Link Building Outreach: Tips + Email Templates From SayNine [Updated]

Email still works. Link builders send emails to find new link building opportunities, build strong relationships with their partners, and do much more.

But, not every email will help them reach this goal. Your messages should be compelling and inviting enough to make your link building partners consider the offer.

We agree this isn’t a piece of cake. People’s inboxes are bombarded with messages. Just imagine that 40% of email users have at least 50 unread messages in their inboxes.

This doesn’t have to be the case for your emails. So, you should reach out to the right people with the right offer.

But how do you do it? Don’t worry; this is exactly why we’re here: to provide you with actionable steps on building successful link building outreach campaigns.

What is link building outreach?

Link building outreach is the process of reaching out to other websites to ask them to link to your website.

Basically, it is the first and most important step you should take in your link building campaign. The purpose of professional link building is to establish a strong backlink profile for your website.

Link Building Outreach: Our Way To Do It

A survey done by Authority Hacker found that it takes about eight days for an outreach email to secure a backlink for you. Now, let’s explore our tactics you can follow to create winning outreach campaigns and earn backlinks as soon as possible.

Step 1: Collect raw data

Start from a blank space. Collect a list of domains you can filter later to find the right websites for potential link building collaboration. 

How to do this? Well, we have two techniques that we want to share with you. First and foremost, there is Ahrefs.

Let’s imagine you need to earn backlinks for a business that provides email marketing services. Start using the Content Explorer feature and add your keyword email marketing in this format: 

inurl:https inurl:/blog “email marketing”.

We call this raw data, but you still have to use some filters. We suggest these ones:

• DR 50-85, Traffic 1000+, because this way you can find authoritative websites.
• Word count 500+ to find websites that have blog posts.
• Choose the date and language (we chose the last 12 months and English).
• One page per domain filter to get only one page per domain and get unique backlinks.
• Highlight unlinked mentions filter to find content that mentions your target keyword or brand but does not include a backlink to your website. 

Only live links filter to find content that contains live, active links.

After setting all filters you can export data into Google Spreadsheets or other preferred formats.

Next, we suggest using LinkedIn Sales Navigator, which is another important tool that can help you find the right link building prospects. It provides even richer data because you can get access to not only company websites but also employees’ LinkedIn pages.

You should apply several filters when collecting data from Sales Navigator, too. For example, we chose companies with employee sizes of 11-50 and 51-200. 

We suggest choosing the industry Technology, Information, and Media in this case because we want to find backlinks for an email marketing company.

Your last step should be exporting data to use later. 

Ok, there is no doubt that you need as much data as possible. But most importantly, you need clean data. For that, you need to filter collected data. You can implement Airtable alternatives to structure and use your collected data successfully.

Step 2: Filter collected data

Let’s start understanding why we need to filter data, anyway?

The reason is simple-we provide only SaaS backlinks for our clients. So, to find them during the link building outreach process, we need to separate SaaS websites from content-only websites. These are types of websites that have one goal-to provide backlinks to another website and artificially boost search engine rankings.

At SayNine we’ve created two bots that we use as internal tools for finding SaaS websites. We’ve “trained” them by giving several words typical for SaaS or content-only websites. SaaS websites usually have product and service pages, so if a website’s home page includes these words (services and products), we can consider targeting them. 

On the other hand, content-only websites instead of service or product pages have articles on general topics and cover almost every subject. Those articles typically are categorized as News, Technology, Business, so consider these phrases as a “sign” that the website is not a SaaS website.

In the second step, we separate websites that match the industries we would like to get backlinks from.

Now, we have a list of SaaS websites. But there is an unsolved problem. There are people behind all these websites, how to find them?

Step 3: Find Potential Link Building Partners

Ok, now you have to find people whom you can reach out to with your link building collaboration offer. 

Here is what we do: Again, we get help from our internally used bots. First, we enter the LinkedIn pages of our target websites. Then we add job positions that we need, like SEO manager, marketing manager, digital strategist, and link builder. After this, the bot provides information about people working in the specific company with job titles we “asked”.

Ok, we are one step closer to creating great outreach campaigns. You can also create personalized link building email templates as an easy path to follow and make your link building outreach management an easy one. Incorporating strategies like testimonial link building can further enhance your SEO outreach efforts by leveraging positive feedback from satisfied clients.

Step 4: Validate Emails

Now, we should validate the email addresses of our potential link building partners to make sure we’re reaching out to the right people. But how to do that? 

You have a person’s and company’s name, so you can create variations of potential email addresses basically by “guessing” them. If a potential link building partner’s name is John Smith and he works for X company, the email addresses can be [email protected] or similar variations.

After creating all the versions, our bot that we use internally automatically validates them, and eventually, we have existing actual email addresses in our hands.

In fact there are so many things you can automate and with link building automation make the whole process more optimized and effective.

Step 5: Find Blogs to Suggest Link Insertion

How to make your link building outreach more personalized, and how to deliver value to your potential link exchange partners? At SayNine, we have a solution for this: we send personalized link exchange offers that already include link insertion suggestions in the potential partner’s website.

How do we do that? 

Remember, we had a client that provides email marketing services. We have a list of SaaS websites that can be open for link exchange offers too. So, our bot crawls those websites’ blogs. It searches blog posts with keywords that are relevant to our client’s services (email marketing in this case). Now, we find articles that we can insert clients’ anchor text and URLs organically.

Step 6: Create Simple, But Unique Templates

Every link builder who works at SayNine creates his/her own template that reflects their personality. So, although the concept of the offer is the same (link exchange opportunity from SaaS websites), everyone adds a unique style to their message. 

The next step is to include personalized offers in your templates. For example, here we have found the best place for link insertion on a potential link building partner’s website which makes the offer more clear for them as well.

With the templates, you must show the thoughts you have put into making them unique. To make your templates even more effective, consider using an AI Paraphraser tool to refine your content. This tool can help you restructure your email to make it more engaging and tailored to your audience. If you are unsure how to make your own templates, you can explore a link building outreach email example to gain a better understanding of the structure and tone.

Another thing you can do is make your message more eye-catching by adding different visuals, gifs, or emojis. A well-constructed, intriguing, and attention-grabbing email secures an increase in the open rate. It all depends on your email content, and to make the content engaging and enhance the efforts, you can even turn to content creation agencies that provide email marketing services. Let’s discuss the perfect email outreach template.

Ok, the last step should be creating follow-up templates that are unique and catchy. You need to show you are ready to discuss potential collaboration any time if they change their mind.

To do this, maintain professionalism while adding personalized, engaging touches. Usually, a reliable link building solution like an outreach tool simplify the process by merging the tags you provide, personalizing each email by using name in the subject line and outreach email signature, sending automated follow-ups, tracking the email sequence, and automatically updating the “status” in the spreadsheet.

Step 7: Schedule Your Campaigns: The Mailmeteor Way

You have great templates, so it’s time to schedule them. Luckily, there is Mailmetor-a trusted and popular email marketing platform that can help you optimize your campaigns. 

All you need is to activate the Mailmeteor extension in Google Sheets. Then, on the sheet, add contact information such as: link building partners’ names, email addresses, and more. Add your templates and choose the frequency at which you want your messages sent.

Now wait and see how new link building opportunities are opening for you.

Step 8: Track Your Email Campaigns

Up to this point, you did a great job, but are your outreach campaigns bringing real results and are you on the right track? That is what you need to know. 

Luckily, with Mailmeteor you can not only optimize your link building outreach campaigns but also monitor how they are working. You can get insights on the following metrics: 

• Open rate – the percentage of people who have opened your email.
• Click-through rate – the percentage of people who clicked on the links in your message.
• Response rate – the percentage of people who have responded to your outreach email.
• Unsubscribe rate– the percentage of email recipients who’ve unsubscribed to not receive your emails anymore.
• Bounce rate- the percentage of emails that “bounced” back and didn’t reach link building partners inboxes because of several deliverability issues.

You can later download this data as Google Sheets to continue analysis and track outreach results directly from a spreadsheet.

Pro tip: We manually add the Interested and Not interested columns to track the percentage of people who aren’t interested in our offer and ones who become link  building partners and are ready for new link building collaboration. 

To ensure we continue receiving more of this good news, we regularly track what’s working well and what’s not. While we focus on techniques that have proven effective, we don’t like to stay in the ‘comfort zone.’

We recommend you do the same: always experiment with new techniques, such as trying different subject lines, changing your offer, and refining your approach until you can confidently say that your email outreach campaigns are powerful and bring real results.

Create Link Building Outreach Emails That Stand Out։ Tips from SayNine

There is always room for improvement and this is about your outreach emails as well. So, let’s uncover more techniques to secure new backlinks for you.

Compose a good subject line

The subject line gets you the clicks. It takes a long thought to compose the perfect cold email subject lines, which are inciting and grabbing. It gets more challenging to stick your message in the minds of busy recipients. 

Excitement = open rate boost. So here are tips for writing a good subject line:

• Keep the length between 36-50 characters
• Avoid spam-triggering words (e.g. #1, best price, etc.)
• Rise curiosity with open-ended questions
• Say something unexpected
• Use a deadline as an urgency alert
• Encourage action with a command

View your subject line as a limited place to fit maximum temptation. It is not much about shortness but the message your subject line transmits. You can give the recipient an idea of the email content in a moderate-length sentence. 

In this example, you can see the subject line is “Your backlink is ready”, which clearly conveys what’s message is about and how the recipient can benefit from potential collaboration.

Personalize your message

A proven unbeaten subject line must include the person’s first name, which makes up the second must-have point. Keep the receiver hooked on reading the email content after the email is opened. The hack is personalization. 

By approaching them with a customized message, show your understanding of who they are and what they do. Instead of focusing on yourself, focus on the recipient. This way, you create a sense that you have spent time exploring their blog and forming an understanding of the person.

In addition to this, you can also use an outreach email signature to add a professional touch and provide essential contact information. Make sure to also learn how to change email signature in outreach in case you need to update your details or branding elements such as your logo.

State a clear pitch

A clear and concise message is the biggest trick in catching the reader’s attention. Experts in marketing are swamped with different marketing campaigns and tight on time to read the long-composed emails detailing the purpose of the backlink outreach. The goal is to get a response. Clarity provides you with this outcome. Especially when it comes to strategies like affiliate marketing where communication is key, mastering the art of clear pitching is important.

Be concise in telling what you want from the collaboration and, most importantly, what you provide. The few lines should state the pitch clearly, inciting lasting impressions. 

The ideal link building outreach email length is between 77 and 100 words. Clear pitch also comprises explicit language and reading. 

Do you have a link exchange offer? Find the article from your link builder’s website where you can add your target anchor text naturally and suggest it in your email.

Do you want to contribute with a guest post with backlinks? Suggest a fit title idea in your guest post outreach to increase the chance of a partnership.

Do you have an interesting link building collaboration offer? Provide all the important details.

Add value to the content

Your catchy subject line incites the person to click with an expectation of a reward. The recipient is expecting value by opening your email. Instead of saying, “link back to me”, “high-quality site”, “great guest post sites”, “I am providing quality sites”, “amazing offer/stuff”, “free”, etc., be exact in your value proposition.

Jump a step further, 

“link back to me” can be replaced with “push your website up on search engines with link building”

“high-quality site” can be replaced with “an ideal blog found to link to”

“Great guest post sites” can be replaced with “your content writing partner is here”

“I am providing quality sites” can be replaced with “a non-promotional link building partnership in your inbox”

“amazing offer” can be replaced with “a juicy collaboration to rank your website”

“free” can be replaced with “ranking opportunities for “site”

By saying, “I am not spamming”, you already create an impression that “you are spamming”. No one can guarantee the site quality; however, based on case studies and trust elements, what you present as an offer will.

Include CTAs

Email is sent, opened, and read. What’s next? Action must be taken. For the action, you need call-to-actions – CTAs. Remember to be exact in what you ask. 

One email must have one purpose, make sure the recipients are clear with a few requests and options. One problem requires one solution: one CTA for each email. You can place it in two places. Yet, they must direct to the same place.

Understanding what is link building outreach and identifying your link building outreach goals must come before drafting the message. Know what you want to create a converting CTA for each message sent. It may be a link insertion outreach, an offer to have a partnership, a guest post outreach, etc.

An example CTA for link building email outreach for backlinks can be “Ready to jump on a call?” or “Schedule a call to start building your links.” Additionally, consider using QR codes in your emails to make it even easier for recipients to take action.

With an exact and clear CTA, you turn your link building outreach email into an interactive process. The CTA is the culmination of your email and guarantees a higher chance your outreach goals will be fulfilled. 

Follow up at some intervals

A busy workday might get your exceptional email lost in the recipient’s mailbox, opened, and not replied to. A follow-up is to ensure the email has got the message across, give you insights about the stage the receiver is at, or offer an alternative solution to the problem. 

Say, your initial email offered a link building opportunity; your follow-up can be a guest post proposal or another special service offer.

A follow-up is a must, yet, you must acknowledge the limits of bothering people with your offers. Give them time to think and reply to you back. A week is an ideal wait time after your initial email to send the first follow-up message. 

If the follow-up doesn’t get a reply either, check on them again to confirm they are uninterested. After the second follow-up, wait a little; no response? Say goodbye with a last email. 

It is essential to let them know you won’t contact them anymore. Give it a last chance. Maybe they’d been waiting to read all the benefits you have for them to react.

There is another side to the coin – getting a negative response. Next to the positive, delayed or no replies, you may also end up getting a negative reply. It is not a red flag; instead, it is a chance to review the people you reach out to, the needs behind using or not using your service, and common reasons behind the negative responses.

There is an important point to keep in mind for your link building outreach management. Ethics of communications:

• Don’t give in to emotional responses
• Don’t ignore the respondents
• Understand why they aren’t interested 

Stay calm and improve your SEO outreach strategy and practices

Include visuals

Seasoning makes the plain and dull salad interesting. Visuals have a seasoning effect on any readable material. Visuals spice up your content and make it attractive. 

With visuals, you can maximize the personalization of your link building outreach email. Visuals are a bonus point. The recipient will spend additional time on your email. The variety of visuals, illustrations, photos, gifs, charts, and graphics, let you experiment with the email and make it serve different purposes. Even by using a simple photo editor, you can experiment with different visuals.

With the right chosen visuals, you communicate more and beyond words. Transmit messages and concepts with the power of visual content. 

For a successful email outreach for backlinks, statistics are your best friends. Many professionals rely on analytics dashboards to gather and interpret these crucial statistics. Strengthen what you suggest with proofs of previous collaborations. Add the metrics of a website from Ahrefs before and after the link building process was completed with your other partners.

After all, experts in the link building process and the experts in digital marketing are informal people who like good humor and appreciate a well-chosen visual effect. Most of the people you will outreach appreciate creativity, so don’t stick to a dull email, include visual effects to maximize your answer rates. Using free templates can also help you craft visually appealing and engaging emails without much effort.

Feature an email signature

The data shows that 48% of marketers turn to email signatures for more website traffic. 

Besides professionalism, signature increases the trust in recipients. A professional signature, especially a customized one for the company, is an effective way to create interest and make your email stand out. 

A signature added to the email is a way to recall your brand. A successful email signature will contain the following elements:

• Your name and position at the company 
• Your contact information
• The name of your company, the website, and a link to it
• Clickable social icons

You must never overload the signature part. The optimal length for an email signature is around 3-4 lines. Having an email signature is like handing out business cards through email.

Avoid spam filters

Any SEO link building specialist’s most significant worry for outreach for link acquisition is avoiding the spam folder. Unnecessary details and spammy outlook doom your emails. Let alone the affected reputation and deliverability rate.

Spam filters are individual criteria for each company. When an email passes through these criteria and scores high, it arrives in the spam box. It is relatively different from company to company; however, there are general anti-spam rules to follow. It’s an essential part of a successful link building outreach management.

The must-have components for a non-spammy email are:

• Sender’s exact information
• A valid “Unsubscribe” button
• An email signature
• Avoiding ALL CAPS, exclamation marks, and link overloading
• No use of spam trigger words, such as “We hate spam”, “free”, “web traffic”, “win”.

It can be the case when you don’t have time, expertise, or resources to manage this and other link building tasks, so you can think about outsourcing to other companies. To outsource link building means when going through the hiring process, you consider external individuals or agencies to handle various aspects of your link building: identifying potential link opportunities, conducting outreach, guest posting, broken link building, and other strategies for building links for your website.

Link Building Email Template Examples From SayNine

Now, we suggest you explore some of the link building outreach templates that our team uses. Maybe they can give you some ideas on creating your own messages.

Link building template #1

Subject line: Let’s Collaborate with ABC

Hello [Name],

A SaaS A-B-C link exchange partner is what I’m searching for. Is that you?

What I propose is as follows:

[Your Offer]

I can also provide backlinks from the websites: 

For instance: [Domain 1], [Domain 2], And many others

I won’t bother you with a follow-up because I will be grateful for either response 😄

P.S. I would appreciate it if you could provide another contact from your team if you are not the appropriate person for this.

Best wishes,

[Your Name]

1st follow-up template

Hello, [Name]

I never heard back from you.

Here are a few additional domains to look over:

Are you having problems locating a suitable placement? 

Simply provide us your targeted keyword, and we’ll figure out the placement.

Tell me what you think.

Best wishes, 

[Your Name]

2nd follow-up template 

Hello, [Name] 

I’ve returned with a revised idea since I haven’t heard from you.

What about guest posts? 

Here are a few samples of our previous writings: 

I will be happy to collaborate anytime you are ready.

Best wishes,

[Your name]

Link building template #2

Subject line: [Name], A-B-C link exchange opportunity ✨🪄

Hey [Name],

Interested in a long-term A-B-C link exchange partnership?

I’m here with good websites, from where you can have backlinks 😉

Let me know if you have any questions, so we can discuss the details 😉

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this. 

Kindest regards,

[Your Name]

1st follow-up template

Hey [Name],

Let me remind you that my suggestion is at NO CHARGE 😊

Feel free to drop by, and let’s start an amazing collaboration.

Kindest regards,

[Your Name]

2nd follow-up template

Heya!  

If link exchanges are not your cup of tea, I would be happy to contribute to your blog with a unique article.

Here are some examples of articles that we wrote👇

If you have any questions, just let me know—I’m here to help! 

Excited to begin whenever you’re ready.

Kindest regards,

[Your name]

The Key Takeaways

Maybe at this exact moment, you got a positive reply from your link building outreach campaign, so let’s wrap up our tips that could maximize your chances of getting more.

• Collect outreach data using the Ahrefs Content Explorer feature or LinkedIn Sales Navigator.
• Filter data to find relevant and authoritative websites.
• Validate email addresses of potential link building partners.
• Track your outreach campaigns’s effectiveness and act on the insights. 
• Personalize your link building email campaigns as much as possible.
• Add visuals to make your messaging more eye-catching.
• Stay away from spammy words and phrases.
• Build effective follow-up strategies to not miss any valuable link building opportunities.
• Add your email signature to maintain professionalism, but also add a little humor to your message to make it more engaging.

FAQ about link building outreach