Table of Contents

Intro

There are many link prospecting strategies available, and email outreach
is one of the more popular choices based on the number of marketers who
have attempted it. Email outreach is difficult to get right but it can
bring you quite a bit of success. However, if you don’t know what to do,
it probably won’t succeed the way you want it to.

One of the best things about email outreach is that it can bring your
audience actionable information. There are many different parts of link
prospecting that you’ll have to account for, however. You’ll need to
structure the process properly and ensure that you have a strong
customer base.

When you first get started with email outreach, it’s important to learn
more about the basics. Today, we’re going to teach you how to prepare
for email outreach. Once you’ve read through this guide, you’ll
understand what you need to know to take full advantage of your outreach
strategy.

Why is it Important to Structure Your Email Outreach?

Why is this Process Necessary in the First Place?

Even if you’re not aware of email outreach, the process has been around
for a long time. For example, if you check your email inbox, we’re sure
that you’ll find countless outreach emails in your spam folder. This is
what happens when you don’t conduct your email outreach properly.

If you make the same mistakes that these businesses did, then there’s
just as much of a chance that you’ll end up in the spam folder. This
means that you failed. Instead, you’ll want to create emails that draw
people’s attention and make them want to reply. This is possible if you
follow a few guidelines.

You have to send out the right message to the proper recipients if you
want to make sure that people will even notice your emails. This means
that you’ll need to know a business’s target audience if you’re doing it
for a client or even for your own business.

How Can You Properly Outreach Your Email Outreach?

The worst thing you can do when conducting an email outreach campaign is
making yourself look like you’re sending out spam. If you’re trying to
implement one of these strategies, you’re going to want to figure out
who your main target audience is so that you can start emailing them as
soon as possible.

It will be easier to create relationships and leads if you’re sending
out the right kinds of emails to your clients. Connecting to new people
will get you additional links, which are a huge part of building up any
site in the eyes of Google’s algorithm.

If you’ve only been replied to once or twice and you’ve distributed over
a hundred emails in the past months, you probably aren’t doing something
right. Keep in mind that even the most perfect outreach strategy won’t
get a 100% success rate, but you can expect the rate to increase over
time.

Creating a Gmail for Your Niche

The Necessity of a Niche

You’ll need to begin by determining what your company’s niche is before
you even start an outreach strategy. Remember that smaller businesses
can’t expect to span across multiple niches because of the resources
that will take. Having a niche means that you can focus more on what
your customers need. To give you an example, a content creation firm’s
main niche would be content.

One of the best things about finding a niche means that you can figure
out your target audience and what they need. If you don’t have a target
audience, then it will be impossible to conduct an outreach campaign.
You need both a topic and a niche if you intend to get guest posts and
editorials. Sites won’t even consider working with you if you are
unclear.

How Do You Create a Niche?

The first step to establishing your niche is getting your Gmail account
ready. This account should be based in the niche that you’re going to
work in. For example, if you’re a content marketer like we mentioned
earlier, you’ll want to create an email that shows that. A good example
would be
“name.digitalmarketingfirm@gmail.com”.

When people see your email, they’ll see that you’re clearly in the niche
that you say you are in. This will give them more trust in you. If you
create an email that doesn’t outline your niche, then people won’t
actually know if you’re dedicated to the kind of work that you’re doing
for them.

Getting in Touch with a Prospect

A great thing about using a Gmail that outlines your niche is that
clients will be more likely to notice you. If you send out an email
while reaching out, it may end up getting directed to someone’s spam
folder. This means that you’ll need a Gmail account that isn’t known for
sending out spam.

Remember that you’ll want to send out emails that get into the main
inbox of the people you’re reaching out to. If you clearly outline your
niche, then it’s likely that your recipient will connect with you more
easily. Even if you don’t get a reply, you’ll want to make sure that
your email gets opened and read.

For every niche that you operate in, you’ll want to create a different
Gmail account. You can’t cross niches with your emails because that will
make it harder to connect with your recipients.

Keep in mind that you’ll want to make sure that your prospect
understands that you’re a real person sending out emails instead of an
automated robot that is spamming out emails.

Getting Your Gmail Account Ready for Outreach

After your account has been created, you’ll need to start preparing your
email address. You’ll need to change around a few settings to ensure
that your account matches all of your needs. If your email account
doesn’t have the touches that it needs, then it will be harder for
recipients to perceive you as a real person.

In this section, we’ll go over some of the main changes you’ll need to
make to ensure that your email address looks as legitimate as possible.
For example, you’ll need to add a profile picture to your account so
that it looks more personalized:

Changing Your Profile Picture

Adding a profile picture to your Gmail is by no means complicated.
Simply head over to your Google account settings and then click the
option to change your profile picture. You’ll want to add a personable
profile picture, like one of your face, to ensure that your clients
don’t end up thinking you’re just another spammy company.

By adding in a recognizable photo of a real person, it will also
convince your recipients that the email wasn’t sent out by a machine. If
you have a company logo, it’s a good secondary choice, but it may still
end up being perceived as spam. Also, be sure that your picture is as
professional as possible.

Creating Your Signature

A signature is the next thing to add to your emails after you’ve added a
profile picture. You’ll have to go to the settings menu, then to the
general section, and then to the signature field. You can fill this in
with info including your company’s name, your name, and your title. This
will let people learn more about you.

You may also wish to add in links to your social media pages in your
signature to make you look more credible. For example, Instagram,
LinkedIn, and Facebook are all excellent choices. Of course, you’ll want
to ensure that these link to your professional pages rather than your
personal ones.

Also, be sure to avoid included information that isn’t deemed necessary
in a signature. You’ll want to make your signature as concise as
possible. Some of the last things you can add to the signature include
your email address, office address, or even your phone number.

Canned Responses

Your canned responses will have to be built up over time, so don’t rush
to create them all at once since it’s likely that you’ll end up making
some mistakes. You have to first go to the labs area and enable canned
responses. When the setting is ticked, you can start coming up with some
good ones.

These responses will be the oil in the gears of your email outreach
strategy. A canned response is essentially a response that has already
been written, allowing you to quickly reply to an email without putting
too much work into it.

Remember that it can get difficult to write the same thing several times
over when you send out emails to hundreds of recipients. A canned
response will allow you to send out replies in a timely fashion without
making your recipients think that you’re just a robot.

Come up with some good responses to the most common emails that you get
and then save them as canned responses. You can then go to the canned
responses menu and select your saved responses from a list, sending them
out whenever you need to.

Giving Your Team Account Access

If you have several team members working with you on the outreach
campaign, you may want to let them access the inbox so they can see
what’s going on and help you out. Since this kind of strategy can be
tiring and time-consuming, you may even end up needing the help of
others.

You’ll need to start by letting your team access the Gmail account that
you’re using for this particular niche. While you could simply give your
team members the password and username of the account, there’s a simpler
way of letting them access your inbox.

Head over to the Accounts and Imports section and go to the Grant
access to your account setting. You can then add other accounts to the
inbox by putting in the other email addresses that you’d like to allow
access to the inbox. This will allow them to edit, send, and delete
emails in your account.

To ensure that everything operates as smoothly as possible, you can also
remove users from the access panel later on. This is helpful if an
employee or team member has moved on to other projects and you don’t
want to clutter up their inbox.

The Importance of Canned Responses

Setting up canned responses is not something that everyone does in email
outreach because some feel that it’s fake. However, there are plenty of
reasons why it’s a good idea to have a repertoire of canned responses
ready for use at any time. Mostly, it allows you to make the process a
little less hectic than it already is.

There are several main benefits to reducing the amount of chaos that’s
going on when you start an email outreach campaign. In this part of our
guide, we’re going to take a look at some of the main advantages of
using canned responses when you reach out to prospective customers.

Saving Time

Let’s say you’ve managed to split up your recipients into two separate
groups. This will allow you to determine what you need to send them.
Instead of sending each of the recipients in each group an individual
email, you can write out two canned responses, one for each group.

This will allow you to save a huge amount of time. For example, even if
you’re not sending out the emails immediately, you can save your canned
responses for use later on. This saves you time having to go through
emails that you’ve already sent out so that you can copy and paste their
contents into your new emails.

Reducing Stress

Conducting one of these campaigns can get pretty stressful, and if you
don’t want your workers or yourself to burn out, you’ll need to reduce
that stress level. For example, you may have deadlines that you need to
reach so you’ll have to speed up your emails and get them out there
ASAP.

You may also be unsure of what you need to tell clients. Having canned
responses will ensure that you always mention the salient points that
you wanted to address. If you’re stressed, it won’t change the quality
of a canned response at all.

Stopping Mistakes from Happening

Another great thing about sending out canned responses to your audience
is that you can almost eliminate typos. After you’ve thoroughly reviewed
and edited a canned response, you can rest assured that it won’t have
any spelling mistakes or grammatical errors in it, ensuring that your
emails look as professional as possible.

Remember that spam emails tend to be riddled with typos, and every
mistake that is present in your canned responses will lower your
reputation in the eyes of a customer.

Be sure to go over your canned responses a few times, even using editing
software, to ensure that they have the right grammar and spelling.
You’ll want to make sure that they’re as perfect as possible if you want
to give off the right impression with them.

How to Set Up Your Canned Responses

You likely know how important your canned responses are by now, but
you’ll also need to know a thing or two about setting them up so that
they’re ready for use. This is probably the easiest part of working with
canned responses because there are really only two steps involved in
doing so.

We already went over how you can enable canned responses in the first
place, but now you’ll need to write out the email you’re going to use as
a canned response.

Composing the Email

Start off by clicking the compose button and then start writing out your
email. You can either write the email yourself or you can use a template
to get it done.

You’ll want to write out a conversational email that sounds personable
and not like it was written by rote. You should tell the prospect what
you have to offer them. While you want to maintain a conversational
tone, you shouldn’t use slang since that will come off as
unprofessional.

Using templates is a good idea for your first few responses, but if
you’re experienced enough to write the email yourself, then don’t let
anything stop you from doing so.

Be sure to remove the signature from your canned responses or it will
show up twice because a signature will be included with every one of the
emails that you send out.

Saving the Responses

Once you’ve written out an appropriate canned response, you’ll be ready
to save it so that you can use it in the future. Go to more
options>canned response>new canned response. You can then save it.

If you want to confirm that you’ve saved it as a canned response, you
can open up a new window and then start composing an email. Open up your
canned responses and then select the one that you just saved. If it pops
up, then you’ve managed to save your canned response without any
trouble.