Yes, SayNine is only four years old, but the team already has strong experience in link building outreach.
Over the years, we’ve sent emails to potential partners. More specifically, 350K emails. Pretty impressive, right?
However, not everything went smoothly. We made some mistakes, learned from them, and improved our strategies.
Now, we’re sharing the insights and tactics that helped us, so you can craft your own winning email campaigns.
Breaking Down the Data From Our Link Building Outreach
SayNine provides SaaS backlinks for SaaS websites. So, the main goal of the data team is to find new websites that meet our criteria and are open for link exchanges.
Here are six key lessons based on our failures and successes that have significantly shaped our outreach results.
Warm up Your Campaigns
Imagine starting to use a completely new email address for link building, or not using your email account for a long time.
The key here is to warm up your email accounts by slowly sending more emails each day. Why? Because if you don’t, your messages might end up in the spam folder.
At SayNine, we didn’t focus much on warming up emails before, but that’s changed. Why? When warm up wasn’t mandatory, and new link builders joined our team, the delivery rate of outreach campaigns from their addresses was low. This led to fewer partnerships and link exchange opportunities.
Now, whenever a new link building specialist joins and gets a work email, warming up that account is one of the first steps.
But warming up never really stops; it’s an ongoing process. That is why we use Snov.io, as it provides useful insights on whether our emails need to warm up or not.
But we don’t just use this tool to warm up emails. It also provides detailed information on key metrics, so we know if our email campaigns are doing well or if something needs to be improved.
For example, if we notice that the spam rate is high on certain days (like on July 3), we usually pause link building outreach and focus on our email’s health.
Always Validate Your Emails
You want to make sure your outreach emails get to the right people, right?
The first step is to ensure that you are sending your message to valid email addresses. Otherwise, your outreach campaigns would not be effective if you sent emails to the wrong people, leading to poor domain reputation.
Before, we didn’t validate emails as carefully as we do now. This means a higher bounce rate due to sending messages to invalid email addresses. As a result, we had fewer potential link building partners.
Today, we use two tools for more accurate data: a third-party email verifier and our internal tool for checking email lists.
We also use Mailmeteor to check if our outreach efforts are bringing positive results.
As you can see in this screenshot, our email campaigns had a 97% delivery rate, which means the bounce rate was 3%.
But the picture is different now after improving email validation. The delivery rate is 99% and the email bounce rate is only 1%.
This means our emails reach people successfully, and we have a better chance of finding new link building partners.
Pay Attention to Time Zones
Finding new collaborations often means reaching out to link building specialists who live in different countries.
That’s why timing matters. We didn’t focus on time zones before, but we also wanted to increase the open rate of our emails. As soon as we realized that time zones influence the open rate, we made it a priority. Then we created an internal bot that provides the location data of recipients. Thanks to this information, we sent emails at the right time for each time zone.
Now, if we’re sending 100 emails and half are in one time zone while the rest are in another, we split them into two separate campaigns.
The result? Our emails now get better open and reply rates.
One more important tip: don’t just focus on time zones. The day of the week you send your outreach also matters.
From our experience, the best days to reach out to potential clients are Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday. People are more likely to check and respond during those days. On Monday, their inbox is usually crowded, so your message might get missed. And on Friday, link building specialists are often busy wrapping up tasks and meeting deadlines.
Make Your Templates Clear To Get Results
Over the years of doing link building outreach, we’ve tested many link building email templates. We made a few mistakes, like using too many links in the templates, which makes it spammy. We also wrote long texts that drove people away because they didn’t have time to read them.
Our follow-ups didn’t add new value and only repeated the same offer, instead of presenting something fresh, such as new domains for link exchange collaborations or suggesting link insertions.
Now, we believe a good email template should meet a few key criteria.
It should:
- Be short and simple
People don’t have time to read long emails, so yours shouldn’t be a novel. Keep it short and to the point.
We tried two campaigns: one with long and one with minimal text. The one got more attention and attracted more interest.
- Didn’t include any spam words
You don’t want to be seen as someone who sends spam. So, make sure your messages avoid suspicious words like “free” or “partnership.”
Before, we sent emails, and they landed inthe spam folder because of these words. Now, we always use spam checkers before sending.
- Show a clear offer
What do you suggest to your potential link building partners, and what do you expect in return?
This is what your email needs to say.
Our template may seem simple, but it actually works. Because of this, more people show interest. In this case, a partner agreed quickly, and we got a live backlink right away.
Be Consistent
Consistency is a key to a strong domain reputation.
This is something we learned the hard way. Sometimes, when we didn’t follow the rule about timing our outreach, Gmail saw our activity as suspicious and blocked our email account.
So the solution is doing outreach for link building nonstop and regularly. You don’t need 1K email addresses for every outreach campaign, even if the number is not big; be consistent.
Always Track Your Campaigns
So, how do our email campaigns work?
This is one of the most important things we focus on, and you should too.
Only by understanding how your campaigns work can you find mistakes, fix them, and get better results.
These are the key metrics to track:
- Open rate
A low open rate can be a sign that something is wrong with your cold email subject lines. So, improve them by making them clearer to get better results.
But keep in mind that if you sent emails and you had a low open rate, it means that your messages probably landed in the spam folders. You can do several things to improve the situation, like changing your templates or using new email warm up tools.
- Bounce rate
You should check the email bounce rate to know if your messages are delivered or fail because of wrong or invalid email addresses.
This means you need to pay attention to the email validation and track how your email validators work as well.
- Answer rate
The main goal of our outreach campaigns is to get positive responses and find new link building partners interested in exchanging links with our team.
So, we manually fill in the answer rate for our email campaigns.
As you can see, this specific campaign had a 6% interest rate. This means potential partners have already agreed on doing SaaS link exchanges. From this point, our team starts to communicate with them to start successful collaboration.
Final Thoughts
During SayNine’s journey, we tried different ways to do outreach for link building.
Of course, we sent emails and made mistakes along the way. But eventually, we learned what actually works and what does not. Then, we took the right steps to improve.
This allowed us to improve the quality and speed of our outreach efforts and deliver non-shitty backlinks for our clients, which helped them rank higher on Google. If you want similar results, feel free to contact us. We’re happy to create a strategy that best meets your goals and needs.
