Let’s say you’ve developed new software and now need links to get it ranking on Google. You can search for listicles of software like yours that were published years ago and check if they have any discontinued tools located on expired domains. Next, ask authors of those listicles to replace the tool that doesn’t exist anymore with your software that’s up and running.
Or you can also browse expireddomains.net for non-existent domains topically relevant to your software. Thanks to the option to sort results by backlinks (BL), you’ll find the domains with the largest number of live links. Then, check where those links are coming from and try to get them replaced with yours.
2. Blogs that link to topically similar content
Your cold email prospecting list should start with blogs that link to content like yours. Such prospects are sort of warmed up by default – not to your persona but to the topic your link leads to. If they don’t mind suggesting it to their audience, you’ll definitely hit the target in terms of relevance.
To find email prospects of this type, go check what posts are currently ranking for your target keywords in the top 10-100, depending on how big your outreach campaign is supposed to be. Next, enter your website backlink checker to see what blogs link to your content competitors.
The problem here is that many outreach specialists go way too broad in their search on Google.
Let’s say you’re going to promote a listicle of email clients. Don’t check search results for generic queries like “email clients” or, say, the “best email clients” only. That’s basically what everyone else does, which results in pretty much identical lists of email prospects and therefore overloading the same authors with the same outreach requests. What it means for you is that the competition on your way will be tougher.
Instead of googling basic queries that first come to mind, try to be more specific. To come up with ideas, open your online keyword tool, type in your broad query, and check its long-tail variations. They can narrow down based on anything from niches and target audience to devices and other technical requirements like an operating system, as shown on the screenshot below.
Yep, niche-specific articles may not have as many links as those targeting broad keywords but bloggers linking to them don’t get bombarded with similar requests either. You’ll have more chances to stumble upon people who are more open to new collaborations.
If you can’t access any keyword tool for some reason, simply use your logic. For the example of listicles of popular tools, it makes sense to check if there are listicles with alternatives to any of those tools like Mailbird alternatives, Thunderbird alternatives, Outlook alternatives, etc.
3. Blogs that have posted on the same topic as yours
These email prospects seem to be easier to approach, as you’re on the same page with them. Covering the topic of their interest should arouse their curiosity enough to write you back. But the truth is many of them never react to such emails.
The reason?
When you contact people who published an article on the same topic you did, you’re trying to flirt with your direct competitors in terms of content. Sure thing they won’t be responsive unless you give them a convincing reason to be.
Email prospects of this type require a more delicate approach with content that would reveal new, previously unknown data on the topic or oppose a commonly known fact. That’s how you can get them intrigued to check out your post and bring the conversation to the point when your request would feel natural and make perfect sense.
Let’s say you surveyed a few hundred companies about the best keyword tool out there. Obviously, you can share only final results in your post, i.e. how many votes each tool got. But everything else remains behind the scenes – what tool each company voted for, how successful that company is, and how high their content ranks for their strategic keywords.
Such insights can give a better understanding of how reliable their opinions are. If a company voted for some keyword tool, but their content doesn’t rank high, their vote doesn’t mean much honestly.
The bottom line is you can reach out to bloggers interested in your target topic and share files with all the data your research is based on. It should spark an engaging discussion and open the door for future collaboration.
4. Blogs that mentioned your brand but forgot to link to your domain
Believe it or not, you are closer to getting replies from these email prospects than you think. When you send them your first email, your outreach won’t be cold 100%. They may not know you personally but must have heard good things about your brand if they were OK with mentioning it on their site. So, a pitch from you should be more welcome in their inbox than from companies they’ve never heard about.
The point is you’ve already crossed half the way without making a single step.
Many people limit themselves here by searching for unlinked mentions of their company names only. It leads to missing out on many other mentions related to their businesses like branded product names.
Branding is an important part of any corporate image. Companies pay round sums to branding agencies for making their businesses recognizable and memorable. For example, Apple named their smartphones as iPhones and tablets as iPads to stand out from competitors. Developers of WordPress themes like TemplateMonster get creative with their product naming too – Webion, Archus, etc. If your products have unique names, check out if they were mentioned somewhere on the web without link attribution.
To add more authority to their content, bloggers also quote representatives of reputable companies but for some reason neglect to link to their websites. Search for mentions of yourself and your teammates on Google to check if all of them are linked to your domain. Whenever you find an unlinked mention, reach out with a request to link to the source of information.
5. Blogs that posted on the topic related to yours but not identical
This category of email prospects includes authors of posts where yours could fit in but wouldn’t compete with directly. In the example of email client listicles, a closely related topic would be an email marketing guide. There’s no way to conduct an effective email marketing campaign without having a good tool at hand.
But it is probably the first topic that comes to mind to every email marketer promoting such a listicle. To face less competition, you need more ingenuity to come up with topic ideas of where your listicle will be a useful addition. Go check what features a typical email client has and what purposes they serve. Next, search on Google if bloggers covered such topics and send them your pitch.
Bottom Line
Since marketing has moved to the virtual environment over the last decade, the competition in inboxes is fierce as ever. And it’s not going to change any time soon.
As an email marketer, you should always be on the lookout of places where your pitch will fit in organically and give recipients a reason to write you back. That’s why you can’t rely on overused strategies listed in every other guide out there.
In this post, we’ve shared cold email prospecting tips that can help you find people potentially more responsive to outreach requests.
